My idea of what was going on in politics was driven by activism. I came out when I was 17, and right away I started working in the AIDS activist movement. For me, politics was about getting drugs approved and getting prisoners access to the same kind of drugs that you could get on the outside. It was about getting needle exchanges approved. That was politics. These were policy problems that were killing people, and we were trying to get them changed.

I never thought when I was a kid that I would become an adult. I never thought of myself as having any sort of distant horizon. I have sort of leapt without a master plan.

The folks celebrating Jim Bunning are seeing him as an anti-government, anti-spending activist. But to embrace Jim Bunning is to embrace a strange record, if you really are a libertarian, if you really are a deficit hawk, if you really care about spending and responsibility.

Hopefully life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come. Do stuff you will want to brag about.

I don't have any option. I'm not going to be less gay or more pretty. I can't try to have less personality or fewer controversial opinions.

I will say that Bernie Sanders are the opposite end of the spectrum from Donald Trump. We see him leading right now in the Republican Party in an intractable way.

I think of my job on television as explaining things.