I think as a gay person, there was no way in my generation to not grow up with shame and a sense of being wrong. It was impossible to avoid. Externally, you might make choices that are very public and very open but internally that was a struggle.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.

The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.

Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid.

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.