Blog
The past and the future are ours
It is 10:43 in the evening. C and I spent the day doing errands—the hardware store for screws for hooks in the utility closet in the back stairs—and chores, principally laundry. It is a warm evening, all the windows are open, and the neighborhood is quiet. After I...
Decades of sustained, confrontational, fearless activism
I want to look at the issue of fighting versus negotiating. What has brought us our success? In the last couple of weeks, the President has brought this up in London and then again later at Howard. Over last weekend, a person I know wrote me, questioning whether I was...
She says, “We stand with you.”
Amazing things have been happening in the last four days. Last week, the Department of Justice delivered a five-day ultimatum to the Governor and State of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina, and others, which fell due Monday. Instead of giving in and...
The President to students in London 2016
Friday, April 23, President Obama spoke with a group of 500 youth leaders at a town hall meeting in London, and among the students who spoke were a number who raised questions that involved the relationship between principles and tactics in social movements like LGBTQ...
Abu Nuwas, poet
My penis, settled upon the backside of Sam’an… it was wanting a two-sided kind of…hospitality. I had never had a host that was better at hosting than that backside of that boy Sam’an: honestly! I turned into him…and if you had watched him, anointing head of my horse...
Human sacrifice, the tide, Canute
North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia—where do these states get their morals? It is often said that they get them from their religion—this is, after all, the Bible Belt, which has been, in itself, enough to drive many of the rest of...
Jeff’s and Mike’s one family
Jeff Zirpolo died this week—C’s colleague, our friend—whom we have known since early in the AIDS years. The wake was on Thursday in Watertown. There were about a hundred people there, his birth family—his brothers and his sisters-in-law, and his sister and his...
Hillary’s loss of memory
Each day the response from LGBTQ people and their allies gets more furious. First, on Friday, March 11, 2016, two days ago, Hillary Clinton complimented Nancy Reagan on her “low-key” AIDS advocacy in the early eighties, which, she says, started a national...
In the matter of Thomas Barrows
In the flurry of marriages and commitments at the end of Downton Abbey—Edith to her Marquess, Mary to her racing car driver (the week before), Daisy to Andy (prospective), Mrs. Crawley to Lord Merton (promised), and perhaps Mrs. Patmore to Mr. Mason—amid all the...
The future and our task
Bruce Hay, a faculty member in the Law School at Harvard, has written an essay on Antonin Scalia, published on Salon. See here. He speaks of being a “naive young fool,” when he first took a job as one of Scalia’s law clerks. He concludes this way: He [Scalia] died as...
Tough, brilliant, kind—and dead wrong
At first, writers found good things to say of Antonin Scalia. From the day of his death (February 13, 2016), TV commentators took the he-celebrated-the-rule-of-law-despite-his-conservatism route when writing obituaries or appreciations of him. They said he was...
Iridescent history
Last week I bought and watched Margin Call, directed by J. C. Chandor and starring Kevin Spacey and Too Big to Fail, from HBO, directed by Curtis Hanson and starring William Hurt. I started watching a Showtime series, Billions, going back to S1:01, starring Paul...
Reparations (3)
Donald Hallman, a veteran from the US Army, was given a dishonorable discharge in 1955 in Frankfurt, Germany, for being gay. He had already served two years. He has now received an honorable discharge and his right to his military benefits reinstated. Sean Mandell...
Reparations (2)
Reparation is an act of reconciliation.* This is the oldest (1348, and now obsolete) meaning of this word in English, and this meaning continues to lie submerged beneath more modern meanings. Two persons or communities, which have been divided by something in their...
Reparations (1)
I said I didn’t trust psychiatrists, and the man said, “Why?” I said, “Because for thirty years or so of my life, psychiatrists said being gay was a mental illness” on no respectable evidence, and then in 1973 they changed their minds. In the US, there are millions...
Daring greatly at Black Mountain
Between October 10, 2015 and now, I have been to see the exhibition on Black Mountain at the ICA maybe half a dozen times. I read a 600-page book on Black Mountain, written by Martin Duberman and published in 1971. I have also studied the catalogue for the show. Aside...
The search for freedom
Fair Shaw and his partner Chris and their friend David, and a younger man, Julio, had been at the Tea Dance at the Boatslip late in the last day of Race Point Light. Then, instead of going to a restaurant, the four of them decide to get food at the grocery store and...
AIDS, freedom, P-town, friends, life
This excerpt is from late in Race Point Light. The narrator is Fair Shaw. He is just arriving at the Boatslip, a hotel on the water in Provincetown that hosts a tea dance every afternoon during the summer. It is June, 2004. Shaw is with his partner, Chris, and their...
Coming out in 2015
In the last day or two, I have been buying kids clothes, gifts for grandchildren, and this has caused me to think about kids coming out. Many people think that most kids are going to grow up to be straight, and they continue to think that until the boy or girl tells...
Seekers after freedom
C and I were in Provincetown this past weekend—cloudless sky, temperature in the sixties— and occasionally men and women were seen wearing red Santa Claus caps in anticipation of the season. It’s a good place to go at any time—the bars, the restaurants, the...