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.

I talked to [Larry] Kramer a little bit about it while I was writing 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was one of those people who took a long time to come out.

I think I just felt a sadness at some points in my career that what is available to a straight writer is not available to a gay writer.

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

[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.

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."

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