Blog
The judges, our sexuality, one giant classroom, Gallup
Tuesday was Pennsylvania’s, Monday was Oregon’s. I understand that Wisconsin and Florida and other states are in the near future. I went to a sandwich shop when I left the Y on Tuesday, and I found a copy of the decision from Judge John E. Jones III declaring...
Anger, its use and abuse
I said, “Of course I’m angry. My generation of gay men tends to be angry. We experienced abuse, and we were treated like shit for much of our lives—by the government, by the churches, the State Department, the military, the courts, by our families and by the people we...
Why are bookstores closing? It’s the books.
Recently in Salon, Steve Berman commented movingly on the closing of Giovanni’s Room, the LGBT bookstore in Philadelphia and the loss to Philadelphia. In his lament, he looks for the cause of these closings—lack of community support, competition from amazon.com,...
The man eating chicken, books in various forms, me
The Guardian had a story a month ago about a photograph of a man eating chicken out of a pot on the steps of the New York Public Library. The man eating the chicken told the photographer that he could take his picture if the photographer would “help [him] deliver a...
Tom of Finland and sex in the South in the fifties
I was a kid twelve or thirteen in the seventh grade, and I had fallen in love with another boy a year older than I. That is, I had developed an intense lust for him. I couldn’t see him but once a day, when he walked past me on his way to his classroom. We didn’t have...
Us, the 10th Circuit, and the radio
OK, the marriage cases are beginning to reach the appeals courts. In the most important case since the Supreme Court decided United States v. Windsor last summer, the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit was the scene yesterday for a hearing of Kitchens v....
Boundaries around what you can know
The only person who can tell what sexuality a person is, is the person involved. Everybody else is clueless. I was searching for something yesterday on the web when I stumbled on an interview with Kirstie Alley, from a couple of years ago. She was talking about...
What is uniquely ours
My classmate from the school in Tennessee and I exchanged letters recently. We’ve been writing occasionally about relationships—gay, straight, and otherwise—and looking to understand differences. (For a straight therapist’s take on all this, see here.) I had written...
Influencing the way we are seen
Last night I was going to write a post to this blog, when I found that the whole blog had been erased. Simply not there. This morning, after a tense night, I went to Blogger, and to the help forums. A half-hour later, after one query from another user of the...
Some things we can know about the future
The last few days I have been reading a book that clarifies where we are. David Brion Davis, writing on slavery in the west, says “dehumanization was absolutely central to the slave experience.” The New York Review of Books says Davis’ book, The Problem of Slavery in...
At play in Tennessee
I was rooting around in my computer, looking for something, when I stumbled into the junk box and there were pages and pages of emails from a man I knew once, slightly, in school. He has gathered around him a group of our classmates, and these men communicate by...
A time when gay men could create themselves
Bo Ravich, 30, a stage carpenter, is sitting on a roof outside the kitchen window of his apartment on Weehawken Street, off Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in New York, June 30, 1969. During the long, hot afternoon, Bo is talking to Belle, the producer of the...
When it’s the government that commits crimes
On Saturday, December 28, the Boston Globe ran an editorial comment about the British Government’s pardoning Alan Turing. The comment is entitled Britain: Reclaiming the Hero it Maligned. I wrote about Alan Turing here. In that blog post, I said, “This posting isn’t...
The gay protest novel (1)
First New Mexico last Thursday and Utah Friday, making eighteen. Life is good right now for LGBT people, but I am reminded of the long years during which we experienced no victories. I remember what those days were like, and the people who didn’t make it to see these...
…and who they love.
Barack Obama, speaking in a stadium filled with South African people and representatives of the world’s nations, said Nelson Mandela emerged “as the last great liberator of the 20th century. Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement — a movement that at its...
Tim, Prior, Lt Choi—they present a problem
I was on the Red Line here in Boston, going to Cambridge to attend a concert in Paine Hall at Harvard. My husband was playing the harp in the orchestra. The train was crowded because it was rush hour—six o’clock—and when I pushed onto the car and grabbed a strap,...
The man on stilts in a kilt in the wind
I wrote about this briefly the other day. The point was that as we assimilate into the heterosexual world, the gay community seems to pull in its horns, so it speak. It seems to become less flamboyant, less “out there,” less extravagant in the way it presents itself....
It could be a bum trade-off
Gay people have recognized for a long time that learning how to live in a largely straight society presents the possibility of assimilation, and assimilation presents problems, different ones at different times. Over the weekend, I was reading Gay Men at the...
Remember them, remember us
At the end of the Stonewall Riots, in my novel Adam in the Morning, four men are sitting on the high stoop of the building just west of the Stonewall Inn. It is eleven or twelve, the night of July 2, 1969, and the men are resting after fighting New York cops for five...
Where we are now
Many people—both gay and straight people—think because gay people can be married in thirteen states that we have solved that problem, and, at least in those thirteen states, we can move on to other issues. That’s only partly true. Think of the long fight for...