Kevin Sessums
When one person mentors, two lives are changed.Collection: Two
I don't think everybody's gay. But I think a lot more people are than the world knows about.Collection: Gay
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Growing Up
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.Collection: Sadness
It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.Collection: 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.Collection: School
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.Collection: Gay
That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.Collection: Yale
[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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Baseball
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Mother
I wasn't a [gay] activist, really.Collection: Gay
I was not "shoe." That's a misuse of the term "shoe," which is derived from "white shoe."Collection: Shoes
We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.Collection: Yale
I have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.Collection: Men
[ 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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Book
Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.Collection: Done
I never appear in any of your work, come to think of it, Calvin [Trillin]. And I look.Collection: Thinking
I'm persona non grata at the New Yorker.Collection: Persona
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.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Yale
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Sweet
Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.Collection: People
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Writing
I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.Collection: Christian
Some people say you have to be a Christian to be saved. I had to stop being Christian to be saved.Collection: Christian
I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.Collection: Live Life
One thing I learned in sobriety is to stop being judgmental, to always be discerning. When I drive, that will be my bumper sticker.Collection: Sobriety
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.Collection: Guy
I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.Collection: Things In Life
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.Collection: Acceptance
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.Collection: Term
"Shoe" just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.Collection: Shoes
[Calvin Trillin] was very "shoe," which means he was a big jock, a big deal.Collection: Mean
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?Collection: Gay
Tony Kushner has said that Larry [Kramer] thinks everyone always has to agree with him.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Army
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Mother
To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.Collection: People
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Gay
I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.Collection: Writing