I was involved in the anti-war movement.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

[John] McCain seemed to be winking to the Right, and [Barack] Obama seemed to be winking to the Left. Neither one of them - if McCain had been elected we'd still be where we are on gay rights.

We were very excited and we brought speakers in – then it so happened that there was a marine recruiter in the center of campus and one of our brothers, one SDS person put up a sign with a quote from the Nuremberg trial and an arrow point at the marine recruiter, saying, "This man is a war criminal." My younger brother and I, he was freshman and I was a sophomore, got caught up in the debates that were swirling around the center of campus and the young Trotskyists had put out a fact sheet on Vietnam that was phenomenal.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.

I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.

I went underground. So I didn't see [my father] for 11 years. So that was pretty traumatic time for my parents for sure.