Here is the transcript of Gloria Steinem's talk on Saturday, February
15th, at Cody's bookstore.  Notes:  []'s indicate comments from the
crowd.  [L] indicates laughter.  [C] indicates clapping.  "G.S." should
be read "Gloria Steinem."  The transcript differs from the actual talk
only in that I omitted "um"s, and other filler words, and very
occassionally corrected grammar.  I also, of course, may have made some
errors.


	Susan Faludi:  Earlier this week I stopped into Walden Books.
Sorry, it was just next to my office.[L]  I wanted to get another copy of
G.S.'s "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," because a friend of
mine had walked off with my last copy,[L]  and I went up to the register,
and I said "Do you have Gloria S...", and that's about all I was able
to choke out before this woman with a very harried glare and that "how
many times do I have to say this?" look on her face said "we're sold
out!"  And I said, "Well, I'm not, I'm trying to...", and she said
"we're sold out of everything by G.S.!  Everything!"[L]  There was this
sort of chorus of wailing voices I heard behind me:  Women saying
"What?  This is the 5th bookstore I've been to!"  And suddenly I felt
like we were sort of a bunch of groupies who were trying to get into a
Prince concert.[L]  I thought "Well, no matter what George Bush or anyone
else says, feminism has clearly hit the mainstream."[C]

	I half expected to see scalpers on the street, and in fact
there were scalpers, as Diana James, Gloria Steinem's assistant
told me, out on Times Square.  You know those guys out on the street
corner selling fake Rolex watches or briefcases?  Well, right under
their office window on Times Square there were these guys with their
stolen books from the truck.  They had "Revolution Within" and Stephen
King's "Needful Thing."[L]  And Diana James said you could hear them all
day saying "I got 'em here, Steinem and King,[L] two for $20![L]"  So we have
indeed arrived.[L,C]

	But, G.S.'s "Revolution Within" instantly rose to #1 on the
charts not just because feminism is a best selling idea, but because
G.S. herself, as a speaker, an activist, and a writer, is the
quintesence of all that idea represents.[C]  She's the feminist
personality we all want to be: humorous, compassionate, smart,
generous, inspirational, and down to earth at the same time.  And she
is the feminist writer whose words have rallied our spirits time and
again, turned our lives around, and even given some of us women literally
reason to live.

	In that last respect, I would like to read to you from a
letter that recently arrived at G.S.'s office.  If any feminist author
in the dark of her study, in the throes of writers' block wonders
whether she should quit, here is a life-long reason to go on.  The
letter writer is a 22 year old woman.  Her mother, a desperately
demoralized battered wife, downed a bottle of Valium one day, she
writes to Gloria, and took a steak knife to her wrists.  For weeks, she
lay in the hospital in a quasi-coma.  The daughter writes (and I'm
quoting here), "during my mother's hospital stay, I read your essay,
'Ruth's story:  because she could not sing it.'"  This, for those who
don't know, is G.S.'s deeply moving story about her mother and her
mother's struggle with mental illness.  The woman writes: "I decided to
read it to my mother, even though she was sleeping, long and white, in
a cold room.  I knew she could hear me.  I read that essay over and
over, until the nurses started repeating phrases."  Her mother finally
came out of the coma, left her abusive husband, went back to school,
majored in political science[L], started going on pro-choice marches[L], and,
last but not least, started dating younger men.[L,C]  The daughter writes,
"Miss Steinem, I know this sounds hopelessly melodramatic, but I know
that if it wasn't for you, both my mother and I would not have
survived.  She often tells me that when she was asleep in the hospital,
she was actually thinking about your mother, about Ruth's song, about
all the other songs so many other women never get a chance to sing.  It
is not often," she writes, "that language transforms itself into a true
healing device, but it did one morning, with a mother, and a daughter, and a 
well-worn
paperback, by a writer and a woman for whom I have the greatest respect
and desire to thank for this communal altar of life."[C]  G.S., we can not
all thank you so eloquently, but we are all deeply in your debt.[C]


