I am one of those people, and I may be personally biased, who wishes that I had some place to come out of the closet besides a bar.

It never occurred to me to write anything that didn't include gay characters in it.

The good thing about New Orleans is that, overall, it's an accepting place. It's accepting of eccentricity, it's accepting of excess, it's accepting of color, in the sense of culture, not necessarily in the sense of race.

I'm not a literary writer who is wedded to notions of realism and fiction. I believe that you can write anything if you can feel it convincingly.

I think outsiders sometimes produce the best fictional perspectives on reality because they're set apart from it, so they have a unique view from the border.

I do believe in the Kinsey scale, I think many of us fall in different places on the scale and I think it's for each one of us to decide where we are on the scale, it's not for someone else to decide for us.

What's become more important to me over time is to not try to sell myself as someone that I'm not, and that begins with coming out of the closet and gradually it's a challenge to expand that into other areas of my life.