“The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.” (Dancer From the Dance)
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“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
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Isherwood was an English novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, known for such work as Goodbye to Berlin, his 1939 novel, which eventually was adapted into one of the all-time greatest hits Broadway has ever known: Cabaret. Isherwood was openly gay and surrounded himself with literary friends, including W.H. Auden and Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmations.
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“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.” (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
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"Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."
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Allen Ginsberg was a Beat poet best known for his seminal work, Howl, which was the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957 because of its description of homosexual sex (sodomy laws at the time made gay sex illegal). The judge ruled in Ginsberg’s favor, saying, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”
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“I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.”
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“We buy balloons, we let them go.” (American Psycho)
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“I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”
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“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings” (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
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“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.” (Every Day)
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White is famous for his early fiction and essays on queer life in America. He also helped found instrumental global gay men’s groups, including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
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A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howards End—English author E.M. Forster wrote incomparable novels that earned him Nobel Prize consideration throughout his life. The novel most gay readers know him for, Maurice, did not appear until after his death—where he discussed his struggle with sexuality in Victorian England.
“Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face.” (What Belongs to You)
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“The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.” (Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry)
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“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
“You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don't dance
So you might as well
dance.” (Three Lives)
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“And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.” (The Little Stranger)
“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.” (A Brief History of Seven Killings)
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“Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.” (Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings)
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“Whoever it is you fall in love with for the first time, not just love but be in love with, is the one who will always make you angry, the one you can't be logical about.” (The Passion)
“Looking back now across fifteen years I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it.” (A Seperate Peace)
“One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.”
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“There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.” (Faggots)
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“Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.” (Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come)
“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.” (A Home at the End of the World)
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"my heart knows who i am and who i'll turn out to be!" (Invisible Life)
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“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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“'Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?'
'Always,' Carol said, smiling, too.” (The Price of Salt)
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“Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.”
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“How very American, he thought, to look at a disease as homosexual or heterosexual, as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between different inclinations of human behavior.” (And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS)
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“Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.”
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“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!” (A Streetcar Named Desire)
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“There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.”
“How is something a memory if you never forgit?” (Push)
“Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.” (Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches)
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American author Truman Capote is famous for works like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, which is credited with the start of the "true crime" genre. More than 20 films have been produced from his works.
Photo Credit: Photo by Roger Higgins/New York World-Telegram and Sun
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