“During the ’50s, when little or nothing honest about gay male and lesbian lives was available culturally, how could a truth teller grab a niche? Not through high culture”

“Drugs became his escape hatch and his prison. As his In Our Lifetime so brazenly articulates, the devil was after his soul and damned if he wasn’t determined to win”

“In America, poetic truths have real-life con­sequences, and Mailer is one of the few American intellectuals to perceive this fact as both fundamental and fundamentally good”

Meet Paul Dano, the "cash register" in Roy Cohn's townhouse

“The essential hallmark of the Yankees has changed in the decade since George Steinbrenner purchased the club in 1973. By now, at every level in the organization — from the guard at the gate to the principal owner in his private box —the Yankees are marked by a broad streak of paranoia”

“In a city where the death penalty has been perhaps the most con­troversial public issue for a decade, cop bullets killed 39 people last year. Two hundred have died this way since Ed Koch became mayor in 1978”