I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.

I'm okay with roaming around the world in my bunk for days on end. Maybe every third day I'll get a shower or stumble out at dawn and realize I'm in a field in Poland. I like that kind of life.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

I longed to read everything I possibly could, and the things I read in turn produced new yearnings.

I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.

We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.

I have seen a lifetime of transgender people and it was hard enough being gay in the '50s and early '60s. One couldn't imagine the cruelty that trans people had to face back then.