Blog
This one is gone.
Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a big one for me. I served in the Army in the late fifties, and I remember condescending sergeants talking about the “pitter patter of little feet in the barracks” and claiming to know everything that happened in their barracks....
“I don’t care what you are, gay or straight, I love you.”
"Mommy!” “What? What’s the matter?” “I don’t know how you can say that.” “What?” “That you love me, but you don’t care what I am.” “Well, I do. I love you, and I don’t care whether you like boys or girls.” “But it’s different, liking boys and liking girls. And if you...
Living in the long tail (2)
The “long tail,” as it applies to the book industry, is described as a graph of the sales of books. If there are twenty-two books for sale, the one with the most sales would be on the left, with a tall bar. And then, stretching out to the right, each of the other...
Living in the long tail
Last week, Ewan Morrison, writing in The Guardian, asked, “Are books dead?” and “Can authors survive?” He was writing in the context of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and his belief that the “publishing industry is in terminal decline.” It is an interesting...
But why should any of us read it?
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, one of the first gay novels by a major writer, was published between 1913 and 1927, in Paris, in seven volumes and 4,300 pages (in the Modern Library translation into English). It is about a young boy growing up and coming to...
Proust, publication, and the danger of leaving it to publishers
Marcel Proust submitted a manuscript of his novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, to the Parisian publisher Eugène Fasquelle, in October 1912. This was the first time the book had been presented for publication. Fasquelle turned it down, saying he didn’t want to risk...
The easiest way to get into the future
Life is tough, but it is tougher if you don’t tell the truth about it. The hardest part of growing up gay in the years after World War II was not knowing what the truth was. People lied to us and about us—people and institutions and organizations, governments and...
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
For the last few weeks, I have been corresponding with a man I knew briefly at a school in the South in 1957 and 1959, and, as may be usual in such exchanges, we attempt to find out how we remember it in 1957 and—very gingerly—to find out how we are today. It is a...
Bear Week in Provincetown
I think the whole idea behind Bear Week is that the community is exploring images of maleness. In the past, maleness has had something to do with images of male beauty—think of anything by Michelangelo or Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Cellini—and bears have...
Betraying the great history of gay people
There is a range of ways men can array themselves with one another, but most of the traditional forms of relationship depend more or less absolutely on the concept of ownership. The two people in the relationship own each other. They can’t have sex with anyone outside...
‘We were outgunned.’
On Saturday and Sunday morning, the images of the celebrating crowds in front of the Stonewall Inn reminded many of us of the images of the very angry crowds in front of the same inn, almost exactly 42 years earlier. Then, there were no professional photographers, and...
Jack’s narrative
A friend said, on reading some story I had written, “Your character missed the whole sixties.” What my friend meant was that my character had missed my friend’s idea of the sixties. My character lived through the sixties in a heterosexual marriage, in middle-sized...
Ennis del Mar
Pride
Today is Gay Pride in Boston. This celebration marks the forty-second commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, and the forty-first Gay Pride march. The first was held in New York in 1970 and was called Christopher Street Liberation Day march. In successive years, other...
The king, the king’s to blame
Hamlet, to set things right in Denmark, kills the king. Whatever he has going on in his life with respect to his mother and her second husband, and to the woman with whom he has fallen in love, he has to act against the king, and that is regicide. The audience to that...
Where I found my freedom
Mitzi, fifteen years old, transgender, homeless, a fierce fighter, has always known that the private, intimate details of her life seamlessly become public every time she goes onto the street. “I think,” Mitzi says, “every time I go on the street I’m giving the finger...
How was it there?
I intended that the three novels of the Stonewall Triptych be gay novels. When I was writing them, I imagined writing for men and women who had experienced what I was writing about, or something similar. I was going to tell the story of what was happening to the gay...
“We lost that wounded look.”
What’s important is how hard we had to fight to get where we are now. There was fighting on Christopher Street very early—from one A.M. to about four A.M.—on Saturday morning, June 28, 1969. And then again that night, and then light skirmishes Sunday, Monday and...
More on the hours when everything changed and how that began
Around 2:00 AM, on June 28, 1969, the crowd in front of the Stonewall became a mob. They threw things at the cops and at the Stonewall—rocks, paving stones, bricks, empty cans, glass, full cans, trash can lids. There were only ten cops now, facing a mob of five or six...
When everything changed, and how that began
At about one o’clock in the morning, June 28, 1969, the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a seedy gay bar on Christopher Street, which was run by the Mafia, the second time this week. The cops checked the ID of everyone in the bar, and those who had proper...