Faith & Spirit Quote by Audre Lorde

Lorde drops "God knows" like a blade: part exasperation, part witness testimony. She is not making a polite taxonomy of identities; she is puncturing the easy story that lesbian life automatically equals feminist politics. The ellipses do real work here, mimicking speech and memory, as if she is pulling you through crowded rooms and half-lit bars where survival came before slogans. That staging matters. "Came up through lesbian circles" frames queerness as an education, a lineage, a set of learned codes and risks, not an abstract label. In the New York of the 1940s and 50s, visibility could mean arrest, job loss, institutionalization. Under those conditions, "community" often had to be pragmatic, discreet, even internally policed.

The provocation is in the gap between practice and ideology. Lorde suggests a generation of women whose desire put them outside heterosexual norms yet who didn’t, or couldn’t, translate that outsider status into a feminist self-conception. Some may have held tight to butch-femme roles as a stabilizing grammar; some may have distrusted a feminism that felt white, middle-class, or inattentive to race and class; some simply weren’t offered the language yet. Lorde’s subtext is also a warning to movements hungry for tidy origin myths: identity is not destiny, and politics is not automatic.

As a poet, she understands how names work. "Feminist" isn’t just a descriptor; it’s an invitation and a demand. Her line makes room for historical complexity while quietly insisting that chosen affiliations, not assumed ones, are where solidarity begins.