Michael Bronski Quotes

There are many times that these representations – novels, songs, films, graphic novels, tv shows – make us laugh or cry because we recognize parts of ourselves in them. That’s great. But we shouldn’t think that these representations actually represent us. Rather can’t. We are all much too complicated to be represented in this way. But nevertheless the longing to see our lives represented is powerful – and we need it. It is great to feel connected to a community because of popular culture – we just have to realise that almost any artefact of popular culture that – by its nature becomes popular – is never the whole truth of people’s lives. It is a consumer item – and that’s fine.; just don’t compare it to the authenticity of human experience, to understand the uniqueness of an individual life.

Books that get banned – historically and now in many, many states in the U.S. – are banned not because they are immoral (under accepted and promoted religious ideologies) but because they challenge a current orthodoxy. Often this orthodoxy is about sexuality, gender and sometimes race. But this is only part of what causes this – for the most part what we call “art” (good or bad art) is a product of the imagination. The nature of the imagination is to, well “imagine” – to think outside of the frames of the real, the material world, what is possible, what is considered acceptable. So this is the reason why “art” gets challenged most often by censorship --- it is, or can be, by its nature, a challenge to the status quo to what we are expected to accept as “normal".

Anything that liberates is not without risk.

The old saying that “history is written by the winners” is – to some degree – true for a great deal of traditional, written history. Only recently – maybe the past 100 years – have traditional historians been willing to look at the histories of minoritized groups and begin including them in mainstream narratives. But this is only focusing on traditional, mainstream histories – there are a number of ways that minoritized groups wrote, recorded, maintained, and saved their own histories. Often this was through alternative means – private correspondence, diaries, folk lore, songs, oral histories, visual cultures, theatre – and often dismissed by academic and traditional historians. The problem with how we conceptualise history is that it is prone to wanting to tell one story (usually the dominant one). The reality is that history – at its core – is multiple stories from multiple points of view. It is not a series of snapshots but many films, all shown at the same time. I do not think that history has a “responsibility” – that is very abstract – but that each and everyone one of us share the responsibility to not only insist on telling our own stories, but on encouraging everyone to tell theirs.

My earliest involvement in the gay community was in the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s. We had very strong opinions then. I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration. If there is one clear, unambiguous argument here, it is that the LGBT history of America is, and has always been, U.S. history. (Author's Note)

Humans are taught to think in dualities – left/ right, good/ evil, sacred/ profane, sin/ grace, clean/ dirty – the American Dream necessitates the creation of an American Nightmare. Who gets to be in the Dream v/s who is forced into the Nightmare is dependent on many factors: race, gender, class, income, physique, standards of beauty, sexual identity. In the past 40 years some queer people -- those who fit into standards of certain acceptability – were allowed into the Dream; but not all. Many LGBTQ people (those who were in the Dream) saw this as progress. But it is not progress until there is no more divide between the Dream and the Nightmare. There is an old Gay Liberation slogan which is “we don’t want a piece of the pie – the pie is poisoned.” So is the dichotomy between this Dream and the Nightmare.

Youth sexuality has often been, like homosexuality, unspeakable in our culture. This has been America's dirty little secret: teens and children think about sex. Some have sexual desires for members of their own gender. Young people coming out earlier, and often finding support in their homes and schools, is a major political advancement. For over a century, charges of "molestation," "corruption of a minor," and "recruitment” have been used-explicitly by J. Edgar Hoover, Anita Bryant, and others, and implicitly by many who are opposed to same-sex marriage-to demonize lesbians and gay men and deny them full citizenship. There may always be bias against LGBT people, but the charges of molestation will eventually fade as more youth come out.

in America, equality under the law is a complicated affair. Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly against the disenfranchised.

I have no “vision” as a professor. I think the best I can do is give my students interesting, provocative material they cannot find on their own and make them think – think deeply – about it. In many ways I learn more from my students than I think they learn from me. Education has to be a two-way street of knowledge and information and thoughts should be freely flowing, both ways. Of course I know more “facts and “statistics” etc. than my students but I do not necessarily know better what they mean or how to think about them in complicated ways. An “educated society” is a society that just spends more time thinking and trying to understand itself: its impulses, its desires, its fears, and its dreams. That is what I hope happens in my classroom!

At its best “art” is subversive and can change the world. Thus, making it not only a viable threat, but a dangerous one.

History is an ongoing process through which we understand and define ourselves and our lives.

Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.

It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country

Pedagogy, like history, will never be able to contain all of America-a great country, an evil country, a place of tremendous generosity and welcome as well as pronounced disdain for foreigners and outsiders. America is not one thing or another. America is queer.

LGBT people are simply Americans-no less and no more. The idea of America has existed, in some form, for five hundred years. LGBT people, despite enormous struggles to be accepted and to be given equality, have made America what it is today-that great, fascinating, complicated, sometimes horrible, sometimes wonderful place that it was in the beginning.