	G.S:  I hadn't heard that letter.  Susan has been in cahoots
with my office.  But that letter helps all of us to know what it is
that keeps all of us going, and I want to tell you that especially on
this book tour I have been kept going by Susan Faludi's work.   I have
never seen more difference between what readers and what we all seem to
feel, and what the media seems to think we should feel,[L] than I have on
this tour.  And I wasn't prepared for it.  I had been staying home
somewhat more over the last several years, to write.  I had, due to my
own journey, grown some additional nerve endings, which means you feel
both the joy and pain much more.  And so when I found myself out there
with critics and magazine articles, and television reports, I really
wasn't prepared for what happened.  Because suddenly it was like
Orwell-city, you know?  What I thought was strength was phrased as
weakness.  I just want you to know that's wishful thinking on their
parts.[L,C]  What I thought was synthesis, that is both of the inner and the
outer revolution together in a spiral that can't be broken, was phrased
as retreat, as going back to thesis, and I want you to know that that's
absolutely not true.  And what I thought was a fairly revolutionary
book, which would get criticism went something like this: "G.S.  says
all we have to do in order to preserve our birthright of self-esteem is
to overthrow 5000 years of patriarchy,[L] racism, monotheism, hierarchy"[L] --
I thought that was what I was saying.  But instead they focused on the
20% of the book that was about me, and not even with the political
message that I thought my individual parables were supposed to be
illustrating.  

	I thought the ultimate proof of this -- you see, I am a
case history, Susan, when you write "Daughter of Backlash," I'll be
right there with research -- the ultimate proof of this was that in the
romance vs. love chapter, the thesis of which is that two semi-people,
since both women and men are trained to be semi-people; women to a much
greater degree, of course, since we only get a 1/3 of the human
qualities, and men get 2/3,[L] so no wonder we're more romance addicted
and more likely to project them on other people.  But for both women
and men romance is that process of projecting the rest of yourself on
someone else, and love of course is quite different because it is two
people at least trying to be whole who therefore can really see,
appreciate and empathize with the reality of each other.  But, though
the theme of that chapter really has to do with the Brontes, as an
illustration, I sort of threw in two little stories of my own because I
thought that having started out the book wrongly, not including myself,
that I was trying to include something of my own experience in each
chapter.  So I thought since it's probably important for people to know
that even if you're as old as I am,[L] and even if you know better, and
even if you never wanted to get married, you can still get tired and
feeling bad, and find yourself projecting some qualities that you
really need in yourself, so I included a ... about a three page romance
story, and then I included a much longer love story about a man who I
hope I will know until one or both of our dying breaths.  Nobody to this
day has asked me about the love story.  They have only asked me about
the romance story, and this, to me, was proof positive that this was
the backlash phenomenon that Susan describes so well, of saying that
feminism is bad for you.  You know, it means that you have unhappy
relationships, it means that, well you know, everything that we know.
I assure you that none of those things is the case, but, by the time I
got to Detroit, I would have gone totally crazy if it hadn't been for
Susan.

	However, the other thing that kept me sane was rooms like this,
because it didn't seem to matter what was going on in this little
rarified world up there with all the press.  (Incidentally, I have a
revolutionary proposal, based on my experience.  Susan, maybe we can do
something about this.[L]  The whole press scene would be changed if people
didn't write from clips.  I could always tell exactly who it was who
had read other people's clips, and who it was who was responding on
their own.  Maybe we can work on this.)  But, the rooms full of people
like these, and the energy that we feel here are absolutely universal
across this country.  In Cleveland (I rest my case)[L] in a book shop
called "Wit and Wisdom" in the middle of a shopping center there were,
because there was that space in the aisle outside the bookshop, there
were like a 1000 people, and the bookstore clerks were overjoyed
because it seemed to be larger, far larger, than the crowd drawn by
Oliver North,[C] Vanna White[L], and somebody else I forget, combined[L].  And,
in a bookshop called "The Open Mind" in Minneapolis, the television
people came to photograph the lines that were going around the block.
At the bookshop where we were yesterday (what's it called?) Kepler's,
there were people wanting to camp out outside for a day in advance, and
they came at 5 o-clock for an 8 o-clock thing.  

