In women's shelters the kind of clothes that women are given to go to job interviews are all girl clothes: little heels, little skirt. If you're gender nonconforming, you're a lesbian, you're not going to put those clothes on to go to a job interview.

Everyone's always told about politics you have to be practical, but I actually think that's not true, you actually have to hold to a dream... and desire is part of that dream.

I feel really - actually - quite terrified about the world as it now exists. The kind of sucking the world dry for a dollar seems to me to be even worse (though it was hard for me to imagine 30 years ago that it could get worse) and the idea that bling and profit over human beings is really more and more a credible idea; people don't even examine it with any kind of question: I find that really terrifying.

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.

Is it different to come out now than it was to come out thirty-five years ago? Sometimes. But if you come out now and you come from poverty and you come from racism, you come from the terror of communities that are immigrant communities or communities where you're already a moving target because of who you are, this is not a place where it's any easier to be LGBT even if there's a community center in every single borough.

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.

I think that white people are not seen as people with racial histories.