Some Strange Music Draws Me In Quotes

“People don’t say this often, but queerness can save your life. It forces you outside, where you have no choice but to find other resources. When you come from a rough place, queerness can set you free. It’s the regular kids who stay stuck.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“This is why the leaders of small places are afraid of music and books. And queers. They offer another way. But they don’t convert. They awaken. Sending a signal to dormant cells, they rouse what’s already there. “It’s time,” they say. “Wake up.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“Without this and other related thoughts, I could not entirely exist, except in halftones, a bunch of dots separated by empty space. At a distance, I might appear continuous, but at close range, anyone could see I was built from clusters of bits and gaps. Over the years, as I’ve gained more words, those spaces have become smaller, but they will never disappear. It doesn’t work that way.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“This is the fear inside every queer, that we are a contamination, an overstimulation, making normal people feel what they don't want to feel”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“Out there, we understand, there is another way to want, to have, to be. Sometimes, even when we do not venture out to find it, when we try to want only what we are given, the object comes to us. And the world, without our consent, breaks open and expands.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“I have since learned that many people take pleasure in the unmasking of others. They like to locate tender hidden spots, jab a finger, and announce, I see it. As if those spots were theirs to uncover. As if bodies were puzzles for them to solve.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“I have since learned that many people take pleasure in the unmasking of others. They like to locate tender hidden spots, jab a finger, and announce, ”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“Once the self expands, it cannot be brought back to its original shape.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“People don’t say this often, but queerness can save your life. It forces you outside, where you have no choice but to find other resources. When you come from a rough place, queerness can set you free. It’s the regular kids who stay stuck. Donna keeps nodding, saying yeah, uh-huh,”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“I wish I could have trusted my best friend, but I’d learned early that even the people who are supposed to love you can turn on you.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“I was glad when he died. Before that, it was like, even when I was in New York, I could feel him. Like you’re in the woods and you know there’s a wolf out there, tracking you, waiting to attack. And then, poof, the wolf’s gone. You feel that, too. The relief of absence. From miles away.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“You’re mansplaining,” Autumn says, tapping a note into her laptop, no doubt a demerit for her report to the dean of Diversity and Inclusion. “I’m a trans man,” I say. “If anything, I’m transplaining.” “Trans men are”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“I just worry about a community that’s more invested in hyper-individualism than, you know, community,” I say.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“All these words are trying to name the experience of non-binary gender, which of course is valid, I mean, it’s been around for thousands of years, but in their limitless profusion, the labels risk devolving to the narcissism of minor differences.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“I preserved this transgender question under cellophane. That would have been at least a year before I began to know myself, before I met Sylvia, and this brings up the mystery of knowing, how we can know a thing without thinking it, and how that unthought knowledge leaves traces, fragments of the truth before it’s fully born.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“She didn’t understand the differences between trans men and cis men, didn’t see the disparity in our payloads of privilege, and she probably believed, as many otherwise well-meaning people do, that to acknowledge the difference, to say trans men are men and also more complicated, hello, more ontologically fraught, is to commit an act of transphobia when it’s the opposite. It’s affirming our complexity.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“but understand that when I was a kid, I was starving for elders, older trans people to show me I could exist and did not have to die”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“The girl I used to be.” Just one note about that. I can say this about myself, but you can’t say it about me. That’s how it works. When you say it, you’re doing something to me. An act of casual aggression. A verbal depantsing. When I say it, well, it’s mine to say. Girl, in this context, doesn’t mean to me what girl means to you. It’s a flickering kind of boy-girl, a girl-not-girl that isn’t not-girl.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“In the mornings, instead of coffee, she heated Tab in a microwave oven and drank it from a mug decorated with a Ziggy cartoon: “Hang in there. Today won’t last forever.” This summed up Ginny’s philosophy of life, in which each day was to be endured until its hotly anticipated end.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“polyester. In that sameness, even with my big bones and heavy feet, I hoped to fail less obviously at girlhood. Something to look forward”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In

“My shape, that enigmatic packaging, had its own design and cared nothing about anyone’s objections, including my own. However the message came, the world confirmed what I felt, that my body was off in its most essential calibrations.”
― Griffin Hansbury, Some Strange Music Draws Me In