Real Queer America Quotes

“Social progress, I realize, happens not just through the sort of revolutionary actions that generate Oscar-baiting biopics but through the underestimated power of conversation—through small exchanges of generosity and goodwill, through questions asked in good faith, through love expressed with no preconditions or expectations of return. I have spent a week doing nothing but talk to people. But talking is far from nothing. Words are the literal stuff of change.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“Nothing could be queerer than getting out of your comfort zone.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“remembering always Eve Sedgwick’s reminder that queer literally means across.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“The kind of category-defying love Foucault describes is a “problem” only because love is supposed to stay inside the proper social channels in our heteronormative culture. The family you’re born into is the family you’re supposed to be content with—and we are told repeatedly, without any explanation or supporting evidence, that we are meant to “love them no matter what.” To fit into such a culture, your friendships ought to be lesser.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“I worked in a white bubble, full of academics more comfortable theorizing about marginalized experiences than sharing space with the people who lived them.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“a man with dimples so deep you could fit pennies inside them when he smiles”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“But when you have a life as filled with pain, turbulence, and second chances as mine has been, you have to take the good with the bad.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

“There was nothing left to do but ponder a past that felt wasted and a future drained of hope.”
― Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States