I went to a very small Catholic school. It wasn't an easy place to be growing up gay.

Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

I'd like to do some female roles again.

I realized my family was funny, because nobody ever wanted to leave our house.

My mother graduated from high school in 1969, and on January 3, 1971, she gave birth to me. She was married later that year, but by the time I was 10, she was a divorced single mother of two young boys. To make ends meet, we moved in with my grandparents, who were also housing two of my mother's siblings and their kids.

During my adolescence, our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had.

I think Dad didn't really treat us like children; he treated us more like little adults. We were good kids.