January 20, 2017

Many people are quoting Martin Luther King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And many people believe that means that eventually things are going to get better. But you know that’s bullshit. There is no “moral universe.” And we...

My books, money, value, the somber truth

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...

The political novel: 3

At the time I started writing my first gay political novel, I had only been out for 24 months, and I was steeping in the literature of gay political theory. The weekend that Charles Howard was murdered (July 7, 1984)—he was the man on whom Bernie Mallett of Ceremonies...

The search for freedom

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...

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...

Building a new world

When the four principal characters of Adam in the Morning, who are, many of them, connected through a local repertory production of The Tempest, come off what is for them a world-transforming moment, they sit on the roof outside Bo’s bedroom window and watch the sun...

Narratives, change, violence

Bo Ravich opens Adam in the Morning lying on the steps of the theatre where he works, on Sixth Avenue, and in the next two or three hours he becomes a different person. Narratives—stories—seem to require that characters change in some way, either suddenly, like Bo, or...

A different kind of gay novel

Joseph Roche was active in voter registration drives in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, in 1964. He was from Los Angeles, and in 1961 he volunteered for Freedom Rides after he saw the first one on TV and saw young people beaten by racist mobs. His mother had taught...