Blog
What do you say, when someone comes out to you?
S. L. Price, writing in Sports Illustrated, May 6, 2013, quotes Patrick Burke on the subject of Burke’s brother’s coming out. “When your brother comes to you and tells you, ‘I’m gay,’ if you say anything other than, ‘Great, I love you, I don’t care,’ that’s where the...
And, for those interested in building things
Three days after the bombing at the finish line, something happened of a very different kind, but which got little attention in the press. The Digital Public Library of America opened online and is now available—even if in a limited way—at URL dp.la. Type in those...
The winning tactic in these wars
Violence—bombs, guns, ethnic slurs—has been so close to us in Boston this week that it’s been difficult to think. One of the threads of this blog has been the need for us to fight back, and various people have asked me what my books are about, and I’ve said, They’re...
Making it cost ’em
My last post was called “How things work,” published April 7, in which I wrote about my encounter with a young man doing missionary work for the Mormon church, as I walked home after picking up something at Home Depot. The young man was polite and friendly, and I...
How things work
I was walking back from Home Depot, when I found myself walking almost parallel with a young man in a pin-stripe suit and tie. He wasn’t dressed for Home Depot. We nodded. He smiled. I smiled. We walked on, and then I asked him if he was a Mormon. I pointed out that...
How are we winning this thing?
All this is getting hard to take. Chris Matthews was just addressing the question, Why have numbers changed so quickly in favor of equal marriage? His answer and the answer of his guests, was that it had to do with the numbers of gay people who have come out. Every...
The Supreme Court, Tuesday Morning
On Towleroad, you can read Ari Ezra Waldman, their resident legal expert, about whom they say, Ari Ezra Waldman teaches at Brooklyn Law School and is concurrently getting his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College and a...
Criticisms of Will Portman
Will Portman came out to his father, Senator Portman, Republican of Ohio, in 2011, which caused his father to announce this week that he had changed his beliefs on marriage equality. Since then we have had a heated debate over coming out and over whether Senator...
Melville, Faulkner, Shakespeare, me
Reading Moby Dick when I was seventeen made me want to write novels. Absalom, Absalom! had the same effect. I majored in English literature in college, and I went to New York and wrote for a year. A friend said, “The trouble is, you don’t know anything about what...
It’s not that they were so nice, it was that we were such good fighters
At every step forward in this long process, we should stop and consider how we got here. We didn’t get here because we were polite and our opponents were kind. We got here because we were tough, relentless, and fierce. We got here because we knew our stuff and our...
The gifts of time
I lived in New York for most of 1963, and one of my best friends was an actress, three years older than I, who had a major part in a major soap broadcast from New York. She was my cousin, and we had much the same background in South Carolina—conservative family and a...
What we demand
The papers and the web have been full of news about Barnes & Noble—they’re cutting back on the number of their bookstores—with analyses on why that has happened and what this means for the future. I went by B&N today and was told our local, intown B&N is...
Interesting times
Race Point Light doesn’t end when the narrator comes out. Like most LGBT persons, the narrator of Race Point Light still has at least half a lifetime to live after he moves into the gay community. He has things to do. He has to find a way to live. He has to support...
The promise of the future
The press has not gotten over it. The president, in his inaugural address, included Stonewall in the short list of significant moments in the great civil rights movements in this country. He said, “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.” Seneca Falls, New York, was a...
We are where we belong
Barack Obama said this today: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided...
Leave Jodie alone! Leave Manti alone!
First everybody jumped all over Jodie Foster for waiting so long to come out and for not saying what everybody thought she ought to have said, because there were all those people she could have helped (see here, and here), and now there is the mystery around Manti...
Watch it, our freedom grows, inch by inch
News important to gay readers came this week. Andrew Sullivan and his blog The Daily Dish have left The Beast and have struck out on their own. Henceforth, without what Sullivan calls a “sugar daddy” to pay the bills and without advertisements, Sullivan will host his...
We can’t forget our past
Here, at the beginning of the year, it is important to remember several things. First, those who suffered during the years we spent in the wilderness. No matter how many victories we experience during this year 2013, we are still going to be living among our LGBT...
Resolutions for 2013
C and I were in a bar Friday night. I talked to a friend about the difficulties of using an iPad or Nook or Kindle outside its own ecosystem—on an iPad, you need to read books from the Apple bookstore, and Amazon books from the Amazon bookstore on a Kindle, and so on....
Goals to fight for and what they mean
The goals are freedom and a community that is supportive.