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."

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 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.

If you can't do anything but fight, so every single solitary thing, every single solitary day, then the privilege of dreaming becomes something that only a few people have.

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

I think that white people are not seen as people with racial histories.

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.