Blog
Hearts and minds and buckets of blood
The Stonewall Riots have been in the news. PBS ran the documentary, “Stonewall Uprising,” on American Experience last week. I got out my copy of David Carter’s Stonewall, originally published in 2004, to compare notes. It’s cool seeing gray-haired men, talking about...
Getting to safety (2)
I don’t remember being bullied for being gay when I was a kid, but I do remember being given a hard time because I was a sissy. This happened when I was less than ten. I was pretty and wasn’t any good with a ball on the playground, and other boys didn’t want me on...
Getting to safety
Today, the paper and the blogs carry the news of the Oregon Study out of Columbia University, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Fenway Institute in Boston, and published in the journal Pediatrics. The study, by Professor Mark Hatzenbuehler,...
The future arrives before we are ready for it
Fair Shaw, who is narrator of Race Point Light, finds that each new phase of his life is not what he expected. Shaw has an education, and he has some experience—he was in the Army and on the fringes of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement—but each time...
Singing our songs
Last Sunday night I attended a concert by the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus whose title was Our True Colors. The concert was influenced by the It Gets Better movement, and during the concert four different men told stories of their youth and coming to adulthood and of the...
Building a new world
When the four principal characters of Adam in the Morning, who are, many of them, connected through a local repertory production of The Tempest, come off what is for them a world-transforming moment, they sit on the roof outside Bo’s bedroom window and watch the sun...
Worm turns
Barney Frank thinks gay marriage is a wedge issue for the Democrats, and ABC reports that 52% are in favor of gay marriage. People say this is a water-shed moment for gay people.So, we sleep well at night, believing as we do that if you hang in there long enough, the...
It’s hard, and we’re here to help
I read it again last night on Towleroad. The story is about Adam Lambert’s track “Aftermath” and quotes Adam’s words “about finding the courage to be honest with yourself.” We hear this so much that it doesn’t raise any comment. We even say this, without thinking what...
I think what they said was, “Power to the People!”
There are two great areas that are subject to the changes brought by the ebook. First, we now have the ability to publish books without moveable type and without paper, which means we don’t need the elaborate methods of shipping and storage that paper books need. We...
Never give in, we own the street
Today, here in Boston, I was at a rally at the State House supporting the demonstrators in Madison and supporting our unions and theirs. It was not very big, somebody said a thousand people, and it was orderly. Everybody seemed to agree on the basics—unions and...
Narratives, change, violence
Bo Ravich opens Adam in the Morning lying on the steps of the theatre where he works, on Sixth Avenue, and in the next two or three hours he becomes a different person. Narratives—stories—seem to require that characters change in some way, either suddenly, like Bo, or...
A literature that reflects us
A friend wrote this morning to say that he is frustrated by the state of gay publishing. Most gay books that come out are humorous essays about gay life and gay romance novels. I’d like to read something heftier, in which the kinds of things that affect me also affect...
A beautiful film
In Night Catches Us, a film by Tanya Hamilton, Marcus, played by Anthony Mackie, comes back to Philadelphia after being away for ten years. His father has just died, and he has come back into a family struggling with the past. Marcus left, and his brother, who had to...
A different kind of gay novel
Joseph Roche was active in voter registration drives in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, in 1964. He was from Los Angeles, and in 1961 he volunteered for Freedom Rides after he saw the first one on TV and saw young people beaten by racist mobs. His mother had taught...
Christopher Isherwood, George Falconer, the book and the movie, 1962
People in chat rooms say the movie of A Single Man, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, is “completely different” from the book. The small group of lines from page 28 in the book—where George is thinking of what the neighbors must be thinking about him and...
Christopher Isherwood, grief, loss
I read A Single Man—about George Falconer’s grief—when I was in school in the late sixties, and I don’t think I liked it much. At twenty-five I didn’t know what grief was, so I didn’t know it when I stumbled on it. I also didn’t know what this story had to do with my...
Looking for Love in the Places that Are Available
My novel, Race Point Light, is about a guy who knows from childhood that he likes men. He never wavers about that, all of his life. He has a magical affair with another soldier in 1959 in the most beautiful meadow on earth, on the higher slopes of Mt Rainier. He goes...
Present at the Creation
Like many men and women of my generation, I was interested in the Stonewall Riots. Like most men and women of my generation, I wasn’t there. I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the summer of 1969, but I read the initial reports in the Times, and then I watched the...
What was it like for you there?
There are, I guess, as many reasons for writing a novel as there are novelists, but one of the principal reasons is to tell what it was like there—in Atlanta in 1864, in Meryton in the early nineteenth century, in Yoknapatawpha County in 1928. What was it like for a...
Heroism
But if there is suffering that cannot be forgotten, there is heroism, too. The mythic narrative that we tell ourselves is that we suffer, and then we rise up and refuse to suffer any longer. This is the great narrative of the American Revolution and of all subsequent...