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 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 | 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 | 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 | 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...
