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

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

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

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

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

[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.

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.