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

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.

When people give up sex and give up love or they only have love in the context of tradition then I think we're missing the opportunity of saying to each other building community, building desire in community gives all of us the possibility of learning how to be who we always were terrified we'd find out we were, and then not be ashamed of it and to not have our desire and our love embedded in shame is a profound thing and it's part of what drives the movement.

If you want to be backed by corporations so that you're elected mayor, then it's going to be very problematic for you to support a living wage campaign that would shift the minimum wage to something else.

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

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.

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.