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Affection never outlasted need. This was the first lesson the city taught me the hard way. The vast majority of us are merely pawns in someone else’s game. Don’t get defensive over this point. Embrace it. Once you do, you can begin to manipulate the board. Positioned correctly, pawns can checkmate kings.
but held that love loosely in my arms, antici- pating its death and mourning it as it lived.
One of the patrons I became pals with was the underappreciated social justice advocate Bayard Rustin.9 Rustin—we all called him by his last name—had been a key organizer of the March on Washington. He’d sat alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at countless strategy meetings for the Civil Rights Movement, and Rustin would be a household name but for his open homosexuality, which included an arrest record for “engaging in public sex,” and his ties to communist and socialist ideologies. He was scrubbed from mainstream African American history and consigned to be a minor notable of the Gay Rights
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Nah, if I’m going to bed a fella, he’s got to remind me of no one. I need a clean slate to turn me on.”
“You’ll do the right things in your own time,”
“I seen enough evil in men to smell it on the ones tryin’ to hide it inside.”
Don’t reject the space you gravitate toward just because the windows aren’t stained glass and the congregation isn’t saved.
We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe. Yet the limits placed on our appetites, talents, and potential are implanted in us when we are children—too young to recognize the prisons built with words. We could blame it all on our families, but then we’d never find the keys to unlock our cells. The awful genius of our confinement is that we are both the prisoner and the warden. We tell ourselves daily that we aren’t free to do this or that because we are that or this. To escape such limited thinking, we don’t have to look far. The keys are in our pocket.
we never meet our despicable adversaries, we’d never be forced to find out how brave, resilient, and cunning we can be.
The theory goes that governmental agencies don’t accidently make accessing information or resources difficult. They do this shit on purpose. The forms are confusing, and the record keeping is ass-backward because it reflects a policy choice. A decision has been made to repel the average citizen from gaining certain knowledge or opportunities.
Yet there is one stone that will slay them all: time. Devils grow old, and the world around them eventually exceeds their understanding and control. Never forget that. Never let them forget it.
Winning rarely changes how people perceive us and almost never soothes our insecurities. Winning, as most of us conceive it, is external and public. I didn’t yet know that the most rewarding activities of my life would be those done in secret.
Women fill a need because they see a need. We don’t necessarily get pleasure from it. We don’t expect a reward. We don’t expect shit.”
The point is to let your bruised and bloodied bodies serve as evidence that the government means to kill you, if you so much as protest its bigoted policies.”
can forgive his anger since I know where it comes from.
