Ezra Furman Quotes

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

As a white queer person of a certain degree of economic privilege, I think that my ability to pass as straight is a privilege that other folk I know don't have. It's important to keep in mind who really is in the most trouble and to direct our attention to assisting those people.

I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

It's a shame that gays who ought to be pushing boundaries have been domesticated and tamed and turned into pets by the Progressive Left.

I don't like following the rules - the patriarchal rules.

That is just the reality of being a marginalized person in this country: you have to deal with the psychological impact of your oppressor - whether that's being a woman dealing with men or gay people dealing with straight people or trans people dealing with everybody else.

My mother said to me, 'Why do you have to call yourself a dyke? Why can't you be a nice lesbian?' 'Because I'm not a nice lesbian, I'm a big dyke.'

We hope we are moving toward a world where sexual orientation is not an issue, because we hate the idea of a gay ghetto. I think that it's a real shame that people become restricted by their sexuality or define their whole lives by their sexuality.

It's hard being bisexual, omnisexual, multisexual, whatever you want to call it, when people have their agenda and expect you to just represent their agenda.

I'm always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.

I absolutely believe in assimilation. I don't believe I'm any different from straight people. My wants and needs are the same as theirs. I don't look at sexual orientation as that big of a deal. It's just an orientation.

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets.

The state and the church seldom approve of anything I do. I don't need their approval. I don't aspire to the heterosexual nuclear family model.

I grew up in society when lots of things were hidden, and they were not hidden just one way, but it was very complicated.

It's always the minorities who aren't a part of the mainstream who define what the limits... of the majority are going to be.

In Mississippi, you don't admit that you're gay. It's just an awkward thing down South, which is sad.

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.

To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist.

Male homosexuality, in particular, seems to possess some quality of being intrinsically subversive when let loose in long-established institutions, especially male dominated ones.

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.

In the locker room, and when I'm with my friends, we use racial slurs... What I do with my black friends is not up to white America to dictate to me what's appropriate and inappropriate.

There were interesting ways that queerness could hide out and get played out pre-Stonewall. It is part of a vast history that is getting forgotten quickly as we trumpet forward into gay marriage and gays in the military and a much different cultural attitude toward gay lives.

The Left not only needs a victim class, it has proven adept at inventing new victim classes as a means of exacerbating social conflict.

For the Left, victimhood has long carried social currency.