This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

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

Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

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

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.