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.

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.

In some ways, the challenge of staying political is to stay a dreamer at the same time.

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.

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.

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.

The economy is not removed from the way you live out your private life.