“My Lesbian history tells me that the vice squad is never our friend even when it is called in by women; that when police rid a neighborhood of 'undesirables,' the undesirables have also included street Lesbians; that I must find another way to fight violence against women without doing violence to my Lesbian self. I must find a way that does not cooperate with the state forces against sexuality, forces that raided my bars, beat up my women, entrapped us in bathrooms, closed our plays, and banned our books.”

“One of the lessons I have learned in trying to live with history is that for every repression, we have found a suitable form of resistance. Our history is the chronicle of our vitality, our passion, our cunning, and at many times, our integrity. We must now work out a way by which we can honor both the old and the new. We must look for connections rather than judgments...In these days of Lesbian performers (or, as they call themselves, women performers) singing at Carnegie Hall, the wooing of us by national political parties, of big-budgeted gay civil rights organizations, remember that our battle is to be accepted in the fullness of our difference and not because we promise to be like everybody else.”

“After a year and a half my therapist retired, so I was bounced to someone else-a woman.Shazam! I suddenly felt I could open up and talk about the real stuff going on in my head. She lasted two session. I guess it was the castration fantasy that pushed over the edge.”

“He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.”

“But some survive. Many of us have lived to tell our stories, to create Lesbian texts, to read Lesbian texts, even to write commentaries and criticisms of Lesbian texts. All of these activities must be pluralized, multiplied, complicated, and pluralized again, because there is no single, narrow, one-sentence definition of "The Lesbian." The sexologists may have been the ones to name us, but we can, and do, create ourselves. Our of a mishmash of disinformation, misinformation and outright lies, each Lesbian constructs some story about who she is and who she might someday be...”

“Women must show their public face. We must help to work out our own community problems. We must insist on having equal voices and equal responsibilities. . . In large part, success depends on changing minds at home, in the streets, and at the workplace - not just in legislatures and in the courts. Each and every one of us has and important role to play in completing that task.”

“Some women can't say the word lesbian... even when their mouth is full of one.”