Home > Work > Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
1 " Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. ...Queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through out families' rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we've faced, the ways in which we've violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have sustained as a result of this, the low income and survival states we've endured as a result of society's loathing, unharmed. Whatever of theses wounds I didn't experience firsthand, my lovers did, and so I say that, for a time, it was not possible to have queer love that was not ins some way damaged or defined by damage sustained, even as it desperately fought through that damage to access, hopefully, increasingly frequent moments of sustaining, lifesaving love, true love, and loyalty, and electric sex. "
― Michelle Tea , Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
2 " Sometime the shittiest, most oppressive thing about being a girl is how good you're supposed to be all the time. And sometime that feeling of an enforced, expected goodness can come from feminism. The thing about being a poet, an artist, a writer is you can't be good. You shouldn't have to be good. You should, for the sake of your art, your soul, and your life go through significant periods of time when you are defying many notions of goodness. "