Kevin Sessums quotes:

[Larry Kramer] got really mad at me once. The precipitating incident was a speech at Yale by the first President Bush's Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, against which Larry led a demonstration. He got the demonstrators to drown out Sullivan's speech, which wasn't allowed.

I haven't had sex in two and a half years. A guy I met in San Francisco gave me a sympathy blow job. It didn't really work. I said, "You're just doing this 'cause you feel sorry for me." We stopped in the middle.

[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.

I had no administrative function at the New Yorker. I am what we used to call in construction back in Kansas City where I grew up "a dog-ass subcontractor."

People who aren't addicts want to know why I became one. They ask whether I had a midlife crisis. I'm only speaking for myself now, but I've stopped asking why and how. It's all about surrender and acceptance. It doesn't matter why I am an addict.

"Shoe" just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.

"Weenie" was definitely a word we used at Yale back then. But I'm not sure you were one, Larry [Kramer]. Also, you were going by a different name.

David Remnick [the New Yorker's editor in chief]is about as interested in anything gay as I am interested in anything to do with baseball. It drives me nuts.

I believe we really became friends [with Larry Kramer] when we bonded at our fifteenth class reunion in 1972.

One thing I learned in sobriety is to stop being judgmental, to always be discerning. When I drive, that will be my bumper sticker.

Everyone disappoints [Larry Kramer]. So it's not a problem for him either way.

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 have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.

[ John] Winthrop was the man who first said America was "a city upon a hill," which [Ronald] Reagan then appropriated. There are incidents like that all through history. We have been here.

[Calvin Trillin] was very "shoe," which means he was a big jock, a big deal.

[Calvin Trilllin] is not writing about things that I can criticize. I can call these other people out for what I think they are not doing. There's a big difference.

Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.

Calvin [Trillin] was much more of a mover and a shaker. That's all I'm saying. I was a "weenie." That was another term back then.

I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.

I don't like the vulgarity of Oscars weekend, but it's also sweet. It's prom weekend for anyone who didn't experience the real prom: the nerds, gay, arty outsiders. Hollywood is high school with money.

I just so desperately wanted to be published in New Yorker, and I'd so desperately try to get something in it. But I'd always get nice letters back telling me that Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987] just didn't like this or didn't like that about what I submitted.

I find myself applying the addict's impulse to how I cruise. I don't look at the ass. If I see a hot guy walking towards me I look at his arm, and if he has a vein I fantasize about shooting up with him.

[Larry Kramer] even wrote this angry letter to the president of Yale, and in it he said what he said to us, that he was so disappointed in his straight friends because of AIDS and everything. He wrote the letter around March. And in it he wrote, "I usually go to the Trillins for Christmas, but I just couldn't do it this year."

[Robert Gottlieb] wouldn't have published 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was a Rhodes Scholar. He was on the swimming team. Had this great California crew cut and this great smile. Life magazine covered his graduation, and Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed it. We all expected him to be president some day. But he committed suicide when he was in his 50s. If he were gay in the 1950s, then the rest of what I wrote was commentary because life was so miserable for gay men back then. And that's why he committed suicide.

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.

Back in Kansas City, I associated Harvard with sort of gnarly guys who wore capes for effect in a kind of Oscar Wilde scene. Even though I also knew there was such a thing as the Harvard-Yale game, I was still a little surprised that Harvard had a football team. I just assumed if there were such a thing as gay people, that they were nothing like us. Little did I know that probably half the swim team at Yale was gay.

Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.

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

I get rejections from the New Yorker. When I had to give a little talk to the people graduating from the MBA program at Columbia who were going into writing and filmmaking and everything, I said, "When I tried to think of what to say, the only subject I thought was appropriate for people doing what you're going to do is rejection." That's what it's all about.

I never appear in any of your work, come to think of it, Calvin [Trillin]. And I look.

I talked to [Larry] Kramer a little bit about it while I was writing 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was one of those people who took a long time to come out.

I think basically what The American People is about is that we've been here from the very beginning, and that has never ever been acknowledged in the history books. John Winthrop wasn't off the boat ten seconds before he passes a law that homosexuals should be hanged. And then he hung 'em, including an attempt to hang his own son when he found out he was gay.

