Sharon Hayes Interview with Huffington Post

HP: You’re going to hate this one: Is the personal always political?
Yes, I think so. I can also answer it more complexly to say the two political conditions I’m most deeply informed by as a person and therefore as an artist is feminism and a lived experience of the AIDS crisis. I wasn’t on the front lines of the AIDS crisis because I came to New York in ’91, so the middle of the crisis, and I was only 21, so it was people 8, 9, 10 years older than I was and their community was decimated. I was experiencing this moment as a 20 year old where you’re so eager to absorb everything – theater, dance, lectures, concerts – and then there were all these political performances and funerals where people were in some ways rageful privately and publicly, and that was deeply impactful. I think it’s impossible to separate the personal/private from the public or the personal from the political – I don’t think those things can be separated. This doesn’t mean we can’t have private moments that we shelter from other concerns, certainly.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/23/sharon-hayes-performance-_n_1609798.html