The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.

You do not get more with honey than with vinegar!

I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.

I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.

I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.