I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.

I don't know that I ever bought into the "American dream." I was a child of privilege. I grew up in the '50s and it was a quiet time in America, at least on the surface and I grew up in a kind of feathery bed of privilege.

I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.

So we were ecstatic and we swirled around spontaneously, the campus in Ann Harbor and about 4,000 of us landed on the steps of the president of the University of Michigan's home.

I more or less shared the view that life should be lived.

The [Vietnam] war's gone on for three years. And we'd thought we'd ended it because we'd done exactly what we were told and what we told ourselves we'd had to do. We had a majority. We were against the war and this created a crisis for democracy and a crisis for the antiwar movement.

Even there, [Barack] Obama's generals, his Pentagon, they're telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us. Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.