Blog
Siegfried Sassoon, soldier, poet, gay
“[Wilfred]’s death was an unhealed wound, & the ache of it has been with me ever since. I wanted him back—not his poems.” The man who writes these words is Siegfried Sassoon, and he is writing about Wilfred Owen. They loved one another. They met in the fall...
Our heroic time
On November 18, 2003 the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts released its decision in the case Goodridge v Department of Public Health, which brought marriage equality to the United States. Mary Bonauto had assembled this case and argued it...
Wilfred Owen, soldier, poet, gay
When I was eighteen, in 1957, attending the school in Tennessee, and, of course, not dealing well with my sexuality. I took a course in poetry that included poems that have stayed with me during the fifty years since. One, called “Greater Love,” began, Red lips are...
Who’s responsible here?
It is Thursday night, at 10:24, and I am watching Lawrence O’Donnell. He and his guests are discovering the one responsible for the disaster on Tuesday night. It was, he says, the Democrats!, and specifically the Democratic leadership, who set the strategy for the...
Remember: On Tuesday, Vote!
On May 8, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to affirm his support of marriage equality. After that time, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer defend the DOMA before the Supreme Court, and, in 2013, the Supreme Court overturned...
The Pope, the Synod, and the people they’re arguing over, us
The recent synod of the church is receiving mixed reviews. Barbie Latza Nadeau, writing in The Daily Beast, says the synod is a victory for Pope Francis, and that all is going to come out well after a year’s discussions and in the conclusion of the synod. Or it may be...
Coming Out Day, freedom, living truthfully
Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and I would join in the fun but I’m out and everybody I know (who’s in that situation) is out, and the coming out is now for other people. Cheers for them, it’s a big moment. But a comment. Every time coming out comes up—and it...
Our lives our literature, part 2
Publishers are businesses and so need to make money. Nobody disagrees with this. As Dan D’Addario said in Salon last year, “Publishing is not a charitable endeavor.” Publishers choose book manuscripts to publish and market to a public that it hopes will buy, so the...
Waldman on the Supreme Court right now
Ari Ezra Waldman has put up a post on Towleroad discussing what’s happening at the Supreme Court right now (3:35 pm, September 29, 2014). They’re meeting for the first time since June to consider petitions for certiorari. Seven of these petitions concern marriage...
Our lives, our literature
“Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.” Edmund White This is not a new idea: people have written about it before. I wrote about...
The future we face, after we are married
While something like half of the commentariat is predicting that the Supreme Court will choose, in its late September 2014 conference, to take marriage equality cases in some form or other, and will give marriage equality in its June 2015 decision to every mother’s...
Being gay, being out, playing cards
Coming out is a big subject, it’s important to just about all of us, it means many different things to different ones of us, and it’s changing all the time. I had a friend in college—we never talked about our sexuality back in 1957—and at first we took the...
The Princesse de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, rough trade, in, out
I have just finished reading Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, in the Penguin edition. It is a novel whose major theme is Time—we age, all of us, and lose our youth, we lose our memories of our past, we forget the people who mattered to...
Anna Paquin, James Franco, heteroromantic pansexual, bi, me
We had a moment this past week when we were shown exactly how far we have to go before we reach freedom. Anna Paquin, she says, is bisexual, married to the actor Stephen Moyer, and Larry King found out about it, and the result, for several days, has been all over the...
Remember Charles Howard
On July 7, 1984, thirty years ago, in Bangor, Maine, Charles Howard was murdered by violent, homophobic boys. After his death, people who knew him found themselves rootless, without a clear way to move forward or a clear rationale for living, and without knowing who...
Hillary Clinton coming to terms with her past
Hillary and Bill Clinton, headed into the 2016 election, have to deal with what they did in the nineties. Many people have this problem. Senator McCain regularly acts as if he didn’t do what we know he did. Hillary was asked this past week about her views on...
Getting straight what happened
I think we ought to get our language straight. The Wisconsin federal district judge Barbara Crabb ruled on Friday that Wisconsin’s same sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. A good, short, description of the principal legal aspects of the event are on Slate,...
A marriage based on love, experience, mutual respect
Jay Michaelson, writing on The Daily Beast, wonders what’s going to happen after we get marriage equality. Will the future be what gives conservatives nightmares—impermanent and non-monogamous marriage? Or will married people in the future be pretty much what marriage...
The Normal Heart, again
Before I arrived in Boston in 1984, I didn’t know anything about AIDS, or, as it was called, Gay Cancer, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), before AIDS was settled on in 1985. Nobody else did either. We knew that it was fatal. And we knew that they didn’t know...
The Normal Heart
Tomorrow night, at nine, HBO will carry The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about the first years of the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1984. It was originally produced in New York by Joseph Papp. Kramer’s play is about one of those times in the lives of men when there...