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

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.

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.

I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.

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

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.

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.