I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of - well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late '50s, early '60s - that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.

I filed the first gay rights bill in Massachusetts history in 1972 in the legislature, one of the first in the country.

I was still closeted, but from the day I decided to run for office, knowing that I was gay, I decided that I would, of course, still be closeted but that I would work very hard for gay rights. It would be totally dishonorable, being gay, not to do that. So I had that as kind of a secondary agenda.

It wasn't until after I was reelected in 1982 that I thought of myself as a long-term member of Congress.

In this view, the role of the great majority of Americans is simply to buy the products produced, work happily for their wages, and leave all of the significant economic decisions to the capitalists.