Earthrise 11

1 Neil Armstrong was difficult to live with and probably denied Janet, his wife, and his sons what they may have wanted most from him—warmth and love—but Armstrong stumbled into the one place on Earth where what was wanted from him was exactly what he had to offer—a...

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...

Present pride in Boston

Last night, Rachel Maddow interviewed Elizabeth Warren. Warren endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Presidency and, toward the end of her comments, spoke of Clinton’s character and what she has shown through the long primary fight. (counter 8:00) She won because she’s a...

AIDS, freedom, P-town, friends, life

This excerpt is from late in Race Point Light. The narrator is Fair Shaw. He is just arriving at the Boatslip, a hotel on the water in Provincetown that hosts a tea dance every afternoon during the summer. It is June, 2004. Shaw is with his partner, Chris, and their...

The petty pace of time

This afternoon, on Towleroad, I read about an English rugby player who has just come out. He’s a nice-looking guy, but it wasn’t anything I needed to read about—I’ve read about athletes coming out before—and I was about to move on, when I stopped for some inexplicable...

Being gay, being out, playing cards

 Coming out is a big subject, it’s important to just about all of us, it means many different things to different ones of us, and it’s changing all the time.   I had a friend in college—we never talked about our sexuality back in 1957—and at first we took the...

What do you say, when someone comes out to you?

S. L. Price, writing in Sports Illustrated, May 6, 2013, quotes Patrick Burke on the subject of Burke’s brother’s coming out. “When your brother comes to you and tells you, ‘I’m gay,’ if you say anything other than, ‘Great, I love you, I don’t care,’ that’s where the...

Criticisms of Will Portman

Will Portman came out to his father, Senator Portman, Republican of Ohio, in 2011, which caused his father to announce this week that he had changed his beliefs on marriage equality. Since then we have had a heated debate over coming out and over whether Senator...

Leave Jodie alone! Leave Manti alone!

First everybody jumped all over Jodie Foster for waiting so long to come out and for not saying what everybody thought she ought to have said, because there were all those people she could have helped (see here, and here), and now there is the mystery around Manti...

Come Out! (3)

Coming out—both the action and the word—differs depending on where you live. It seems it has always been easier to come out in coastal California and in the Northeast than in the South and the middle parts of the country. It has been easier in New York, Los Angeles,...