A Quote by Martha Shelley

...I discovered that I could take a risk and survive. I could march in Philadelphia. I could go out in the street and be gay evenin a dress or a skirt without getting shot. Each victory gave me courage for the next one.
There was nothing else to do but call upon the Creator, praying, begging, pleading, bargaining—anything to make him protect Xavier. I couldn’t have him ripped away from me like that. I could survive emotional turmoil; I could survive the most intense physical torture. I could survive Armageddon and holy fire raining down upon the earth, but I could not survive without him.
And I used to go the punk clubs such as a gay club in Poland Street that everyone would go to because it was the only place you could go to looking like that without getting beaten senseless.
There is always going to be a risk in a new love, a difficulty to be overcome, and more so considering all the challenges facing gay love, particularly in an adolescent. The desired other person could turn out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, could hurt us, could even ruin us. But the risk has to be taken.
In my experience, God rarely makes our fear disappear. Instead, He asks us to be strong and take courage. What is courage? As Ordinary discovered, courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it's choosing to act in spite of the fear. You could say that without fear, you can't have genuine courage.
Dance gave me a focus so I could survive, and energy so I could have confidence in myself.
Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my family we didn't go around saying we loved each other. We went around screaming at each other. So what do I do, when you say you love me? I go and undermine it.
My mother gave me very good advice years ago. I grew up in the Great Depression and she always told me to get a good little basic black dress - well-cut, well-made, good fabric - and it could take me through everything. I could go to the office in the morning and stay out all day in the same dress. Just by changing accessories, because they are so transformative, you can make six different outfits. I find that very useful. My mother worshipped at the altar of accessories and I'm an accessory freak, as everybody knows. That, I got from my mother.
You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay - that was literally the last place many people went.
I wanted to get that scholarship to - a division one scholarship and play ball and go to school for free. And that, to me, was - I was always about getting to that next step. If I could get to that next place, then I could figure out essentially what to do with being in that space and how to manage my time and handle those - handle all the benefits of being in that space in a way that would get me to the next place.
I could play a cop, I could play a crook, I could play a lawyer, I could play a dentist, I could play an art critic-I could play the guy next door. I am the guy next door. I could play Catholic, Jewish, Protestant. As a matter of fact, when I did The Odd Couple, I would do it a different way each night. On Monday I'd be Jewish, Tuesday Italian, Wednesday Irish-German-and I would mix them up. I did that to amuse myself, and it always worked.
I shot images of everything I could find over the course of a year. I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day, I could easily take thousands.
There was a lot of pressure on me when I was 18, 19 to move to America. I went out for a couple of weeks and hated it. I thought I could go out my mind. You could really see how people could go off the rails.
I lay in the bed at the hospital and said, 'let's see what I have left.' And I could see, I could speak, I could think, I could read. I simply tabulated my blessings, and that gave me a start.
The values transmitted through oral history are many - courage, selflessness, the ability to endure, and to do so with humor and grace. I got those values listening to my dad's stories about the Depression and how their family survived. It gave me courage that I, too, could survive hard times.
I think people in general don't take enough risks. Some people feel that before they can take on that next challenge they need to be 100 percent ready. It's just not true. Even people in their jobs aren't perfect at their jobs. So my biggest advice to people is to step out there. Take the risk and deal with it. What is the worst that could happen? It's about thriving on risk instead of shrinking from risk.
If the circulation of blood theory could not have been discovered without vivisection, the human kind could well have done without it.
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