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.

I didn't come out and pay a really painful price often, to be LGBT, to not claim my sexuality at the same time. It's not all right with me to not talk about it so I don't make anybody nervous.

If you struggle with issues of documentation, issues of your health care, issues of whether or not you'll be punished for being open about who you are, those things affect how you can be employed or not employed, how you can get an apartment or not get an apartment, how it is that you feel free or not free.

I was a commie and I fought about Marxism and class and race and it informed everything I did.

We're impacted by all the intersections of our identities and those then are reflected on what our choices are.

To actually be possessed or possess someone in a way that is unimaginable when you're a young person struggling about your body and whether anybody would ever want you, that's a huge world and that doesn't shift because you're fifty; it doesn't shift because you're 80. It's a vision of the possibility of claiming the right to dream and imagine an impossible place that you were never allowed to go, but you want the world to have as a possibility in the future.

My father is a gypsy. He traveled in caravans and was branded by the Ku Klux Klan. You know I have a history about race in my family that has very much to do with the other things that you name about poverty, about class, about access - or lack of it.