Blog
Livin’ in a crazy-makin’ world
“It is enough to say that Proposition 8 operates with no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians, through the public law, a majority’s private disapproval of them and their relationships.”--from the 9th Circuit’s decision on Prop 8. We already knew that,...
At last, the truth
Two good places to go for commentary on the Ninth Circuit panel’s decision in the Perry v. Brown Proposition 8 case are Adam B on Daily Kos and Ari Ezra Waldman on Towleroad. I don’t know what Proposition 8 supporters are thinking right now—I don’t read that kind of...
The necessity of imposing oneself on one’s culture
Nothing in my last post should be read to imply that having children is a necessary part of having a “rich life” for gay people. That’s it for us, and that came about when I underwent a divorce, and then when I worked for the subsequent years with my children, as they...
A rich life
People say of themselves that they “just happen to be gay.” I think that’s bullshit. I am profoundly, inextricably gay, and being gay affects every single part of me. I didn’t “happen” to be gay. I am so deeply gay that if you took the gay away, there wouldn’t be...
Freedom to feel
Freedom. We are in an election season, and the word is everywhere, but we don’t usually feel we have to ask what it means. For us, the big gay-rights cases before the Supreme Court place the word in a constitutional context. That’s important, but there are other...
All around us are ruins
Before 1983, when I announced that my marriage was over, I had always been monogamous. It was not until 1990, as I was beginning another relationship and still in the first bucking, sweaty throes of it, that I felt I needed to say something that was...
The will to assert the right to be different
What are we going to work for, after all of us can get married? And what, now that we have DADT repealed? Will they really accept us then? And will we be happy? What about the people who don’t get married? Or who don’t go into the Army? Who don’t want children? What...
‘Lawrence v. Texas’ Co-Defendant John G. Lawrence Dies at 68
John G. Lawrence is dead. He is the man who gave his name to “Lawrence v. Texas,” the case before the Supreme Court decided June 26, 2003 that invalidated all sodomy laws in the US. Lawrence was in his bedroom with another man, Tyrone Garner, having sex, when local...
Mme de Guermantes at the Opera
Night before last I read something that was breathtakingly beautiful. In Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is sitting in the Opéra, observing the beautiful women in their parterre boxes above him. “At first there were only vague...
Letting go during the eighties
Longtime Companion, the film by Norman René; is about a small group of men who know each other from the bars in NYC and Fire Island—that is, some of them know some of them—who are caught for a moment on Fire Island and at work and at home in the city as they digest...
Alan Turing, suffering, gay fiction
The Boston Globe published a long article on Sunday, titled “A Computer That Thinks Like the Universe,” by Joshua Rothman. It’s interesting—it’s about quantum computing—and along the way to its conclusions, it discusses what the computers we use are and introduced...
Thoughts on getting home
C and I have just come back from the eastern Connecticut shore where we joined extended family for Thanksgiving weekend. We had good food, good conversation, a good sense of belonging—all the things that are expected of such a weekend—and then we returned to Boston...
Ebooks and ereaders mean freedom to gay people
I hear or read how sad it is that the publishing industry is collapsing. People resist ereaders. “I stare at a back-lit LED screen enough already.” There are a few things to remember. The publishing industry has not worked well for a lot of people. It has not...
the Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray
Marcel, the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is in Balbec, a resort on the north coast of France. We read this: One very hot afternoon, from inside the dining room [of the hotel], which was in half-darkness, sheltering from the sun behind...
Mourn no longer for Malone.
Sometimes a work of art does not present itself so that we know who it is about. Maurice, by E. M. Forster, seems to be about Maurice Hall, and then it seems to be about Maurice and Clive Durham together, and it is only later that the reader discovers the novel is...
A moment of love
When I saw Law of Desire, in 1987, I was a couple of years into writing Ceremonies. I think one of the reasons the movie was so exciting to me--so thrilling—was that Almodovar was showing me something that I hadn’t seen before. I know now that Proust had written about...
Love is never a joke.
About midway through Law of Desire, the movie by Pedro Almodovar (1987), Antonio, played by a young and beautiful Antonio Banderas, asks Pablo, a movie director who is very self-centered and seems always to be doing lines of coke, “Who is the boy in the letter, that...
Unthinkable ideas
Some ideas are unthinkable, then they become thinkable. This happens all the time. I suspect that for the vast majority of people in this country, same-sex marriage was unthinkable right up to the moment they had to start thinking about it. They had never seen it,...
Me and my buddy and the Army, fifty years later
I got an email two days ago from a man whose name I haven’t heard in fifty years. The email said, “Are you the Dwight Cathcart that was stationed in Yakima, Washington. 1960-1961?” This man and several others and I were in the Army together and formed a little group...
The Kindle and freedom of choice
The direction we should be going toward is toward freedom. We need to remember this at every step, so that when somebody takes us in the wrong direction, we will know it immediately. In the contemporary world—the one outside my window—I am free to walk down the...