Nancy Garden
My writing books with positive gay characters has come more out of anger than anything else: anger at not having been able to find honest, accurate books about people like myself as a teen, books that show we're as diverse as straight people and that we can lead happy, healthy, productive lives just as straight people can.Collection: Positive
When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the '50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay character's committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or 'turning' heterosexual.
I think kids in every minority need to see people like themselves in books; that's an acknowledgment of their existence on this planet and in this society.
I write for young people because I like them and because I think they are important. Children's books can be mind-stretchers and imagination-ticklers and builders of good taste in a way that adult books cannot, because young people usually come to books with more open minds. It's exciting to be able to contribute to that in a small way.
My coming out, like most people's, was and is a gradual process - for no matter how out one is, there are always situations when one's with people who don't know, and one has the choice or, sometimes, the necessity of coming out to them.
Don't punish yourselves for people's ignorant reactions to what we all are. Don't let ignorance win. Let love.Collection: Ignorance
But what really is immorality? And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?Collection: Mean
Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?Collection: Soulmate
The thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but there's a view from top every time when you finally get there.Collection: Climbing
It's Annie and me they're all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; It's Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love.Collection: Falling In Love
The 1st day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to do that forever.Collection: Cat
Don't let ignorance win. Let love.Collection: Love
And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that live under the streets.Collection: Summer
Liza-don't let it make any difference. It won't, will it? With us, I mean." "Of course it won't," I told her. But I was wrong. Six months of not writing-that's a difference. And so I lied to Annie. On top of everything else, I lied to Annie, too.Collection: Writing
Ugh! Young girls, they should laugh. Life's bad enough when you're grown, you might as well laugh when you're young.Collection: Girl