Kevin Sessums Quotes

"Shoe" just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.

I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.

One of the few nice things about [time in Yale] was you got to know people before there were labels on them, so you got to know them as people, not as either gay or straight. Because as far as we knew, we thought everyone was straight.

I had no administrative function at the New Yorker. I am what we used to call in construction back in Kansas City where I grew up "a dog-ass subcontractor."

[Larry Kramer] said, when it was all about to fall through, "You betrayed me, Calvin." And I said, "I resent that. I was against you from the beginning."

I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.

I never appear in any of your work, come to think of it, Calvin [Trillin]. And I look.

[Larry Kramer] got really mad at me once. The precipitating incident was a speech at Yale by the first President Bush's Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, against which Larry led a demonstration. He got the demonstrators to drown out Sullivan's speech, which wasn't allowed.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

[Calvin Trilllin] is not writing about things that I can criticize. I can call these other people out for what I think they are not doing. There's a big difference.

I don't think everybody's gay. But I think a lot more people are than the world knows about.

[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.

I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.

One thing I learned in sobriety is to stop being judgmental, to always be discerning. When I drive, that will be my bumper sticker.

Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.

My father always wanted me to be president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county. I think my father was okay about my going into journalism, though.

I was not "shoe." That's a misuse of the term "shoe," which is derived from "white shoe."

Everyone disappoints [Larry Kramer]. So it's not a problem for him either way.

I'm sorry to keep focusing on the New Yorker, but everybody who was growing up when Calvin [Trillin] and I were growing up wanted to be published in the New Yorker.

[Calvin Trillin] was very "shoe," which means he was a big jock, a big deal.

Back in Kansas City, I associated Harvard with sort of gnarly guys who wore capes for effect in a kind of Oscar Wilde scene. Even though I also knew there was such a thing as the Harvard-Yale game, I was still a little surprised that Harvard had a football team. I just assumed if there were such a thing as gay people, that they were nothing like us. Little did I know that probably half the swim team at Yale was gay.

Those people are seen, I assume, by Larry [Kramer] as writing partly about gay issues and problems, whether it's on the surface or not, and I am not. But another thing is when we met, there still wasn't exactly a gay/straight divide in the minds of a lot of straight people. There weren't any gay people, as far as we knew, at Yale.

We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.

When I graduated [from Yale], I went back to Larry [Kramer]. But when I go to Yale reunions, there are still people who call me David.

I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.

People who aren't addicts want to know why I became one. They ask whether I had a midlife crisis. I'm only speaking for myself now, but I've stopped asking why and how. It's all about surrender and acceptance. It doesn't matter why I am an addict.

Sometimes if I am walking down the street and thinking about my panoply of God, Ganesha, Parvati [Ganesha's mother], I say "Lucifer," because he belongs in that panoply. I miss him. That's why I'm a theist.

[Robert Gottlieb] wouldn't have published 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was a Rhodes Scholar. He was on the swimming team. Had this great California crew cut and this great smile. Life magazine covered his graduation, and Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed it. We all expected him to be president some day. But he committed suicide when he was in his 50s. If he were gay in the 1950s, then the rest of what I wrote was commentary because life was so miserable for gay men back then. And that's why he committed suicide.

Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.

"Weenie" was definitely a word we used at Yale back then. But I'm not sure you were one, Larry [Kramer]. Also, you were going by a different name.

[Larry Kramer] even wrote this angry letter to the president of Yale, and in it he said what he said to us, that he was so disappointed in his straight friends because of AIDS and everything. He wrote the letter around March. And in it he wrote, "I usually go to the Trillins for Christmas, but I just couldn't do it this year."

There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.

I was raped: I said no and he wouldn't stop. I also had a scar on my back and blood coming out of my ass. To some that's just rough sex. Some would read that sentence and be turned on by that: the 51st Shade of Gay.

Is it easier for you to have straight friends, Larry [Kramer], since you seem so often disappointed in your gay friends who can't live up to what you expect of them as gay people?

I wasn't a [gay] activist, really.

It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.

Just to put that in some context, 1954 was the same year that From Here to Eternity won an Oscar. Swanson's manufactured its first TV dinner. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised. The term "under God" was inserted into the "Pledge of Allegiance." Steve Allen's Tonight Show premiered. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Bob Dylan was bar mitzvahed.

David Remnick [the New Yorker's editor in chief]is about as interested in anything gay as I am interested in anything to do with baseball. It drives me nuts.

My father was dead by the time I became a writer, and he would have had a heart attack if he had read the first thing I wrote when it came out. My mother still keeps her copy of Faggots hidden away in a bottom drawer.

There's always a door you don't get in. I'm a star in my own right for certain things. I'll own that. During Oscar weekend I did fabulous things. But there's still one inner sanctum I'm not allowed in. That's the one I'm fixated on.

Some people say you have to be a Christian to be saved. I had to stop being Christian to be saved.

If there was criticism about [Oscar Wilde], it was because it was written by a straight man who wasn't very educated about the gay world.

Larry [Kramer] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.

Larry [Kramer] and I often disagree. There was the whole meshuggaas we went through about his donating his papers to Yale, and I disagreed with him on a number of things about that. You wanted a gay center.

I was so unhappy as a child in Washington I figured if I'm going to Yale, I am going to start a new life. I'll change my name to my middle name. So I was known for my four years at Yale as David Kramer.

I haven't had sex in two and a half years. A guy I met in San Francisco gave me a sympathy blow job. It didn't really work. I said, "You're just doing this 'cause you feel sorry for me." We stopped in the middle.

I just so desperately wanted to be published in New Yorker, and I'd so desperately try to get something in it. But I'd always get nice letters back telling me that Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987] just didn't like this or didn't like that about what I submitted.