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.

Is it different to come out now than it was to come out thirty-five years ago? Sometimes. But if you come out now and you come from poverty and you come from racism, you come from the terror of communities that are immigrant communities or communities where you're already a moving target because of who you are, this is not a place where it's any easier to be LGBT even if there's a community center in every single borough.

The economy is not removed from the way you live out your private life.

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.

Being respectful of extraordinary work that has happened in the last thirty-five years is not the same thing as it reflecting my values. I'm not sorry that gays can now enter the military and I'm not sorry that we can marry, but frankly I come from a moment in time, a radical vision in time that never made marriage or the military my criteria of success.

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.