Salman Toor, The Bar on East 13h, 2019

Queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being. It offers a counterhegemonic discourse of losing as a way of refusing the finite forms of being offered by late capitalism.

- Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011)

Queer orientations are about the spaces created by tables, and what is gathered around them. By over-occupying spaces that are not intended for them, queer bodies can make space 'happen.' Such spaces are not just about finding a room of one's own, but about finding a room where you can be with others.

- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006)

The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formance, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically compelled illusion.

- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The point is not that queerness is yet to arrive but that it is an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.

- Jose Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

That’s one of the things 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren't made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (1993)

I know it feels like your life is a line of dominoes that only knows how to fall, 

but I promise you, you are the hand that can pick them up and build a fortress.

- Andrea Gibson

And yet the look of that life stayed.

The specific movement of that love,

the pure and unashamed light.

- Constantine Cavafy

You are a beautiful thing. We are all beautiful things, 

turning the dark corners of the world into 

places where we can finally breathe.

- Richard Siken

I am a woman who loves women

and I am a person who loves the beautiful,

and we are rewriting the map of what is possible

with every single touch.

- June Jordan

We are the architecture of our own rescue.

We are the ones who can love ourselves

when no one else is looking

or willing.

- Essex Hemphill

You are not a mistake. You are too many exquisite things to fit into a word.

- Andrea Gibson

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

- Mary Oliver

it is

a power

nourished by comfort

knowing

we are

doing each other's work

- audre lorde

let across the world
a million boys
wake up laughing
& safe in their skin

- danez smith