…what it would be like to live as a man instead, the relief that would come from passing, with not having to face the everyday violence and humiliations of living in my body. As if I've never thought about how I don't want that, how every cell in my body recoils at the thought of being a man, and yet how harrowing it is that the only way I can get out of my bed and make it through the day is by wearing masculinity on my body.

Sick read 🤒

Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through culture. Culture is made by those in power. Men make the rules and laws; women transmit them . . . The culture expects women to show greater acceptance of, and commitment to, the value system than men.

Copa book club pick

Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila‘s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.

We would have written together, we would have been authors together, we would have dravn power from each other, we would have fought shoulder to shoulder because what was ours was inimitably ours. The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition.

Inside was the struggle to leave her, the old conviction that without her nothing truly important would ever happen to me, and yet I felt the need to get away . . . Her life had overwhelmed me and it took days for me to restore clear outlines and depth to mine.

“She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy”

Picked up as part of my effort to read all the books I own. A lovely vacation/sick read. I rarely read YA so the dialogue and romance scenes felt deliciously ridiculous.

tg La Lentille D‘or is still in business

The last time I read this book I was 19, barely out, completely new to lesbian literature. This time around I was struck by the role literature plays in mediating our relationships. Connection and understanding that feel impossible interpersonally can be achieved through art. The vital necessity of our existence!!

A beautiful reread during #TradPride (gay guy parties 🤝 lesbian literary stuff)

Lesbian feminism wasn‘t just swapping women for men. It was an entirely different model. Mutual subjectivity!

Difterent though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God.

So much had been breathed out by the pores that Tea Cake still was there. She could feel him and almost see him bucking around the room in the upper air. After a long time of passive happiness, she got up and opened the window and let Tea Cake leap forth and mount to the sky on a wind. That was the beginning of things.

translator deserves an Olympic medal

we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.

It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Koosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.

"Lonely, ain't it?"
"Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”

…the norm that makes a prison for adults—especially women—out of their own commitment to children they love.

From a bubble of privilege, she extolled idleness. I think one must be idle in order to become oneself, she wrote. 'If you have a profession you become part of that profession. With work you become a function. With idleness you become who you are.'

funny to read this in the middle seat of a packed flight shuttling a Methodist church group. Smart AND fun, a rare feat for a novel these days!! Clearly a debut (stilted dialogue, esp early on), but delivers on its impressive ambitions. What I took away from this is that motherhood, like all expectations of womanhood, simultaneously dehumanizes and humanizes. The only way women become people is by giving ourselves over to the care of another.

As a fellow daughter of Chicago suburban decadence I liked this a lot

Every book I read by her makes me a better person…

All of us have a landscape of the soul, places whose contours and resonances are etched into us and haunt us. If we ever became ghosts, these are the places to which we would return.

We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.

In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another's long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.

I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

I never really came near to be being successful, although in Ireland you can get along for a long time before the truth starts to matter.

The rise of gay political power is part of a history of queer incorporation into municipal politics, as well as a history of building projects that leave intact the extraordinary legacy of racial apartheid, or even embed it in the built environment. The shift…of lesbian and gay activism away from the classic focus on civil liberties and freedom from police harassment…increased the visibility and power of Chicago's gay minority, but at a cost.

For a moment, Nora felt impatient with her. She was starting her life, she could live where she liked, do what she liked. She did not have to get the train back to the town where everybody knew about her and all the years ahead were mapped out for her.

And, of course, in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

She knew through what fires the soul must crawl, and with what weeping one passed over. Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot.

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

The faggots act out their fantasies without beieving them to be real. The men act out their fantasies always proclaiming that they are real. . . . The men's fantasies are about control and domination and winning. The faggots move towards the limits of living in the body for they have known body ecstasy and want to live there with everyone always.

“What does a woman see in a woman that she can‘t see in a man?”
Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, “Tenderness.”
That shut me up.

I had to recreate myself and then become her again, and she would create a self and become herself again.

In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect.

There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.

Feminism can be experienced as giving life, or as taking one‘s own life back, a life that you might have experienced as what you have given to others, or even what has been taken by other people‘s expectations.

The first responsibility of a ‘liberated‘ woman is to lead the fullest, freest, and most imaginative life she can. The second responsibility is her solidarity with other women . . . she has no right to represent her situation as simpler, or less suspect, or less full of compromises than it really is.

A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.

I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

We rest our foreheads against each other, like sand dunes dissolving into each other. My tears pool in your clavicle, your hands run affectionately through my hair…I am exhausted from trying to understand why our stomachs hurt around each other so often, how the closeness felt in one moment meta-morphs into strangeness.

Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and have never been depressed.

Boystown hadn't been that much of a hangout for me in Chicago. It was literally a boys town, clearly not where the lesbians were, a neighborhood full of moneyed clubs where, if you were not physically knocked down by a horde of shirtless, waxed Ken dolls, you needed to resign yourself to the fact that you had no chance of getting a drink, unless you got a gay man to get it for you.

“… they tell you whatever lie it is they're telling to Blacks and Puerto Ricans and women that day…After watching Daddy, I haven't got the heart to see it all over again." She stopped, took a breath and lowered her eyes to the linoleum floor, " … Maybe some of it is that I don't have real work of my own. I go around being beautiful and having fun, yeah, but I don't have anything for me, really mine, and you do, and it fucking kills me.”

They had gone together to the cliff's edge and looked down at the strand and the calm sea. Asking a direct question about plans would have broken the ease between them. He let the moment pass.

His mother had served everyone…When she went to sit down, with her own plate, his brother had reached out and quickly pulled the chair from under her - and she had fallen backward, onto the floor. She must have been near sixty years of age at that time…but his father had laughed - all three of them had laughed, heartily, and had kept on laughing while she picked the pancakes and the pieces of the broken plate up, off the floor.