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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.