“I was wandering around Times Square (on my first day in New York in the 1950s) and this guy says, ‘I’m going to Radio City Music Hall, would you like to come?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I thought, ‘Wow, New York is everything I heard it was going to be!’ We’re in the audience, I’m a young hot-blooded Canadian and out come the dancing girls, a plethora of women – and I feel his hand brush my knee. I thought, well, it’s an accident, then I felt it again. What the fuck? I got up and ran out.”

“I’ve never seen a worse job of lobbying done by the transgender community (than on the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, ENDA). They seem to think that all they had to do was to get the gay and lesbian community to say ‘OK.’ I think they thought that this was a train, and that they were a car on the train. I said to them, ‘You’ve got to work this, you’ve got to lobby people.’ They did a terrible job of lobbying, and so we didn’t have the votes.”

“For the third year in a row this man (Mayor Yuri Luzhkov) has deprived me and my fellow activists of the right to go on the streets with human rights slogans in support of sexual minorities, openly branding us as satanists and weapons of mass destruction. Two years ago, as part of the first Moscow Gay Pride, I tried to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier next to the Kremlin wall as a sign of our fight against fascism. I was allowed to go no further than the closed doors of Alexandrovskiy Garden where fascist extremists of contemporary Russia pulled the flowers out of my hands and crushed them while I was arrested by militia as a criminal. The next day Mayor Luzhkov said that gays wanted to be irreverent about our sacred place and ‘they were justly beaten.’”