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The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.

For a long time, I lived in West Hollywood and watched young gay men strolling through life having no idea what came before. They didn't know about the riots at Stonewall, the vice squad, the raids.

The Stones can get out there and do it till they're old men. But certain groups are sad-looking to me.

I didn't know any gay people in my childhood.

For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.

I don't think anything predated Christians.

I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.