	Now, what this says to me, and what the fact that Susan's book
is on the best seller list, that Naomi Wolf's book, "The Beauty Myth" is
on the best seller list, that where every we go there are rooms like
this: it's very very clear that the majority consciousness of this
nation has changed.  We are the majority, and it's a trick of the Bush
administration and other folks up there at that level who are still
representing the 20 or 30 % of this country who are anti-equality, who
are anti-all the issues we care about.  You remember, there was once a
brilliant cartoon of Ronald Reagan, in a western hat, saying "a gun in
every holster, a pregnant woman in every home, make America a man
again"?[L]  That's exactly why foreign and domestic policy is really the
same thing, and that's their side, and you know what our side is.  The
majority consciousness of this nation is reflected not in the White
House, I'm sorry to say, but in the public opinion polls, and in rooms
like this.  But, it is a trick of the leadership, and of nature of the
media to make us feel alone.  We sit, and we read the newspaper, and we
look at television, and we feel alone.  And that is what is so
important about coming together in rooms like these, so that we can
see, there's somebody from my laundrymat, there's somebody from my
English class, there's somebody from my apartment I didn't even think
gave a shit,[L] you know, and realize that we are indeed the majority.

	I'm going to talk for a few minutes, but what you have given me
and each other by your generosity of spirit to come here and take a
chance on a stranger, and respond to this signal, is at least an hour
here of very precious time together.  So, I'm not going to go on for
too long, because what I hope this will turn into is an organizing
meeting.  What we have to do is to overcome this old-fashioned
structure we've got going here with you looking at me and looking at
each other's backs and so on.  That's hierarchical, which is based on
patriarchy, which doesn't work anywhere.[L]  We can just declare this
meeting the first meeting of the post-patriarchal age.[L,c]  So, I hope that
while I go on for a few minutes more, you'll be thinking of organizing
announcements you want to make of upcoming troublemaking meetings,[L]
things this group should know about, any new fact, new idea, new
subversive tactic that you want this group to know.  Stand up and say
where the bodies are burried locally.  If you'd rather not say it, pass
me a note.  I'll read it.  I'll read anything -- I'm leaving.[L]  I know,
I have a glimpse, I see Laura X, I see, well, there's so much heart and
courage and experience that's in this room, that it's very clear to me
that my very best function is an excuse to bring you together and
discover that you didn't need anybody from the outside.  So, Think
Organize.  And also, I just want to ask you one other thing: before you
leave this building you have to promise me to meet at least 4 other
people who are here, because we share values, and this is a chance for
instant friendship.  And who knows, a new job, a new revolutionary
cell, a new love affair, who knows what can happen.[L]

	As I wander around the country I see a lot of smart suffering
people, represented very well, I think, by grafitti writers.  Have you
ever noticed how terrific they are?  They're really poets, really
populist poets.  my favorite graffiti so far is "Sadaam Hussain has a
job, do you?"[L] Don't you think that's perfect?[L]  I think we ought to make
that the motto of the next presidential campaign.[L]  Certainly what I
also see is that the double role, the superwoman problem, is still the
single biggest problem affecting women, at least it affects the largest
number of women.  And, as Susan Faludi has pointed out, this problem,
which of course comes from the enemies of feminism, is attributed to
feminism.  We are supposed to have invented superwoman.  This is not
true.  I just want to remind everyone, the women's movement did not
invent superwoman.  We've spent a great deal of time trying to kill her
off.[L]  The truth of the matter is that what happened was that in the
beginning of the women's movement when we wanted to be TV repair people
or bookstore owners or whatever we wanted, they said "No, you can't do 
that," and then when we did it anyway, they said, "o.k., you can do
that, providing that you raise 2 or 3 perfect children, cook 3 gourmet
meals, dress for success, and, as somebody said, "are multi-orgasmic
until dawn."[L]  Makes you tired just to think about it.[L]  And yet we
have fallen for the notion that the women's movement invented
superwoman, that we thought having it all meant doing it all, and
that's bullshit; we always knew that we couldn't do it all.

	So I suggest that we need another psychic leap forward.  If the
simplified version of our leap of 20 years ago was women can do what
men can do, now we need another one that is men can do what women can
do[L,C].  Until kids are raised as much by men as by women, men will go on
being deprived of children, children will go on being deprived of
fathers, and we, whether we're boys or girls, will go on feeling that
we have to divide up our nature; that only women can be loving and
nurturing, that only men can be acheiving in the world outside the
home.  And that will be the beginning of losing the full range of our
true authentic self.  That will be the beginning of coming to believe
that, if we're boys, some part of ourself that is quote feminine
unquote is shameful and wrong and must be concealed, and if we are
girls, some part of ourselves that is quote masculine unquote is
unavailable to us and is to be punished.  And that is one of the very
deep roots of a loss of self-esteem.  That feeling that your true
authentic self is not o.k., that you have to construct a false and an
artificial self, in order to earn approval, to earn love, to even be
safe in the world.  

