I tried to read this at ALA and then on zine tour, but my concentrate sucked, and I gave up. I’d pick it up again, but honestly, while the book is full of colorful quotations, it’s chaotic and hard to read. I’ve got enough chaos in my life right now, so I’m not going to force my way through. I do want to share the awesome quotations, though.
Homosexual marriages, p. 4
...I think society has a nerve to say that the church has a monopoly on the license to fuck, that you must lie one on top of the other (which is fairly boring in two senses of the word), and that you must not suck. I don’t know why anyone would want to give anybody else a blow job, but in my opinion it’s not for me or the church or anybody else, to tell people which of these rather unesthetic activities they ought to be involved in.
Sex work, p. 5
Talking about sexual recreation reminds me that a very average prostitute in almost any part of this country can get $100 a night minimum, or if she is fairly well-known she might make as much as $500. A run-of-the-mill file clerk nets about $100 a week, and a run-of-the-mill housewife will get zero a week for filing, fucking, ironing, having the baby, nursing the baby, baby-sitting, and the whole megillah. In my opinion, a government that cannot provide full employment for women who don’t have degrees, and even those who do, has a pretty big ner making the most lucrative occupation a crime.
Blaming the rape victim, p. 8
Clothes are like packages--sometimes they are indicative of the contents: for example, in a rape situation, a jury can be made to believe a woman almost invites rape when she’s wearing tight pants or jeans, whereas a man in an expensive coat doesn't suggest he should be mugged, and wearing a diamond doesn’t mean you are inviting robbery. And women supposedly invite rape by wearing miniskirts. I am sure that nobody in our society is absolutely free of that feeling, but it would not occur to anyone seriously to suggest that a bank invites robbery by having all that money there.
The testicular approach, p. 11, from the Colorado Daily, v. 24, no. 75
Kennedy deals with the pigocrats by using the “testicular approach.” That was described as the “nice colored lady,” the kind who wears housedresses--not “Kimberly knits”--going to the dentist, and, when he proceeds to carelessly hurt her with the drill, grabbing him by the testicles “just short of enough to make him go down on the floor and die,” and saying “We are not going to hurt each other, are we?”
The Tyranny of the Weak, p. 14
Ten years later we had the phenomenon of Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia, presidential hopeful in 1976, our Bicentennial year, and people like Terry Sanford, the former governor of North Carolina, appealing to the northerners not to freak out over busing. They’re like reformed alcoholics who go out and try to save the other pathological communities from freaking out--”Look, it’s not that bad, we did it. We started the busing, we desegregated the schools, and poor white kids don’t die when Black kids come and sit in the same room with them, and they don’t catch anything. In fact, it’s much more likely that Black kids will catch head lice from the white kids.
On media, p. 14
In September 1971 The New York Times came out with an article, probably based on a handout from Albany, that the guards at Attica had their throats slit by the inmates, and that one of them had been castrated. Later it turned out that this was just not true, and the Times had to back away from this horrendous tale for the simple reason that it never happened. And this sort of thing goes on often enough for people to start being a little skeptical of the Times, and not only those people who challenge the mass media version of events. There must be recognition of media’s role in the Control-of-Niggers Game.
Post-MLK assassination demo, p. 61
Dorothy Pitman Hughes was there, I remember, and when the people next to us were singing “We shall overcome,” Dorothy in her beautiful voice sang instead, “We shall overthrow.”
CATS: One cat, named Walker, that she liked more than dolls, but not the warmest endorsement