Chicana lesbian writer and cultural/queer theorist whose poems and essays reveal the isolation and angst of occupying the fringes of identity.

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"Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues on fire."

Prolific orator, debater, author, and activist whose personal and searing analysis of race in the United States ran parallel with the civil rights and gay liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century.​

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"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

Chinese-American activist, author, and philospher whose Marxist leanings and vision of what an American revolution could be led to a hefty FBI file and legendary imprint in Detroit.​

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"Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after."

A pioneer of the LGBTQ+ community, prominent figure of the Stonewall riot, gay liberation activist, and self-identified drag queen. She sang, she modeled for Andy Warhol, she created a home for those who didn’t have one, and word on the street is she threw a shot glass that was “heard around the world.” ​

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"No pride for some without liberation for all of us."

A "concert of voices," Audre Lorde was a writer, feminist, lesbian, and civil rights activist wose work magnified the conflicting differences within the self and the necessary resistance of injustice.​

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“If [we] cannot love and resist at the same time, [we] probably will not survive.”

K'iche' feminist and Indigenous rights activist from Guatemala and founder of the country's first Indigenous political party, Winaq.

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"I am like a drop of water on a rock. After drip, drip, dripping in the same place, I begin to leave a mark, and I leave my mark in many people’s hearts."

Korean-American disability rights activist and advocate of fair treatment of people with disabilities and advisor to the Obama administration.

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"Grow. Change. Be better. But also [...] know you are a beautiful human being who deserves love and tenderness and care as you are."

First openly gay elected official in the history of CA who shifted San Francisco politics and sponsored a bill that passed banning discrimination in public accommodations, housing, and employment on the basis of sexual orientation.

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"If you are not personally free to be yourself in that most important of all human activities—the expression of love—then life itself loses its meaning."

Puerto Rican/Venezuelan gay liberation and transgender rights activist and drag queen who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Marsha P. Johnson.

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"We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are."