When people give up sex and give up love or they only have love in the context of tradition then I think we're missing the opportunity of saying to each other building community, building desire in community gives all of us the possibility of learning how to be who we always were terrified we'd find out we were, and then not be ashamed of it and to not have our desire and our love embedded in shame is a profound thing and it's part of what drives the movement.

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.

We gain power in our refusal to accept less than we deserve.

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

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.

To take on the question of race in America and believe that you could transform this country so that it would actually be a place that was welcoming for everyone that was here, including dealing with the history of slavery and the kind of oppression this country is based on, that's an amazing moment to begin to find your own political ideals.

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.