Larry [Kramer] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.
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.
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.
[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."
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."
[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.
[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
There was a lot really awful about that time [in fifties] if you were gay.
Everyone disappoints [Larry Kramer]. So it's not a problem for him either way.
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.
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 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."
[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."
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.
I believe we really became friends [with Larry Kramer] when we bonded at our fifteenth class reunion in 1972.
"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.
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