No political movement can avoid the reality of desire in its midst. Every office building is full of the illicit affairs, the unwanted pregnancies, the crises that happen in human lives.

We're targeted as LGBTQ people because we make people nervous around sex and we practice desire or have the possibility of practicing desire in magical and very, very profound ways. We shouldn't be giving up the possibility of articulating the claim of our body and the claim of our desire as something distinctive and erotically profound.

If you're a person with resources who is LGBT, you may have some problems with that - but, frankly, you'll probably have an apartment. If you're poor, if you're transgender, if you're a person of color, if you're HIV positive and you're homeless, the ability to act on desire, the ability to be safely somewhere to make love with anybody that you want to make love with is unlikely.

Issues of the economy are profoundly affected by how you live out sexual orientation and gender identity.

I think desire gives us - imagination - as well as actually often we pay a terrible price for it. Women are punished around their sexuality and perceived to be immoral if they practice a certain kind of promiscuous sexuality. It's a very different thing still if you're a guy, if you're a woman and you're straight.

For a political movement to not understand that sexuality is a profound component of both how people are oppressed and how people dream, is not to recognize the reality of political power and where it's centered.

I think that the power of a political vision is deeply engaged with the possibility of how you can live out the liberation that you seek and part of that vision is very much about desire, about the erotic.