I think I just felt a sadness at some points in my career that what is available to a straight writer is not available to a gay writer.

I think it's a Jewish Yale custom. I wasn't aware that other people celebrated Christmas. My wife was very big on Christmas, and I was very big on my wife.

I was not "shoe." That's a misuse of the term "shoe," which is derived from "white shoe."

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 was raped: I said no and he wouldn't stop. I also had a scar on my back and blood coming out of my ass. To some that's just rough sex. Some would read that sentence and be turned on by that: the 51st Shade of Gay.

I was so unhappy as a child in Washington I figured if I'm going to Yale, I am going to start a new life. I'll change my name to my middle name. So I was known for my four years at Yale as David Kramer.

I wasn't a [gay] activist, really...

I wrote an essay too, and mine started something like, "When I was asked to contribute to this book, I said, 'I could do a piece on [Larry] Kramer as a pain in the ass, but I suppose you have too many of those, as it is.'" And Sarah's began something like, "When I read about America's angriest AIDS activist, I can't believe they are talking about my sweet Uncle Larry."

If someone had come up to me at Yale and asked me how many homosexuals there were in my class, I would have said I don't think there are any. There may have been a few who were shy with girls. You have to understand, this was the 1950s.

If there was criticism about [Oscar Wilde], it was because it was written by a straight man who wasn't very educated about the gay world.

I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.

I'm persona non grata at the New Yorker.

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.

In Western culture, there's a dichotomy between the easy narratives of God and the Devil. I now believe in this greater overarching spiritual thing. We are the light and the dark, and have to own the darkness. It's part of us. It's not evil. It's needed. You need to own both of them to be whole. Absorb it, and live it as part of your life.

Is it easier for you to have straight friends, Larry [Kramer], since you seem so often disappointed in your gay friends who can't live up to what you expect of them as gay people?

It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.

I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.

Just to put that in some context, 1954 was the same year that From Here to Eternity won an Oscar. Swanson's manufactured its first TV dinner. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised. The term "under God" was inserted into the "Pledge of Allegiance." Steve Allen's Tonight Show premiered. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Bob Dylan was bar mitzvahed.

Larry [Kramer] and I often disagree. There was the whole meshuggaas we went through about his donating his papers to Yale, and I disagreed with him on a number of things about that. You wanted a gay center...

Larry [Kramer] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.

My father always wanted me to be president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county. I think my father was okay about my going into journalism, though.

One of the few nice things about [time in Yale] was you got to know people before there were labels on them, so you got to know them as people, not as either gay or straight. Because as far as we knew, we thought everyone was straight.

Some people say you have to be a Christian to be saved. I had to stop being Christian to be saved.

Sometimes if I am walking down the street and thinking about my panoply of God, Ganesha, Parvati [Ganesha's mother], I say "Lucifer," because he belongs in that panoply. I miss him. That's why I'm a theist.

That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.

The first time I remember our being socially in the same place was after we graduated and [author, investment counselor, philanthropist, and fellow 1950s Yalie] Peter Wolf had a party at his house in the Hamptons.

There was a lot really awful about that time [in fifties] if you were gay.

There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.

There's always a door you don't get in. I'm a star in my own right for certain things. I'll own that. During Oscar weekend I did fabulous things. But there's still one inner sanctum I'm not allowed in. That's the one I'm fixated on.

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.

To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.

Tony Kushner has said that Larry [Kramer] thinks everyone always has to agree with him.

We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.

We don't like to say that [my wife was Jewish] because her mother was Jewish, which means she was Jewish. So don't imply that my wife was a shikse.

When I graduated [from Yale], I went back to Larry [Kramer]. But when I go to Yale reunions, there are still people who call me David.

You're talking about the 1970s now and not the 1950s. We were all more sophisticated by that time, and I just assumed he was gay. But I do remember when we were all sitting around on a roof one night and Larry turned to me and said, "You do know I'm gay, don't you?" There was a statement made. A declaration. We just never had really talked about it.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

[Larry Kramer] said, when it was all about to fall through, "You betrayed me, Calvin." And I said, "I resent that. I was against you from the beginning."

My father was dead by the time I became a writer, and he would have had a heart attack if he had read the first thing I wrote when it came out. My mother still keeps her copy of Faggots hidden away in a bottom drawer.