The form of the protest—the bizarre blood sculpture, the poems—was itself a protest against passivity, lack of imagination, and normalcy.

“Ephemerality is a virtue,” she writes. Failure and transitoriness should be endemic to the utopian attempt.

We are all giving and receiving, and through those interactions, we become like one organism.

co-ops arise from mutual vision and need,

What that meant to me was individuals living their own lives, respecting their own needs and patterns, and bumping into one another within common spaces and shared concerns. Because they weren’t overly prescribed, each interaction was dynamic instead of stagnant. Our household was made up of strong personalities. We each had our own projects and

He told me about older women ogling him at the public pool and at his dad’s assisted-living facility. On one visit, a woman in her eighties had cornered him and demanded, “Kiss me!” “Why don’t we start with a hug?” he replied, and they hugged for a while before he continued on his way.

How could I so powerfully agree with their politics and also feel so uneasy with their form of expression?

limited-equity housing cooperatives. In New York City, there are over eleven hundred HDFCs (Housing Development Fund Corporation co-ops).

I’d taken for granted what was required for women in the sixties to reimagine their lives and cut against the cultural grain, but it wasn’t a subtle shift. It was a cataclysm. Rejecting cultural norms took a strength of conviction fierce enough to oppose the status quo.