Oh, Mona, we're all damned fools! Some of us just have more fun with it than others. Loosen up, dear! Don't be so afraid to cry . . . or laugh, for that matter. Laugh all you want and cry all you want and whistle at pretty men in the street and to hell with anybody who thinks you're a damned fool!

The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live.

Being in love is the only transcendent experience.

I had been a storyteller by instinct all my life. I was that boring little kid who made the rest of his friends sit around the campfire and listen to his ghost stories. It's been very much a part of my makeup.

I know I can't tell you what it's like to be gay. But I can tell you what it's not. It's not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity.

When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

Don't listen when they scoff That you are too old and I am young, For I am old enough to know better And you are young enough not to care.