"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."
Marsha P. Johnson
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Audre Lorde
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A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.
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If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. |
Your silence will not protect you. I am deliberate and afraid of nothing. |
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. |
"When i say i want to “end the gender binary,” i am not saying that i want everyone in the world to be nonbinary nor that being a woman or a man is a problem. what i want is for “man” and “woman” to be understood as only two of millions of potential ways of being. i want all gendered & agendered ways of being to have access to the same legitimacy, safety, compassion & beauty, i want the category “woman” to exist without an oppositional relationship to that of “man” (and vice verse), i want “man” to not be regarded as mutually exclusive with “woman,” i want “woman” & “man” to contain multitudes & not be homogenized & flattened. identifying as a man or a woman isn’t about “reinforcing the gender binary.” the way that we perpetuate the gender binary is more about the systems of value we uphold & how we treat each other than the particular words that we affix to our experiences. this is why i believe that all of us — regardless of how we identify & navigate the world — have a stake in ending the gender binary! it’s a system of power that values its reproduction over our realities, its supremacy over our stories, its universality over our uniqueness. i want a world where gender is respected as a story, not just a word. one where we understand that it means a fundamentally different thing for one person to be a woman than another, where we recognize that there is no one way to be a man. when nonbinary & gender non-conforming people challenge the gender binary it is not because we want to police or restrict others, rather it is because we want to create a world that values difference, complexity, and infinite transformation."
ENDING THE GENDER BINARY HELPS EVERYONE
January 3, 2018
“I am a person of color, working-class, born to a single mother, but I stand before you tonight an artist, an actress and a sister and a daughter, and I believe that it is important to name the multiple parts of my identity because I am not just one thing, and neither are you.”
Venezuelan artist Daniel Arzola’s artwork is a form of activism he calls “artivism,” and he counts celebrities like Madonna as fans of his work. In 2013 he created graphics for a campaign called “No Soy Tu Chiste” (“I Am Not Your Joke”), bringing awareness to his home country’s lack of LGBT rights.
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(Above) One of the most famous artists of the 20th century, Frida Kahlo was married to Diego Riviera but took both male and female lovers—including singer Josephine Baker.
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The religious icon challenged the gender norms of her time by going against church law and choosing to present as masculine. She was seen as an equal to male soldiers and was never linked romantically to a man during her lifetime.
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While the Harlem-born writer James Baldwin was the rare out author at that time whose novels went on to become queer literature classics.
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