Audre Lorde

o Profundo: Sister Grace Boggs said: “My revolution is to share my/ our love, beauty and our history[herstory], experiences, successes and failures—of exits and entrances, to make space for our souls.”

I’m saying we must observe the implications of our lives. If what we are talking about is feminism, then the personal is political and we can subject everything in our lives to scrutiny. We have been nurtured in a sick, abnormal society, and we should be about the process of reclaiming ourselves as well as the terms of that society. This is complex. I speak not about condemnation but about recognizing what is happening and questioning what it means. I’m not willing to regiment anyone’s life, but if we are to scrutinize our human relationships, we must be willing to scrutinize all aspects of those relationships. The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives

n the interest of a capitalist profit system for us to privatize much of our experience.

The question I ask, over and over, is who is profiting from this?

Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is.

It was recognized that there are things we do not share with white lesbians and gay men, as well as things that we do, and that clarification of goals is necessary between white gays and lesbians, and Third World gays and lesbians.

I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppressions as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest.

But, as with all families, we sometimes find it difficult to deal constructively with the genuine differences between us and to recognize that unity does not require that we be identical to each other.

Black women are not one great vat of homogenized chocolate milk. We have many different faces, and we do not have to become each other in order to work together

no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.