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.

We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

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.

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.

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.