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.
Kevin SessumsAnother example of what I have to put up with from him. But there was a time I was mad at all my straight friends when AIDS was at its worst. I particularly hated the New Yorker, where Calvin [Trillin] has published so much of his work. The New Yorker was the worst because they barely ever wrote about AIDS. I used to take out on Calvin my real hatred for the New Yorker.
Kevin SessumsWe don't like to say that [my wife was Jewish] because her mother was Jewish, which means she was Jewish. So don't imply that my wife was a shikse.
Kevin Sessums[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.
Kevin Sessums[ John] Winthrop was the man who first said America was "a city upon a hill," which [Ronald] Reagan then appropriated. There are incidents like that all through history. We have been here.
Kevin Sessums