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 | Dec 3, 2018 | Coming to terms with the past, Larry Kramer
The Congress, at this moment, is delivering eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda. Somebody said, “A man of grace.” Vice-President Pence was moved to say, “He was a good man.” Well, no. George Herbert Walker Bush, in his campaign for president, accepted the help of the...
by itabix | Jun 13, 2018 | bookstores, Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Daniel D'Addario, Earthrise, eBooks, Gay literature, In Search of Lost Time, Sodom and Gomorrah, Where meaning comes from
During most of my life, there has been only one way to get a manuscript into format in which everybody can read it, and that is through the publishing industry, owned and operated by large corporations whose expertise is in making money, not literature. They do it by...
by itabix | May 30, 2018 | Alcoholism, Coming to terms with the past, Earthrise, Gay literature, inclusive gay community, language, Memory, the South
This, said to us by the man who says of himself, “Call me Ishmael:” It [the spermiceti] had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here...
by itabix | May 11, 2018 | Coming to terms with the past, Earthrise, Freeing yourself of it, Gay literature, Save the raw material, Where meaning comes from
Two weeks ago, on April 26, 2018, the Legacy Museum and Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama, funded by the Equal Justice Institute. This is the only museum and memorial in this nation dedicated to the victims of the crime of lynching. The...
by itabix | Jan 20, 2017 | Adam in the Morning, Anger, Barack Obama, Ceremonies, Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Fighting Back, gay community, Generational Divide, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michelle Obama, Race Point Light, Stonewall National Monument, The Myth of Sisyphus, Winter Rain, Writing
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...
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 | Nov 6, 2016 | A single man, Adam in the Morning, Anger, APA, Ceremonies, Charles Howard, Coming out, Coming to terms with the past, Fighting, Fighting Back, Gay Pride, Publishing, Race Point Light, Stonewall Riots, The future, Winter Rain
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...
by itabix | Nov 6, 2016 | A single man, APA, Charles Howard, Coming to terms with the past, Gay literature, Generational Divide, Middlebrow Queer, Publishing, Sexuality, The Gay Revolution, Writing
Even though I didn’t have many extended, free-wheeling conversations with friends about the military’s rules against my serving (I served anyway), still the fact that what I was doing sexually was a crime occupied me deeply. A novel about me during the sixties in...
by itabix | Oct 22, 2016 | Coming to terms with the past, Generational Divide, Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walking wounded
We will get to the place where the President, the Congress, the courts, and the people of the US will acknowledge the fact that the nation has abused gay people. They will apologize for it, and then they’ll pay reparations. Because this is what Americans do. But this...
by itabix | Oct 1, 2016 | Anger, Coming to terms with the past, Gay kid, Gay literature, Generational Divide, Middlebrow Queer, Sexuality
In 1957, when we were students at a school in Tennessee (I was eighteen), students understood that it was against the law to engage in same-sex sex. You could be arrested, tried, and convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for a felony. What I think we were more...
by itabix | Jul 26, 2016 | Celebration, Fighting Back, Freeing yourself of it, Hillary Rodham Clinton, The future, Victory
I don’t know of anything so deeply moving as to be here, now, in front of the TV, at 5:46 in the afternoon on July 26, 2016, watching the roll call of states as the assembled delegates from the Democratic Party in the United States cast their votes, one state after...
by itabix | Jul 17, 2016 | Cemeteries, Coming to terms with the past, Gay literature, Provincetown, Race Point Light, Writing
When we’re in Provincetown, staying with our friend, Ed Stewart, we get into town by walking through the cemetery at Winslow Road and Jerome Smith Road, which holds mainly nineteenth century graves. Ed says it is “cemetery #2” because it is not the oldest one in town....
by itabix | Jul 10, 2016 | Coming to terms with the past, Marriage, Save the raw material, Stonewall Riots, The effects of bigotry, the South, Walking wounded
Elie Wiesel, who died this week, said in his Nobel Prize speech, “I have tried to keep memory alive […] I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.” But it’s worse than that. If we forget what has happened to...
by itabix | Jun 26, 2016 | Assimilation, Barack Obama, Books, Celebration, Coming to terms with the past, Don't Tell Me to Wait, Fighting Back, Gay Pride, Stonewall National Monument, Victory
Monday, tomorrow, is the forty-seventh anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and today is the forty-sixth Gay Pride Parade in New York. Two-and-a-half million people watched last year’s parade, and organizers expect at least that many today. Click here for information...
