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 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.

I'm a high femme lesbian who loves butch women. That erotic identity has an enormous amount to do with how I live my life, who I live my life with and what it is we can or can't do.

Sex may be private in the way that you make love, but it's not private in the context of the world we live in.

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.

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.

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