Kevin Sessums Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“When one person mentors, two lives are changed.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Two #Mentor #Changed

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

#Gay #Thinking #People

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Sweet #Real #School

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Mother #Thinking #Missing

“To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#People #Knows

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Acceptance #Asking Why #People

“I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Things In Life #Aberration #Done

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Guy #Hot #Looks

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Jobs #Sex #Sorry

“I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Live Life #Space #Littles

“[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Gay #Thinking #Max

“Everyone disappoints [Larry Kramer]. So it's not a problem for him either way.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Way #Problem #Kramer

“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

#Writing #Thinking #Mba Programs

“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

#Dog #Cities #Kansas City

“[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

#Fall #Betrayed #Kramer

“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

#Gay #Yale #Numbers

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

#Believe #Class #Kramer

“"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

#Yale #Names #Different

“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

#School #Yale #Class

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

#Shoes #White #Misuse

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

#Yale #Kramer #Mutual

“I have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Men #Yale #Term

“[ 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

#Men #Cities #America

“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

#Book #Son #Gay

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Writing #Gay #Yale

“There was a lot really awful about that time [in fifties] if you were gay.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Gay #Awful #Ifs

“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.”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Nice #Gay #Yale

“[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

#Yale #Mad #President

“[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."”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Yale #Years #President

“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."”
-- Kevin Sessums

#Sweet #Uncles #Pain