I do, therefore I am.

Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) has never quite cut it with me. Oh, don't get me wrong. I think about things all the time. But such an act would simply involve a declaration: Cogito. It's the question of one's central nature that is captured in the rest of the phrase: Ergo sum. The more appropriate phrase to sum up my adult life so far would be, Facio, ergo sum--I do, therefore I am.

I've been some sort of an activist all my life, and in a thinly veiled, not too ironic parody of the perennial question dogging lesbians and gays, I have to ask, Are activists born that way, or do they choose it? I go with the genes.

There is something about a situation in which someone is suffering, being treated unfairly, under attack, or paralyzed by fear or some other injustice that pains me to the point of needing to act. People ask me when I first became an activist, expecting that I will detail some great loss because of my sexual orientation that lit a fire, ignited a bulb, or wound up the spring leading me to devote this part of my life to the lesbian and gay movement. Imagine their surprise when I say, "It was the day my sister's tricycle was taken by a bigger kid." I had to do something, and therein lies the root. The tree, however, took longer to grow.

At the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1960s, I volunteered at Unicamp, a camp run by students for "underprivileged" kids, as we called them then. Those ten days in the mountains left me stunned at how joyful I felt working for the kids, listening to them, pushing them to believe in themselves. I forgot entirely about myself.

In the late `60s, back at UCLA as an adviser to most of the new radical student organizations and learning more from those students than they ever got from me, I saw firsthand how organizing a group with common concerns could change an institution. In the early 1970s, suddenly, these students were talking about me, about issues important to me as a woman. And for the first time I felt that same compulsion to make changes that would affect not just them but me too. It was exhilarating.

Actually, my "click" into activism resulted from a meeting in which I still believed I was helping someone else's cause. The women students at UCLA (and everywhere in the country) had not yet awakened to the changes that needed to take place in their lives and at the university. So I dutifully attended a meeting on their behalf, and, sitting among a circle of others talking about these issues, I suddenly began to cry uncontrollably. A good friend, one of the psychologists in the student counseling center, took me into his office, and I talked and talked about all the ways in which my life was an example of inequality--at work and in the world.

I hadn't even known I had this pain. Yet this flood, dammed up for years, was the thing I turned into action for the next 20 years, working on issues others called "women's" issues: domestic violence, access to courts, custody inequities, and health care. Sometimes I think the work was a way to keep ahead of the pain.

There may be a profound connection between pain and activism, but it wasn't until years after I had been told I was "a little too butch" to have my own TV series, years after I had been expelled from my sorority in college when they found out I'm a lesbian, and even a few years after I came out to my family and friends that I made the connection between the pain of the closet and activism.

I didn't have a context until the 1980s, when I was under the tutelage of my ex-lover and best friend for life, Torie Osborn. Torie, who was executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, inhaled and exhaled activism. Through her I learned to make organizing as organic as sleeping, to make strategy my first thought, to understand that all wrongs are connected and that political systems and people's inertia all play a role. Finally, my instinct to do flowered alongside my strong sense of myself as a lesbian, as a woman. It was a fine epiphany, and I recommend it to anyone who needs a little joy, passion, meaning, and frustration in her life. Even if you don't think you're born that way ... you can choose it. You'll never be sorry.