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Watch our “Salon Talks” here, or read about it below to hear more about “Mayfair Witches,” the gamble of playing gay in a pre-AIDS crisis world, his response to Bethenny Frankel’s comments about his pasta sauce, and being a “Real Housewives” husband.

There are also drawings, photographs and paintings from the ’80s by artists like E’wao Kagoshima, Julio Galán, Peter Hujar, Andreas Sterzing and Luis Frangella that offer a window into an edgier, largely pre-AIDS New York — as well as the rise of various aesthetics around graffiti and L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. art.

It’s a fascinating, scrappy time capsule of queer life in post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS epidemic America that chronicles the revelry and protest that greeted the modern gay liberation movement.

Boisterously breaking ground for gay writing while living comfortably off the smartly invested proceeds of his screenplay for the notorious Hollywood musical flop “Lost Horizon,” he found himself embattled on two fronts: ghettoized by a dismissive mainstream and criticized by the gay community for giving voice to his ambivalence about pre-AIDS party culture.

He turned his observations of pre-AIDS gay culture into a kind of parable conveying its values and conventions—such as they were—and imparting lessons meant to sustain future generations of queer people, with the ultimate goal of guiding them toward the social and sexual revolutions Mitchell hoped to see.