by itabix | Oct 16, 2019 | Anger, Being gay, Channing Smith, Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Earthrise, Freeing yourself of it, gay community, Gay kid, Marriage cases, Queer, Reparations, Sexuality, suicide, Teenage Suicides, Words and their meanings, Writing
I wrote this a week ago: It is a truth that LGBTQ+IA persons do not have a literature that reflects us. We have a literature that reflects some of us, and we have a literature that reflects many of us partially. We don’t have a literature that reflects how varied the...
by itabix | Jul 7, 2018 | Ceremonies, Earthrise, Gay literature, LGBTQ suicide, Middlebrow Queer, Teenage Suicides, Writing
Ceremonies When my friend Charles Howard was murdered on July 7, 1984, in Bangor, Maine, I had already quit my job teaching and was planning to leave Bangor at the end of the summer, in about two months. After Charlie’s murder, and thinking that someone was going to...
by itabix | Feb 25, 2017 | Being gay, LGBTQ suicide, Marriage, Teenage Suicides, Words and their meanings
Now we learn that when our culture demonstrates it can be inclusive, then fewer teenagers try to kill themselves. That seems clear enough, and it ought to drive the whole nation into the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party. Here are the details. The scientists are...
by itabix | Jan 10, 2017 | Adam in the Morning, Alcoholism, Barack Obama, Being gay, Bookstores, bookstores, Ceremonies, Coming to terms with the past, eBooks, Gay literature, Publishing, Race Point Light, The effects of bigotry, Uncategorized, Walking wounded, Winter Rain, Writing
I read an article on Slate today on writing and money, and it compels me to respond. The point of the article is the fact that so few writers actually make any money at their writing. Just about all writers are supported by doing something else, like teaching, and yet...
by itabix | Jan 31, 2016 | AIDS, APA, Coming to terms with the past, DOMA & DADT, Fighting Back, Stonewall Riots, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Teenage Suicides
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...
by itabix | Jan 12, 2016 | Adam in the Morning, Barack Obama, Being gay, Ceremonies, Coming to terms with the past, Freedom, Freeing yourself of it, Race Point Light, Sexuality, Words and their meanings, Writing
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...
by itabix | Dec 11, 2015 | Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Courage, Freedom, Sexuality, Teenage Suicides
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...
by itabix | Jul 8, 2015 | Alan Turing, Barack Obama, Coming to terms with the past, DOMA & DADT, Life and death, Teenage Suicides, Walking wounded
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...
by itabix | Mar 1, 2015 | Alan Turing, Being gay, The effects of bigotry
Yesterday we found that Leonard Nimoy died. His character gave us the belief that it would be possible to live rationally, and even though many people loved Spock, it is probably true that it was never possible to live totally rationally. The Imitation Game is a...
by itabix | Feb 23, 2015 | Alan Turing, Assimilation, Gay kid, Teenage Suicides
“When I was sixteen years old, I tried to kill myself. I felt weird and I felt different and I felt like I didn’t belong. Now I’m standing here. So I would like this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she’s weird or she’s different or she doesn’t fit...
by itabix | Jan 22, 2015 | Fighting Back, Teenage Suicides
The president was in Boise, Idaho, on Tuesday, which is, as Rachel Maddow said, the reddest of red states, and the crowd around him was mesmerized, cheering him on. He spoke, briefly, of what has been accomplished in Washington. He touched lightly on his achievements,...
by itabix | Dec 28, 2014 | Being gay
Since last July, we’ve been working on updates and improvements to Adriana Books—putting the site and the blog in the same place and making the experience easier. These improvements also include a revamping of the appearance of the site. I hope that these changes will...
by itabix | Nov 30, 2014 | Being 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...
by itabix | Nov 25, 2014 | Being gay, Federal Court Cases, Fighting Back
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...
by itabix | Nov 12, 2014 | Being 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...
