Blog
Sex and the bright line
The man’s name is Nyle DiMarco, and he describes himself as “sexually fluid.” His picture and the article about him—he’s worth reading about—appeared in Towleroad this week. What is interesting about him is the idea of someone being sexually fluid. What does...
Vulnerable human bodies
This is the President of the United States at his press conference in Antalya, Turkey, November 16, 2015: But what we do not do, what I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America...
Black Mountain
Twice in the last week, I have heard or overheard other men speak of the new show at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston called Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957. I figured something was prodding me, and on Thursday, I went to see for...
Two old men on Pride Day
The past. It’s important because of us. That is, whenever the LGBTQ community gathers, as it does on Boylston on Pride Day, we have around us men and women who came to adulthood—and frequently to their sexuality—in all the different decades since World War II. And...
The complicated lessons of history
Two books on LGBTQ subjects have been published in the last few weeks that respond to an LGBTQ need to study ourselves and our past. Lillian Faderman’s The Gay Revolution, September 2015, covers the period between 1945 and May 2012, and Kerry Eleveld’s Don’t Tell me...
The best years of our lives
Professor E. K. Johnston, acting dean of the School of Journalism, in an auditorium of the University of Missouri, stands on stage and gives out awards at the end of the term to students at the school and congratulates each of them as they are honored. He then gets in...
Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall
I can see why Stonewall, by Roland Emmerich, has been widely and thoroughly savaged, even to the point of a call for a boycott. The movie has been attacked for having a white, straight-acting actor who plays Dannie from Indiana. Dannie is widely described as being...
Plunder and pain
Prince Jones, a friend of Ta-Nehisi Coates, “exhibited the whole of his given name.” Coates says, “He was handsome. He was tall and brown, built thin and powerful like a wide receiver. He was the son of a prominent doctor. He was born again, a state I did not share,...
Blind justice
I was in the Back Bay Thursday, on the second floor of the Library, when I saw the headline, US Clerk jailed for gay marriage defiance; dispute goes on. I was on the subway coming back to Somerville, ruminating on the headline. It made people think of the sixties. I...
Disrupting the complacent
Lately, we’ve been reading about Black Lives Matter and their disruptive tactics on the campaign trail. BLM have disrupted Hillary’s events twice, here and here, and Bernie Sanders, here, the mayor of Washington here, and they may have disrupted a Republican or two....
Lies, truth, and the movies of Roland Emmerich
The web has been full of comment in the last week or ten days about the trailer for the new movie from Roland Emmerich called Stonewall. People are pointing out that the principal character of the new movie is a young white dude—maybe even a straight one—instead of a...
The petty pace of time
This afternoon, on Towleroad, I read about an English rugby player who has just come out. He’s a nice-looking guy, but it wasn’t anything I needed to read about—I’ve read about athletes coming out before—and I was about to move on, when I stopped for some inexplicable...
Men who kill other men in the sky
My husband and I spent the weekend with his father and stepmother on the Connecticut coast. While we were there, C helped his father construct a model of a sculpture that, when built, is going to be very large and will occupy one of the public spaces in their town on...
Law of desire
I wrote this and published it on this blog under the title Love is never a joke in October 24, 2011. Tonight I watched the movie again, and I was so moved by it that I thought I would write another post on it, but when I searched and found the earlier post, I realized...
The wounds that won’t heal
When the state, or society, or the culture commits a wrong against a gay citizen, there are a number of ways that wrong can be corrected—a new law, a court judgment, a social movement, among others. What usually can’t be corrected are the effects of that wrong on the...
SCOTUS, Charleston, Grace
I began to realize yesterday that the SCOTUS decision on marriage would probably come down today, and I already knew that Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s funeral was going to be today, with the President giving the eulogy, and it occasionally crossed my mind that they might...
Living in interesting times
The issues introduced by the digital revolution are not going away. We were having brunch when one of the men at the table—I forget what led up to this—said that he didn’t read ebooks because he didn’t enjoy the experience of holding the tablet computer in his hands....
The Irish family, enlarged
Well, it’s happened, and it puts the lie to all the right-wing nuts who wanted this issue submitted to “the people,” content that the people would never approve marriage equality. Now they have, resoundingly, and the world cheers. It is unclear, however, that the...
Sublunary lovers love
Five days have passed since the Court hearing on Obergefell v. Hodges. Things got off to the wrong foot when Justice Kennedy, to whom most people are looking to make the majority, expressed how disturbed he is by the proposal to change an institution that has been...
Last links
First, the name of the case is Obergefell v. Hodges. The link to one of the online pronunciation sites is here. Lyle Denniston, of SCOTUSblog, has put up a post “Same-Sex Marriage: The Decisive Questions.” This is fairly technical, but, like anything from Denniston on...