44 Queer Pioneer Quotes
Words Of Wisdom About Life + Love
Be inspired by the wit and wisdom of LGBTQ heroes and iconoclasts. The following quotes celebrate a colorful, vibrant vision of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
"Ever up and onward."
Billy Strayhorn
"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."
Virginia Woolf
"A rose is a rose is a rose."
Gertrude Stein
"The root of heterosexual fear of male homosexuality is in the fact that anyone might be gay. Straight men aren't threatened by a flamboyant faggot because they know they aren't like that; they're threatened by a guy who's just like they are who turns out to be queer."
Vito Russo
"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly."
Langston Hughes
"Hope will never be silent."
Harvey Milk
"I won't be a rock star. I will be a legend."
Freddie Mercury
"Google me, I’m not hiding."
Kristen Stewart
"The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth."
Radclyffe Hall
"For the record, I am gay."
Megan Rapinoe
"I'm an eccentric English actor, and there's a lot of us around."
Ian McKellen
"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."
Tennessee Williams
"I was always out of the closet. I didn't have to come out."
Ruth Ellis
"There's a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they're mismatched. That's all it is. It's not complicated, it's not a neurosis. It's a mix-up."
Chaz Bono
"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept."
Angela Davis
"People want me to shut up, but I won't. I believe social change is possible; that's why I'm an activist."
Andrea Dworkin
"When you put love out in the world it travels, and it can touch people and reach people in ways that we never even expected."
Laverne Cox
"Don't accept the world as it is. Dream of what the world could be- then help make it happen."
Peter Tatchell
"There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own."
Larry Kramer
"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
James Baldwin
"I believe in fair play, and I believe that when people are struggling, you don't talk down to them, you help lift them up."
Tammy Baldwin
"I do 'sissy with a heart of gold' really well."
Billy Porter
"Nature made a mistake which I have had corrected and I am your daughter."
Christine Jorgensen
"If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me."
W.H. Auden
"Treating people the way you'd want to be treated is the golden rule for a reason!"
Karine Jean-Pierre
"Equality means more than passing laws. The struggle is really won in the hearts and minds of the community, where it really counts."
Barbara Gittings
"Your silence will not protect you."
Audre Lorde
"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
Andy Warhol
"I think the least of people's worries is a man In a dress."
Divine
"No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us."
Marsha P. Johnson
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
Oscar Wilde
"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
Truman Capote
"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer."
E.M. Forster
"The whole point is to live life and be - to use all the colors in the crayon box."
RuPaul Charles
"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."
Allen Ginsberg
"We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are. We have to show the world that we are numerous. There are many of us out there."
Sylvia Rivera
"I'm a tomboy from Nova Scotia."
Elliot Page
"Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces."
Claude Cahun
"I prefer living in color."
David Hockney
"I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality."
Frida Kahlo
"If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy."
Jean Genet
"When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him."
Bayard Rustin
"Don’t postpone joy. Keep it hot!"
Edie Windsor
"Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further."
Keith Haring