Most people who are HIV positive are on drugs and that gets their viral load so low that it's harder to transmit it. Most new infections come from people who don't know they're infected.

Losing my virginity was very boring.

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.

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.

I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.

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.

We had the fun of being outlaws. But there's a whole generation now coming up with new gender identities. For this generation of kids who don't think that being gay is anything special, they might be more interesting than any of us.