I can never tell when something is funny. I just have to do it onstage and find out.
I love Wilco’s “I’m the Man Who Loves You.” Nels Cline has that weird guitar slide at the beginning and the song is whispered actually.
I voice my opinions on social media and I have people threatening me with violence. It is troubling but I can fight back, which is good.
I was about 17 or 18 and there were a lot of clubs and dancing. It was the beginning of rave culture and a lot of ecstasy. Because of all the drugs, there are certain songs that make me feel high.
This was an era where I was going out every night seeing Sparks, Berlin, Duran Duran, and Split Enz. Amazing acts doing really weird stuff, and I was very open to music and letting it transform me.
I get a lot from great ’90s artists like Juliana Hatfield, The Pixies, and bands like That Dog and The Breeders.
People have a lot of shame and suffering around it and I felt that the best thing I could do was to share my experiences, which I have been doing for a long time, and let people know that of all the things that I’ve endured.
Your goal is to write that masterpiece. Yello’s masterpiece was “Oh Yeah.” Whatever I say about the song doesn’t matter, because it has a huge impact on how we remember the era.
If you’re a songwriter, you want to write a song like “Oh Yeah” that radically shifts everything. You can definitely retire on that song. You want to have something you can put in your songbook that everybody can recognize, whether it’s a good or bad thing.
Christ’s purpose was to really show how everyone can be loved and how everyone should be loved and accepted.
I’m a survivor. But I’m also victim, too. Surviving has the connotation that you’ve been through it, you lived through it and that’s wonderful – but a victim is what I was. “Survivor” is the more healing way to look at it.
My philosophy is, “murder the rapist in your mind so you stop killing yourself.” I’ve seen, in my lifetime, that sexual abuse has turned into self-abuse. When I kill the rapist inside of me, I will stop killing myself.
I think that when you are accused of being in bad taste it can be quite positive. You’re challenging the notions of polite society. I’d like to put across the notion that bad taste is actually good for you.
The label of tasteful or tasteless is so often used to silence people and to maintain the status quo. It’s used to shame people for not following the commonly accepted routine, for not aligning themselves with the status quo.
I think I started out okay but with AIDS came a great deal of silence about gayness and this period of lose and morning, but at the same time a kind of feeling like you wanted to get back into the closet because being gay was such a terrible thing at that point.
It’s okay for you to have relationships, but it’s not okay to talk about them. It’s not okay to be out or to be public about it. It’s not okay to be photographed with your partner.
I don’t like catchphrases either. A current one would be, “Bye, Felicia.” It’s used so much that we don’t even know the origin anymore.
I was lucky. I always had really great friends in my personal life, people always just knew who I was. It wasn’t until I was in show business where that sort of changed or shifted at first. I have always had a great support network. I have had a lot of really wonderful, close friends.
I think that reaching out to kids that feel really isolated is a life saving gesture that we have a responsibility as older queers to do.
That it is not the people who really feel that way, but it is people who have the most money to fire up these propaganda campaigns, these like, basically these lies that they are willing to lie to the public in order to manipulate them into doing what they want. And to me it doesn’t make any sense.
My father tried to get me to be around gay people a lot when I was young. He owned a gay bookstore and it had a lot of gay literature and art books and he wanted me to be taken care of by the young gays and lesbians who worked for him.