A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.

When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.

I did try theatre out when I was little. I did roles as a child actress. My parents didn't push me into it. But I was up for it. I didn't enjoy doing eight shows a week, though. That repetitiveness didn't appeal to me. I love doing something different every day and travelling. You can't do that in the theatre.

While we may be of different faiths, we have a strong sense of faith, family, community. We hold the values of freedom and human rights very high and I think that those are all a part of a very strong quilt that binds us together.

I find it fascinating how hip hop as a culture mirrors every mythology from the beginning of mythology. The concept of the single mother and child - the Madonna concept. Hip-hoppers were raised in that.

I was born five days before D-Day in 1944. My father was a mechanical engineer, which was a reserved occupation, so he didn't have to enlist. My mother was a housewife. She worked in a bank before marrying my father.