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.

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

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.

I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.

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.

If you're a person with resources who is LGBT, you may have some problems with that - but, frankly, you'll probably have an apartment. If you're poor, if you're transgender, if you're a person of color, if you're HIV positive and you're homeless, the ability to act on desire, the ability to be safely somewhere to make love with anybody that you want to make love with is unlikely.