I like pleasure! I mean, I'm queer because I find it fun to be queer, not because it makes me feel virtuous to be queer, not because I was "born this way." I don't care at all about why I'm queer; I feel very lucky to have this life, and that's it. Of course, many of us have struggled mightily, and we also have access to such particular pleasures, so many cultural traditions centred around sex and art and beauty and new ways of doing things. As the Pet Shop Boys said, "we were never being boring."

I think my life has been wonderful. I have done what I felt like. I was given courage and I was given adventure and that has carried me along. And then also a sense of humor and a little bit of common sense. It has been a very rich life.

What I wanted was to have an interesting, diverse life filled with lots of learning - and especially meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I feel that I have gotten these in abundance and I am happy.

I just feel so fortunate, you know? … I feel so happy. I feel so different from how I felt when I was closeted, and to have experiences where I meet people who have been touched in some way by just getting to be who I am is such an incredible experience ... I'm in a very fortunate place in my life. I'm a very privileged person to get to talk about issues, particularly those that affect people much, much more vulnerable to me … I feel really grateful to be in a position where potentially I can do little things or whatever I possibly can to help anyone any way I can.

…I would have been a much better-adjusted adult earlier on if I’d read a single book about real queer people when I was growing up.

Life has been good. I’ve been into a lot of things. I’ve been doing good.

I love the word queer, because what's useful about it is that it has the potential to be radically inclusive. I hope it signals an interest in, if not radical political thought, at least a destabilising. Destabilising binary ideas of gender and sex. I really struggled with this feeling of not being trans enough, I don’t feel like any of the words really work. I like words that leave things a little unclear. The main thing for me is if you respect people self-determination, and if somebody says they're queer, or they're trans, they are, and it’s not that big of a deal. And I will also say that having been in adult queer life for a number of decades now, most of the time, people who have some vested interest in saying they're queer or trans, there’s a good reason for it.

And then meanwhile, the AIDS crisis is going on. There's a ton of activism, and some of my friends were a little bit older and were already going downtown to Act Up meetings. So I started doing that and that was really how I came into queer life, through that kind of radical organising. That was a really exciting place, because it was people working together across their differences to make change. It was a coalition: lots of different people working together with a shared enemy. It's a model which is obviously super relevant today.

Sex is a part of life. I think pleasure's really important. I feel that our queer and trans cultural heritage is to prioritise pleasure and self-fulfilment, self-knowledge and art and humour – those seem like really good things to me.

Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well

It is a queer world and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want?

I am becoming old and queer.

The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

This is my life, and I'm very, very happy with it.