I was raped. That was a hard thing to write about. I never owned that part of it. Guys don't look at themselves as being raped. We're not raised that way.

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

I think basically what The American People is about is that we've been here from the very beginning, and that has never ever been acknowledged in the history books. John Winthrop wasn't off the boat ten seconds before he passes a law that homosexuals should be hanged. And then he hung 'em, including an attempt to hang his own son when he found out he was gay.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.

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

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.