[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.

Kevin Sessums

Categorized in : Yale President Mad

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

Kevin Sessums

mentor changed two

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.

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

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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?

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

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I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

Kevin Sessums

new-yorkers nations writing

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.

Kevin Sessums

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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."

Kevin Sessums

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[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."

Kevin Sessums

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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.

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

kramer class believe

"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.

Kevin Sessums

different yale names

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.

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

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[ 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.

Kevin Sessums

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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.

Kevin Sessums

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

Kevin Sessums

gay people thinking