Back in Kansas City, I associated Harvard with sort of gnarly guys who wore capes for effect in a kind of Oscar Wilde scene. Even though I also knew there was such a thing as the Harvard-Yale game, I was still a little surprised that Harvard had a football team. I just assumed if there were such a thing as gay people, that they were nothing like us. Little did I know that probably half the swim team at Yale was gay.

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

I wasn't a [gay] activist, really.

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 believe we really became friends [with Larry Kramer] when we bonded at our fifteenth class reunion in 1972.

I was raped. That was a hard thing to write about. I never owned that part of it. Guys don't look at themselves as being raped. We're not raised that way.

We 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.