	I also notice that there's still a great notion abroad in the
land that young women, well, it goes like this, it's just an
assumption: young women don't like the word feminist, young women are
not feminists, and doesn't that mean that the women's movement is
over.  Well, you hardly know where to start with this, because there
are actually more young women who call themselves feminists and who are
active feminists then there ever were before.  But the problem, the
deeper problem with this assumption is that it supposes that there's
only one pattern of activism, which is of course the traditional
masculine pattern, that is to be radical and activist when you're
young, and to grow steadily more conservative as you get older, except
for the men in this room, every one of whom is an exception.[L]  In fact,
the female pattern has always been the other way around.  It was true
in the first wave of feminism, in the suffragist wave, and it's true
now.  We are more conservative than we are likely to be at any other
time when we are young, and we get steadily more radical with age.  It
makes sense, when you think about it, after all an 18 year old young
woman has power in the way that women have power in the patriarchy,
which means as a potential child-bearer, energetic worker, sex-object.
She has more power than she probably will when she's 50, and a young
man has less power at 18 than he probably will when he's 50.  So our
ptterns of activism in general have just been different, and it's very
interesting to look at the psychographic and demographic changes with
that in mind, because what we're gaining now is the first critical mass
of older, uppity, radical, difficult, pushy, aggressive women[L] who have some
tradition of independence, who no longer are going to be cast aside
when the reproductive role is over, who have nothing to lose, and who
are going to be the red hot center of this whole fucking revolution.[L]

	We may be at the point of maximum frustration, because we're
always going around explaining things like I'm just explaining: no, we
didn't invent superwoman; no, our pattern of activism is the other way
around.  But we have to keep understanding this, saying it to each other
and gradually pushing it into the media; the important thing is not to
let the adversary invade our heads, take away our power, make us feel
that we are alone, and make us feel that these acusations and
mythologies are true.  And in order to do that, we need an enormously
strong self-authority.  We need the courage to see through our own
eyes, and to believe our own experience of reality.  And that's why
self-esteem as a concept, I think, is so threatening.  There's a
paragraph you'll find at the beginning of this book in which I quote a
Polish theorist of revolutions who says that though books about
revolution generally begin with chapters about economic explotiation
and about violence, that these things, these painful conditions and
opressions can exist and do exist without revolutions.  Revolutions
really begin when the man on the edge of the crowd looks at the
policeman who's controlling the crowd, and the policeman looks at him,
and suddenly, in that flick of a second, they both know that that man
is no longer accepting the defining gaze of the policeman.  And that is
when revolutions begin, and that is the beginning of self-esteem.  

	We had this in the beginning of the women's movement, with
consciousness raising groups or rap groups, or quilting bees, or
whatever we wanted to call them.  All of us golden-oldies remember
this, right?  And what happened was one woman or two women would say
this unsayable thing, and six other women would say, "you feel like
that?  I thought only I felt like that."[L]  From this would emerge the
political reality.  Each others' lives have always been our only true
textbooks.  But we got away from that over the last 20 years, you know,
we understandably got more externalized.  This is a very externalized
culture, number one, and so we were pressed to achieve in the outside
world, to worry about legislation, to make laundry lists of issues, to
use all those words that end in "t-i-o-n", to have more and more meetings
about which we thought "oh god, I have to go to another meeting", which
is a sure sign there's something wrong with the meeting -- it's not
nurturing the people who are there, not allowing for the inward half of
a revolution.  And in addition, as women, we brought with us our
socialization as nurturers, as people who were very good at putting our
center in somebody else.  We put our centers in each other as women,
which is certainly a step forward; by helping other women, we were
indeed helping ourselves, but we still weren't really learning to
balance, learning to understand that our inner reality is not less real
than the outside world, and not more real, but as real.  There is the
golden rule, which was written by and for men, and it's real important,
that we need to treat people as we ourselves would like to be treated,
but for women the revolution is usually to treat ourselves as well as
we treat other people.  We really haven't done that, and we have begun
to lose strength to lose self authority to lose vision, to lose
nurturing, to do the external half of the cycle without the internal
half, and therefore to be unable to make a strong invincible spiral
into the future.  The spiral is the strongest architectural form for
the reason it can't be broken, but it has to be both the inner and the
outer curve of change.  

