Blog
The Stonewall Riots and me
Today is June 26th, and tomorrow is June 27th, and after midnight tomorrow night, one hour into June 28th, we will be into the forty-third anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. If you stay up one hour past midnight, it will be exactly forty-three years since Lt. Pine...
We live in a world they made
Today is Alan Turing’s one-hundredth birthday. Alan Turing contributed to the Allies winning World War II by breaking the Enigma codes that Germany used to communicate with its submarines. He had a large hand in inventing the computer that we use today and that today...
But mainly just remember
The mixed news from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, discussed here last post, and the continuing epidemic of gay teenage-suicides around the country—it’s hard to find any positive aspect of that fact—may be what caused some of us to find Gay Pride a...
Getting out in the open with our speech
Brandon K. Thorp posts on Towleroad, about President Obama proclaming Gay Pride Month: “At some point, I'm sure the novelty of seeing presidents speak this way about LGBT folk will wear off. For this writer, it hasn't yet.” To get the same sense of satisfaction, check...
Understanding our communal present
I have been writing to a man who went to the school I attended my first two years of college. I didn’t know him then—1957-1959—and we haven’t written in the intervening years. Then, about a week ago, he found my page in a leaflet for our fiftieth class reunion. On my...
Disambiguation among Buchanan, Obama, Clinton, Shakespeare, Cellini and me
Newsweek’s cover, “Our First Gay President,” has caused people to ask, “Is he really?” Andrew Sullivan used the word in the same metaphoric sense that “black” is used in the sentence, “Bill Clinton is our first black president.” It meant that much of Obama’s...
When we needed to hear what Obama said, but there wasn’t anybody to say it
At ten, in 1949, in the fourth grade, I was aware first of what was happening on the playground. I couldn’t play ball. My father tried occasionally to teach me, but he didn’t know how to teach me and didn’t really know what it was he was supposed to be teaching. I...
Precious citizenship
In North Carolina, returns are in, and we lost, as predicted. Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell both pointed out that some version of this issue has come before the voters thirty times in various states, losing every time. Maddow also made the point that each time...
The business of this country
Another gay teenager committed suicide last week. Apparently, we don’t know details yet. Towleroad has the bare facts. Jack Reese, seventeen years old, killed himself near Ogden, Utah, last week just as his eighteen-year-old boyfriend was about to take part in...
North Carolina, Dean Tillman, the future
On Towleroad, Krista Tillman, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and is a mother of a young gay man (she’s also a dean of her college) explains why her gay son doesn’t live in North Carolina. “It’s not as open and accepting as other places are.” She tells what she...
Living on the edge
When a person is on the edge between in and out, he is not often faced with a binary decision, either in or out. He is faced with a range of possibilities, only one of which is, in the particular situation, coming out. He may decide to do nothing. He may decide to...
The very private meaning of “coming out”
Tyler Clementi was in the process of coming out when he died. We can’t know how he felt. Tyler is the only person who could know how he felt and the only person who could know how far he had gone on the process toward coming out. It is appropriate here to...
An intensely private pursuit
In Ceremonies, Mickey gives two television interviews. In the first his face is lit so he can’t be recognized, and when he sees the broadcast of the interview, Mickey sees what he has done: The reporter, on screen, is a warm and vibrant person with attractive...
Jesus, another tour group
In Ceremonies, after Mickey came out to his sister, and then to his mother the next day, he found he had to come out to his friend at work. He took his friend Charles to a fast food restaurant on the highway. After some preliminary talk about cars and tires and...
Everybody is different
In Ceremonies, a young woman is walking down the street, preparing to attend a memorial service for a friend. She turns the corner and sees TV lights focused on the door of the church. If she continues to the door, she will walk past these TV cameras. She says to her...
Dharun Ravi and Tyler’s coming out
Ian Parker, writing in The New Yorker, says about Tyler Clementi, “there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.” Writing at the same time, Angus Johnston, of the website Student Activism, says, “‘Out’ is not a binary concept, and it’s not at all...
Dangerous Halls
I found a short video on Towleroad today, Man in the Mirror, in which it is said that a “closeted jock faces outing in Joel Schumacher’s short.” It is also on PBS.org. Jason is an athlete, a high school senior, maybe seventeen years old, beautiful, a Puerto...
“It ain’t necessarily so.”
One result of the recent procession of federal court cases, beginning with Romer v. Evans and including Lawrence v. Texas, and the latest, the Ninth Circuit panel rejection of Prop. 8 in Perry v. Brown and Galinski v. OPM, is that we can now see that the intellectual...
Another victory
Today, a federal district court in California declared DOMA unconstitutional in a summary judgment. Adam B of Daily Kos calls this a “big win,” and I recommend his analysis here. Ari Ezra Waldman, of Towleroad, continues his superb job of legal analysis of these court...
Queer
Queer is permanently outside the culture and therefore in opposition to it. Queer does not look for a time in the future when there will be resolution, when the failures of today will be corrected and those outside brought in. Queer neither seeks nor wishes for...