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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you struggle with issues of documentation, issues of your health care, issues of whether or not you'll be punished for being open about who you are, those things affect how you can be employed or not employed, how you can get an apartment or not get an apartment, how it is that you feel free or not free.

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.