by itabix | Oct 13, 2014 | Being gay
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...
by itabix | Sep 29, 2014 | Being gay
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...
by itabix | Sep 29, 2014 | Being gay
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...
by itabix | Sep 27, 2014 | Being gay
“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...
by itabix | Sep 15, 2014 | Being gay, Fighting Back
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...
by itabix | Aug 7, 2014 | Being gay
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...
by itabix | Aug 31, 2012 | Being gay
Right now, I can’t escape thinking about politics and our choices. The question that occupies me is raised in my walks around the city by the demands made on me—on my time and energy—by various groups asking for money and support, by a homeless man holding a sign,...
by itabix | Aug 17, 2012 | Being gay, Who can tell?
Last week people wanted John Travolta to come out, and he wouldn’t, and then writers retracted their requests, ending up with statements like, “Nobody’s personal life is my business.” We think very badly about sex in our culture. Mary Elizabeth Williams,...
by itabix | Apr 30, 2012 | Being gay, Teenage Suicides
Another gay teenager committed suicide last week. Apparently, we don’t know details yet. Towleroad has the bare facts. Jack Reese, seventeen years old, killed himself near Ogden, Utah, last week just as his eighteen-year-old boyfriend was about to take part in...
by itabix | Feb 6, 2012 | Being gay
Nothing in my last post should be read to imply that having children is a necessary part of having a “rich life” for gay people. That’s it for us, and that came about when I underwent a divorce, and then when I worked for the subsequent years with my children, as they...
by itabix | Jan 31, 2012 | Being gay
People say of themselves that they “just happen to be gay.” I think that’s bullshit. I am profoundly, inextricably gay, and being gay affects every single part of me. I didn’t “happen” to be gay. I am so deeply gay that if you took the gay away, there wouldn’t be...
by itabix | Apr 10, 2011 | Being gay
Fair Shaw, who is narrator of Race Point Light, finds that each new phase of his life is not what he expected. Shaw has an education, and he has some experience—he was in the Army and on the fringes of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement—but each time...
by itabix | Apr 2, 2011 | Being gay
Last Sunday night I attended a concert by the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus whose title was Our True Colors. The concert was influenced by the It Gets Better movement, and during the concert four different men told stories of their youth and coming to adulthood and of the...
