I'm sorry to keep focusing on the New Yorker, but everybody who was growing up when Calvin [Trillin] and I were growing up wanted to be published in the New Yorker.

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.

I could appear in this million-word book [Larry Kramer] are working on. Nobody would even notice me.

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

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.

I don't think everybody's gay. But I think a lot more people are than the world knows about.

Another 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.