	I think that's why there's such a response to the idea of
putting the inner and the outer together.  I think we have the hunger
for it, we have been missing it.  And, it doesn't matter where we start
it.  Perhaps like me you started in the external part, and also used to
say like I did, "an examined life is not worth living," or "I'm for
anything that's off it's ass." Actually, I still am.[L]  Perhaps, like
many others you started in the self realization part of the cycle,
where you needed to go back and heal childhood wounds that were so deep
that they didn't let you act, that you were part of the great populist
surge of truth-telling about childhood sexual abuse, about all kinds of
problems within our families, bad treatment as children that made us
feel we were bad people.  Maybe that's where you started.  But we each
have to complete the cycle.  We have to go in the other direction,
too.  I was thinking about the 12-step groups, for instance.  I
understand there are 10 million Americans in 12-step groups.  And, we
can talk about the problems women have with 12-step groups, since the
method was meant to tear down ego, and that isn't exactly our problem,[L]
but we're sort of modifying it and working with it, and we're trying to
explain that a co-dependent is really a well-socialized woman,[L] and a
dysfunctional family is really a family in which both parents are
non-feminists,[L] stuff like that.  But, suppose the 12-step groups had
had a political extension, an activist extension into the other half of
the circle.  Who better could have warned us about Ronald Reagan?  I
mean, this guy is the king of denial.  He was the child of an
alchoholic, and he *** learned throughout his childhood to deny, "no
there's not an elephant in the living room, everything's fine,
everything's fine."  And, he took the whole country into denial: "no
there's no problem with poverty, the deficit is terrific, everythings
great."  They could have told us that.  There are all kinds of ways in
which we'll be much stronger if we bring what we have learned
internally into the external world and vice versa.  

	I think, perhaps especially, of the women and the men who have
been courageous enough to come forward and to remember and talk about
childhood sexual abuse.[C]  It's a paradigm of truth telling.  And I think
for women especially, because so many of us, who knows how many, the
figures are 1 in 5, 1 in 3, who knows how many.  It is this underground
river of poison, this sexual abuse of little girls that has grown these
evil flowers we see before us and don't know where they came from.  But
conversely, having learned to tell the truth, having learned to tell
men's secrets, the biggest secret of all, then in public life there
would be no suffering.  If we took the courage that it takes to tell,
that incest survivors have used to delve into the truth, and used that
in public life, think what we could do, and think who we could name,
and think what asses we could kick.[L,C]  And we wouldn't be shy anymore,
right?, about telling the secrets of the ruling group.  And we could
list many many ways in which we will be much stronger when we put these
two things together.  

	I just wanted to say, by way of news bulletins, because I also,
in wandering around the country, I see things that are not in the media,
and drive me crazy that they're not, that while we are all of us here,
I know, worried about reproductive freedom, protecting it, I don't have
to tell you all we need to do to protect the right to safe and legal
abortion state by state, we know that, alright?[C]  What I sense is that
there is something else growing up out there, which is a new and larger
legal umbrella that is, at the same time that we're fighting this rear
guard action, beginning to be formed.  I don't know what it's going to
be called.  I think of it as "bodily integrity," because it seems to be
an umbrella that will cover reproductive freedom, but also, all the
forms of biotechnology that now threaten, or can be the basis for
threatening to use bone marrow, to use organ transplants and all these
things and to pressure economically to do so.  All the problems of poor
women whose wombs are being used, through economic pressure, by middle-
class childless couples, the problems of involuntary AIDS testing, I
mean, you name it.  All of it needs the protection of an overall
umbrella called "bodily integrity."  That is, the power of the government
stops at our skins.[C]  It will take decades to work toward this, and it
is the next step.  It includes anti-capital punishment, I mean, yes,
can we be incarcerated, yes, I suppose we can, with due process and
good cause, we hope, but nobody but nobody can breach this frontier
that is called our skins, whether we're women or men, the power of the
government has to stop there.  

