Radical Self-Expression Quotes

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

Burning Man is a crowning achievement of freedom in festival culture.

Drag resists conservatism in the most basic way possible, and also in the most effective way possible, because it's improper when it comes to looks, which is everything in conservative systems.

I'm becoming more and more apolitical - I think the most revolutionary thing you can do is just live your life and have a good time. Before they scoop you up on the street or you die.

For the 'Try' video, I didn't prep or starve myself and over-exercise. And then I didn't get my nails done. I didn't get my hair done. I didn't get a facial. I didn't have a stylist.

Identifying as a Pagan, feminist, Witch, and anarchist is possibly a way to alarm great segments of the general public, but at least it keeps me from sinking into a boring and respectable middle age.

Burning Man is like one big giant art installation in the middle of starkly beautiful desert landscape, and the attendees are creative in the way they dress.

There was just this amazing individuality. It's just a whole different world of optimism and fearlessness, women taking off their bras and dancing around naked, and a political hopefulness and involvement.

From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today.

At Burning Man, the audience is the show: the boundaries between stage and public overlap and melt. Every form of self-expression, every fantasy... everything has a place. It's kind of a utopia, and everyone who sets foot in it is so impressed that they do their best to respect it and keep it alive.

My evangelical phase about Burning Man is well and truly in the past.

It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. Stop settling for what's good enough and start creating art that matters.

Burning Man is like a big family picnic. Would you sell things to one another at a family picnic? No, you'd share things.

I've always been interested in queerness and underground and fringe and periphery, and who and what flourishes in those spaces. Those spaces that are darker and dingier and more dangerous, more lonely. What comes out of there, to me, is the life force. I'm excited when the center reaches over to those places and pulls inspiration from them, and translates it for a lot of people.

At its best new wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides.

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

Not all drag queens but certainly the ones who empowered me, are people who pushed buttons, and poked fun at society from Leigh Bowery, to Lady Bunny and Divine.

I represent a kind of underground, punk side of drag.