In an interview with New York magazine, gay hoteliers Ian Resiner and Mati Weiderpass speak at length about their thoughts on the blowback following their intimate “fireside chat” and dinner with anti-LGBT Sen. Ted Cruz last week. 

You’ll recall after news broke of the reception, gay organizations began to quickly pull out of fundraisers and events at establishments owned by the two NYC multimillionaires. Cruz himself also seemed to want to distance himself from the two in the wake of headlines, as he filed two new bills targeting same-sex marriage a short time afterwards. 

Reisner told the magazine the negative reactions on Facebook and elsewhere deeply troubled him:

Besides the business aspect, for me the horrible part is the abundance of communications in all forms. Letters, calls, texts, emails, Facebook notifications, and postings. Like, hate. The hate against us is so strong, for me, it literally makes me weep. That there’s a vast group of gay folks in America that don’t know what I have done for the gay cause, consistently for decades, and now think I’m anti-gay. There’s such a massive divide between the reality of what we do, did and do, and their limited thinking of what we do because of a few facts and a few headlines.

Reisner added that in many ways the reception was only held so that Cruz could meet and discuss Israeli politics with Reisner’s business partner Sam Domb, an Orthodox Jew who watched his mother perish in the Nazi death camps during World War II.  

The full interview, which can be read HERE, also touches on Weiderpass’s time in the army, naked Twister at the penthouse, why Reisner thinks gays are an “entitled” group and more.