	And second, I have also been noticing around the country
something that this community especially with its, well, when I come
here I can always count on meeting at least 3 anarchists.[L]  Anarchism
just got a bum rap and a bad name.  ["Total destruction"] Total
destruction.  But it really meant a bottom up paradigm of economic
development, of production, of government, of many kinds of things.
There's something that's happening in the country now, among women
especially, at least I'm only seeing it among women that hasn't been
reported in the press.  And that is, the most interesting empowerment
movement.  Since women are a 3rd world country wherever we are, low on
capital, low on technology, and labor intensive,[L] we seem to be
reinventing a third world kind of Ghandian-village-level economy,
anarchist with women's values added.  You know, you can describe it
however you want.  It's an economic form.  It's not capitalist, and
it's not socialist, I don't know what it is.  It's anarchist plus
feminism.  It's fascinating.  And there are say, six women pooling
their savings to buy a communally-owned florist shop.  Or there are the
women of Watermark in North Carolina, who were into handicrafts, and
everybody said, "oh, you can't make money in handicrafts," but they
didn't have anything else to do so they started to make kid's furniture,
or quilts, all kinds of things, and the woman who had started it made
sure that when women came in they were brought in from the welfare
rolls and the battered women shelters, and exactly where jobs are
needed the most, and as a result they now employ hundreds of women.
These women all get higher salary than the state average.  Their
products are sold through JCPenney internationally, through catalogs.
It works, it actually works.  And there are dozens of these, and in
fact they have their own publication which comes from here: "Equal
Means."  Have you heard of "Equal Means?"  [I'm assistant editor of "Equal
Means"]  Great![C]  Anybody who wants to demystify the economy should
definitely subscribe to "Equal Means."  And don't be put off by the word
"economy"; this is really a fun publication.[L]  But there are dozens,
perhaps hundreds of these, that I see especially because the Ms.
Foundation for Women has been coordinating their annual institute,
where women who have been working in these fields come and learn from
each other.  But I see as I travel groups like these that I never heard
of before.  These groups have created hundreds, perhaps thousands of
jobs exactly where they are needed most and the Wall Street Journal
seems quite disinterested.  The Fortune 500 I would like to add hasn't
created a new job since 1968.[L]  So, as I travel, are kinds of pieces,
bright hopeful pieces of a new economic model that might one day become
a quilt of an economy that has to do with respect for the environment,
that has to do with including all kinds of cultural and emotional, the
full range of the internal and the external circle in these groups.
These women sing songs as they work, compose songs about their work,
say prayers and poetry at the beginning, have dances at night, include
the patterns of their kids' lives in their work.  It's possible, it
really is possible.  And it's not possible, I think, from the top down
in theory, because all those words with an end -tion do get us divorced from
the inner parts of ourselves.  But it is possible from the bottom up,
by good instinct, by good planning, by care for each other, and by
understanding that while Marx may have been right about many things he
was wrong about about one, well, he was wrong about several things, we
know he was wrong about women, but he was wrong about the fact that the
end justifies the means.  The end never justifies the means.  The means
is the end.[C]  These women, these groups are really using humane means to
procede, and therefore are creating humane jobs that respect culture,
respect the environment around them, and respect the needs of those
individual women.  

	And so, I just want to give you that as an example of both
sides of the revolution.  There's no telling what we can do if we
really put the inner and the outer, however you want to phrase this,
together.  It's amazing.  Now, I guess I would have, if I were the me
of 5 yrs ago or 6 yrs ago, I probably would have ended this part of the
meeting and begun the organizing part by simply declaring all of us
here to be the members of the International Revolutionary Anarchist-
Feminist, Feminist-Anarchist Government in Exile.  Well, we are, we
are, and I would still say that, but words like government, they click
old things in our brains, so we need to have some new paradigms at the
same time.  So not only are we members of the government in exile, but
we are also, um, well perhaps we could call it members of the secret
society of the butterfly's wing, because even the most hard-nosed of
physicists has finally recognized that the flap of a butterfly's wing
here changes the weather thousands of miles away.  And that within each
of us there is the universe.  Literally all of the powers of the
universe are in microcosm in each of us, and each of us has a unique
version of that, that could never have happened before, and could never
happen again, and the question is how to set that free.  

	I think the closest paradigm I've come across, the greatest
inspiration, really, is that lesbians and gay men have given us this
phrase called "coming out" and invested it with such enormous courage
and honesty -- and our sexuality is such a true part of ourselves, such
a path into the authentic self.  Whatever society can't command, can't
make you do, is probably a path into the true self.  It can't command
sexual pleasure, it can't command laughter, it can't command intense
interest, and so all of those things are paths into the true self.  So,
I think what we all need to do is to work on "coming out" as our true
self, whoever it is that we are, and understanding, as I have really
come to believe over the last two years especially, that if our dreams
weren't already really within us, we couldn't even dream them.[C]