More visibility is more power, but more vulnerability.

Learning that someone is gay, queer, trans, doesn't tell you much by itself. They could be any kind of person aside from that particular slice of identity.

Some part of me hopes for a guardian angel to protect me and other people who need protection.

My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.

Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.

I'm a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation. I think that's true of a lot of queer people.

I really don't care about what anyone says unless they are also gender-nonconforming. Then I really listen. I love the solidarity felt between us gender failures.

I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.

I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.

My main theme as a songwriter seems to be a feeling of homelessness, of being in motion. The feeling of being somehow unmoored, a radical internal freedom that is very painful and also joyful.

My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.

My two most fervent interests are pop music and traditional Judaism. Hell of a pair of fervent interests.

I think I'm becoming a climate activist.

I think most of the work of songwriting is thinking of great phrases - I'm addicted, always on the hunt for a really great phrase.

If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.

I think there's a large worry in queer communities about imitating straight people, when queerness has its own identity and maybe can be a radical force that should be dismantling stuff that locks people into structures.

I want to be a force that tries to revive the human spirit rather than crush it, to open possibilities rather than close them down. Sometimes a passionate negativity is the best way to do that.

To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world's worldview.

If I can see the sunrise - and I usually don't - I like to. I'm a big fan of the sun.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life - not fearing any authority on earth.

You have to be an anti-racist to not be racist. Because it's just a cultural tide that will pull you into it if you're not swimming against it.

A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.

We punk fans have so much energy to give to the fight against injustice, i.e. the abuse of the poor by the rich, i.e. climate change.

I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.

I've been writing songs since I was a teenager, so one kind of song I've written a lot is about, I don't know, teen angst feelings - feeling unsure of yourself and immature.

There is something embarrassing about asking for money, but if I hadn't done that, I would have not continued to be a professional musician.

It's a good feeling to not tell people what's going on.

You know, a lot of people have an instinct to downplay the fact that they are performing and be, like, 'There is no theatre here. This is just me playing the songs.' At some point I just realised how much better it could be if you weren't shy about being a performer.

I guess I just do being a man different than some.

I want to make the greatest record ever made. It's the only thing I can think about.

Ezra Furman And The Boy-Friends was a band with a specific mission - to be a really good rock'n'roll band. And we achieved it.

People get stigmatised for their bodies and for their differences. Then those people become very vulnerable.

Chuck Berry invented rock 'n' roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.

We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.

I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground's records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn't get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn't interested in having to follow.

Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum.

I've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.

I'm not an actor.

Listening to songs is like eating and writing songs is like vomiting. You're putting a ton of stuff in, it combines in unpredictable ways, and comes back out in a big mess.

I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.

If you're trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn't the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.

I'm interested in God. I'm not interested in religion for religion's sake.

Being in a rock n' roll group, or being a musician, it is in conflict in some serious cultural ways with being an observant Jew, but in a conceptual way, for me, they go together real well.

My favourite artists are the ones who are human, and you know they're not in a failure-proof environment.

Judaism is a way of thinking, more than anything else, that I think is entirely distinct, and the more you know of it, the more you can enter into that kind of thinking.

I'm in this effort to unify my life and to live day to day in a disciplined way, to be real at all times, not just in front of people, or not just in a synagogue.

I'm going to make the music I wish someone else was making.

I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.