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.

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

If I'm fighting for the possibility of having a kind of desire and possibility, that right now is not too likely, it gives me a different kind of engagement with the future, than if I say, "sex doesn't matter; it's private."

We're targeted as LGBTQ people because we make people nervous around sex and we practice desire or have the possibility of practicing desire in magical and very, very profound ways. We shouldn't be giving up the possibility of articulating the claim of our body and the claim of our desire as something distinctive and erotically profound.

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.

Do we now fight for the kind of passionate belief that I have about sexuality, about the importance of the erotic, of people actually getting to fulfill desire and not be punished because they have it? No, we're nowhere near close to that. We're dealing with an AIDS epidemic that continues out of control globally and in this country, NO, THIS IS NOT the movement that I am fighting to create. Has it succeeded in places that are very significant? Yes it has - and it would be foolish to say that those things don't matter.

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