"I grew up with this album, and I remember being really sensitive to the different musical styles. It's quite a New York album, as well—all the different styles melting into one city. This is a really witty album. There's a true masterpiece in it, "Real Men," which was queer before it was a huge subject of conversation, quite gender-bending—questioning this idea of being a man and what that means. Musically, it's really rich, and very frilly as well: lots of long songs with improvisation. It's an interesting and empowering album."

"A work of genius. But more important—and from a purely selfish point of view—a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."

"This is about an East German singer who has a botched sex-change operation and is left with an “angry inch” of flesh between her legs. Moving to the US, she gets involved with another singer, who steals her songs and becomes famous, while Hedwig, played by the director John Cameron Mitchell, ends up playing in a chain of seafood restaurants called Bilgewater’s. It’s a beautiful film that touches on Greek mythology and the origins of love, as well as gender identity. It’s a lot of fun too – a comedy with a serious message. And the songs are great."

"I was a student when I read Orlando for the first time, and I remember how for many days afterwards I walked around in a happy daze. Daring to transcend boundaries of gender, class, history, culture, geography…. this is a story—Woolf called it a biography—like no other. Our hero wakes up and finds himself turned into a woman, and delightfully, this transition takes place in Istanbul—Constantinople. Orlando is a novel about transformations and journeys—from man into woman, from the West to the East, from one existence to the next and vice versa."