anger is constantly the fuel that feeds the work that I do, keeps me thinking of myself as an activist, and keeps me writing. - Jewelle Gomez

Gentrification has put a new face on the neighborhood; upper-middle-class lesbians and gay men now cruise the streets, looking disdainfully at the house I grew up in because it doesn't fit their standards of elegance. But inside that house are the people who made me who I am. They're the people I write about in my books. And I write about them because they are heroic in

if they can start defining us, why shouldn't we define ourselves? It is a feminist vision that helped bring us here today as lesbian and writers and editors and publishers-we must not forget that. It was all the movements that came before the lesbian-feminist move ment that brought us here today. And we should not forget that. And not only should we not forget it; we should learn to use it. It's one thing to just simply quote it and say, "Yes, I know that," but what is it that you learned? What is it that you do differently now? Because you understand the oppression of women in this society and the exclusion of women and people of color and poor people from this society. What is it that you learned that makes you do things differently?

when we forget that the media lies, we forget ourselves, we forget the realities that we know. Our presses, the feminist presses, the small presses, taught us: they will lie to us. They lied to us in every book that they published that didn't bother to mention the gay character who we knew was embedded in the text-or created a Black character who sounded exactly like the white characters in the interest of cosmopolitanism, as if the thoughts in their heads were exactly the same as the white characters.