"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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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?