Quotes about Identity

One cannot worship the false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time. .

when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

you will change your mind; You will change your looks; You will change your smile,laugh, and ways but no matter what you change, you will always be you

The southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow, so that when he had no money for food, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man.

What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.

Why is it that, in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like?

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be femme, and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be butch. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

our sons must become men — such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home

I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.

Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home.

Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.