“I asked her, ‘What are you gonna do?’ and she said ‘After college I’m gonna go to San Francisco to become a lesbian. You should come with me’. So she came here and I followed. I was the only one with money. They had gotten a little apartment on Oak. They got me a bed off the street. That was a time when people you didn’t know would knock on your door and say ‘Hi, I’m a friend of Mary’s, can I stay here?’ It was like that. So many people would move in that we would just have to move on to the next flat, and the next flat. Everyone lived in communes. The idea was to break down all of those boundaries we had grown up with that we didn’t understand. It was a time of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the Vietnam war. It was a very shocking time for all of us. We went to Maoist classes. We taught each other because we wanted a different way to live. It was like ‘let’s create another world away from our families, away from everything that was so fucked up…so that’s what we did’.”