In a different moment, in the 60s and 70s, I did believe we were going to succeed - that we were going to create a revolution, that America was going to be a completely transformed nation state and that there would be an amazingly different set of beliefs; that this country would reflect. And I thought that that was the fulfillment of the American democratic dream and I believed in it passionately.

I worked very hard to try and figure out what I thought and I believed that we were going to succeed and that revolutions would happen globally and we would be a part of that and we would have then not capitalism. We would have values based on human lives, not profit. We would actually transform the kinds of ways people built love and built community. It was a very shocking thing to me, out of the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, to realize that that dream - while I still believed in it - was not going to happen in the way that I had hoped.

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.

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.

There's a profound price to the incorrect assumption that LGBTQ movements are white, male and wealthy. That is not a good thing to be dealing with if you're in the midst of a conversation where the recession profoundly impacts you at the same time because people say well, "Really? What's your issue? I mean you all have money. You all have access."

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.

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