Who cares what the state thinks about your relationship? They're giving you tax breaks and this and that - it's just nonsense. You want to live with somebody, then live with somebody. All that other stuff is just a way for the state monitoring and codifying certain activities and ostracizing others.

Losing my virginity was very boring.

I always hoped that I would settle down with someone. Marriage, I could really give two shits about, as an institution, but it makes things easier.

One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

Your life could be taken from you at any moment. Between AIDS and the violence against gay people that was so prevalent back then, you really didn't feel like you were living in the United States of America, in a first world country. You had a sense that life was a precious commodity you had to fight to keep.

Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.

AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.