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.

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

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

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

If someone had come up to me at Yale and asked me how many homosexuals there were in my class, I would have said I don't think there are any. There may have been a few who were shy with girls. You have to understand, this was the 1950s.

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

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.