Nathan: Can you provide some biographical details about how you came to be involved in activism and campaigning – maybe how you even got interested in politics?

Andre: Almost all of my interventions into politics have been through the lens of identity, as opposed to issues. I don't think I planned for that to be the case, but when I look back on my career a lot of it has been about identity-driven campaigning. And I think as a working-class, Black, gay American all of those identities have been a big part of why I got into organising and campaigning. […]

I had been interested in politics and I had definitely been going through a period of trying to understand and read and think about what it meant to be a critically engaged Black person in America. Reading all the things that people of that age read when you’re Black, like James Baldwin, and really trying to understand and make sense of this unique set of identities. I think that was how I got involved with the Black student union at Ohio State. It was kind of a social group but it was also pretty politicised; they’d done a lot of work in the previous year on the diversity plan on campus and making sure that Ohio State was a great place for students of all races and ethnicities. So there was a political element to the group which I think was what I was most attracted to.