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I was twenty-seven when I began to write seriously, and after two years of rejections, my first book, 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo,' was accepted for publication.

In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.

I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.

I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.

The stories that engaged me as a kid were all science fiction. Later, it turned out that I didn't have the language to talk about what was bothering me in a way that was straightforward.

Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Early on, I tried fiction, but I wasn't very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere.

One of my favorite things I read was John Steinbeck's journals while he was writing 'East of Eden,' which was so cool.