Jan. 11
Walter Cole
aka Darcelle XV
“There were gay bashings, there were all sorts of things happening, and we, of course, did not want to get hurt. We didn’t walk in the streets. We didn’t go from club to club. We were in the club, and that was it. Now, of course, everything’s changed beautifully. We’re accepted everywhere and involved with everything in the community, everything. Major corporations want drag queens to do their parties, and on and on and on."
Jan. 25
Gregory Gourdet
Chef
“Someone’s like, ‘You need to go to rehab,’ and you’re like, ‘OK, I need to go to rehab.’ And then you’re drinking in rehab, and your friends who told you to go rehab still want to party. I think for anyone, there’s just a point of understanding. That you truly want to be sober, and you feel like it’s time for you to make a lifelong, life-changing change. That’s when it sticks.
Feb. 15
Dolly Parton
Musician and actress
“I think people are just blind without knowing it sometimes. If you can open their eyes and throw a little light in the darkness, they don’t even realize they’re in. Through music we can do a lot of things.”
March 22
Rose McGowan
Actress
“As a street kid I had known how to be on guard for trolls. It just never occurred to me that the head troll would be in Hollywood.”
April 12
Rutger Bregman
Dutch historian and author, regarding a universal guaranteed income
“The welfare state can be incredibly bureaucratic and paternalistic. And there’s the issue of the poverty trap, where people lose their benefits and are worse off because they start working. In many cases around the world, the welfare state as we have it right now can trap people at the bottom rather than act as a trampoline for them to bounce up.”
April 26
Sara Goldrick-Rab
Scholar-activist, Temple University professor, founder Hope Center for College
“Usually what happens is the finances get very tight and the student starts to make some trade-offs. … They’ll start going down to one meal a day. So the next thing that happens is your grades fall. And then there’s an even more vicious (consequence) in that financial aid is contingent on grades. ... So you’re in a downward spiral. You’re losing your financial aid, and things are getting even worse. And that’s the pathway toward which you see students leave college, and now they have debt."
May 10
Maria Bamford
Comedian
“I’m not a fan of meds except that they have totally changed my life and made it just completely different. But also I think I got to a point where it got so bad where I didn’t care (about the downsides). I wasn’t able to work anyways. Sometimes people feel like, especially with manic depression, it will take away my edge if I don’t have the manias anymore. I had gone past that. I just felt like, oh, I’m going to kill myself and I definitely won’t be able to write anymore when I’m dead.”
May 31
Jeremy Ebobisse
Portland Timbers forward
“If we’re going to have the conversation of professional athletes being overpaid, then we automatically have to talk about collegiate athletes being underpaid. I’ll go on the record and say that especially when it comes to football and basketball, that people profit hundreds of millions of dollars — I would assume, if not more — in sponsorships, ticket sales and revenue. For the players not to receive a cent needs to be addressed more than anything else.”
May 31
Thom Hartmann
Author, “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment”
“Literally nowhere, at any time, under any circumstances — even remotely — did any of the founders sit around and say, 'Yeah, this government we’re creating, someday it may go just nuts, so we should tell the citizens that they can kill government employees if the government is oppressive.' They literally never thought that. That’s the most bat-guano crazy thing that you could assert.
July 12
Rep. Tina Kotek
Oregon House speaker
“We have seen a sea change in the Legislature about housing. When I started doing this four or five years ago, it was all about 'this is Portland’s problem.' Every legislator knows that they have a housing problem. It looks different in each community.”
July 19
Morgan Godvin
Sentenced to prison for dealing drugs that resulted in a death
“We have been sold a lie that punishment is the cure to addiction. We have been getting bad results. The cure to addiction is compassion, not vengeance.”
Aug. 30
Ben Ferencz
Chief prosecutor of the Nuremburg trials
“We can air our differences of opinion — that’s as it should be — but if they get to be so inhumane that you’re taking it out on babies and on poor people that all they want to do is live in peace — that was my family.”
Sept. 6
Ashley Tabaddor
Immigration judge and president of the National Association for Immigration Judges
“Now we are seeing every conflict of interest that existed pushed beyond the envelope in the last few years. We are seeing unbelievable increases in our case backlog, unbelievable interference in our judges’ ability to manage their docket. Every portion of the court is being monitored and interfered with, and there is really nothing left of a semblance of independence.”
Sept. 20
Margaret Atwood
Author
“When you get to 76, there’s a whole load of people who have died, and who you never got to say everything you wanted to. By the time my parents died, they weren’t really capable of those kind of conversations, but I’d already had them earlier in our lives. Because you just never know.”
Oct. 11
Kent Ford
Former Portland Black Panther leader
“When we were running the Black Panther Party here in Portland, we had a requirement that each member was supposed to read two hours every day. We also had a reading group. … Reading about people locked in struggle can help put things in perspective when times are tough. To this day, I try to get in at least two hours of reading a day.”
Nov. 1
Brian May
Queen guitarist
“I still catch myself feeling like the shy schoolboy of many years ago. If I go into a room of people I’ve never met before I have exactly the same feelings of smallness as I did when I was 16; nobody knows me, everyone’s going to think I’m a bit strange.”
Nov. 8
The Rev. William J. Barber
Pastor, civil rights leader
“Anytime when we see millions of people without health care and silence too often by the church, when we see 62 million people without living wages and silence from too many of the churches, we see 140 million people living in poverty, and there not be an outcry from the church, then we actually enable greed by our apathy and absence from the public square.”
Nov. 15
Lin Manuel-Miranda
Creator of “Hamilton,” on singing at the White House in 2009
“I’d only ever sung that song before to my wife and the guy at the piano. They’d (the Obamas) asked for a song from ‘In the Heights’ but they also said, ‘unless you have something about the American experience.’ And I had 16 bars on Alexander Hamilton.”
Nov. 29
U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley
Democrat from Massachusetts, on her proposped People’s Justice Guarantee
“And we know by staying acutely uncomfortable, and listening to those stories, it ensures that we never grow complacent in the work. But it’s also by being in the proximity to the hurt and by actively listening and leaning in where we find the best solutions.”
Dec. 13
Art Alexakis
Everclear frontman
“Right now we’re in a crisis. Will it be our last crisis? Probably not. But what do you do, give up? Fuck that. I’m not giving up. You’re not giving up. We’re not giving up. We do what we have to do to make it better.”