I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.

Larry [Kramer] and I often disagree. There was the whole meshuggaas we went through about his donating his papers to Yale, and I disagreed with him on a number of things about that. You wanted a gay center.

I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.

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?

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

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

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.