by itabix | Jun 10, 2016 | Assimilation, Barack Obama, Celebration, Coming out, Coming to terms with the past, Fighting Back, Freeing yourself of it, Queer, SCOTUS, Sexuality, The future, The Gay Revolution, Transgender
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...
by itabix | Jun 7, 2016 | Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Generational Divide, The future
It is 10:43 in the evening. C and I spent the day doing errands—the hardware store for screws for hooks in the utility closet in the back stairs—and chores, principally laundry. It is a warm evening, all the windows are open, and the neighborhood is quiet. After I...
by itabix | May 19, 2016 | AIDS, Anger, Barack Obama, Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Fighting, Frank Kameny, Generational Divide, London April 23 2016
I want to look at the issue of fighting versus negotiating. What has brought us our success? In the last couple of weeks, the President has brought this up in London and then again later at Howard. Over last weekend, a person I know wrote me, questioning whether I was...
by itabix | Apr 15, 2016 | Arabic poetry, Coming to terms with the past, Gay literature, Queer
My penis, settled upon the backside of Sam’an… it was wanting a two-sided kind of…hospitality. I had never had a host that was better at hosting than that backside of that boy Sam’an: honestly! I turned into him…and if you had watched him, anointing head of my horse...
by itabix | Mar 27, 2016 | AIDS, Assimilation, Coming out, Coming to terms with the past, Generational Divide, Queer, The effects of bigotry, Walking wounded
Jeff Zirpolo died this week—C’s colleague, our friend—whom we have known since early in the AIDS years. The wake was on Thursday in Watertown. There were about a hundred people there, his birth family—his brothers and his sisters-in-law, and his sister and his...
by itabix | Mar 14, 2016 | AIDS, Anger, Coming to terms with the past, Courage, Fighting Back, Larry Kramer, The effects of bigotry, Walking wounded
Each day the response from LGBTQ people and their allies gets more furious. First, on Friday, March 11, 2016, two days ago, Hillary Clinton complimented Nancy Reagan on her “low-key” AIDS advocacy in the early eighties, which, she says, started a national...
by itabix | Mar 11, 2016 | APA, books, Coming to terms with the past, Gay literature, Movies, Reviews, Walking wounded
In the flurry of marriages and commitments at the end of Downton Abbey—Edith to her Marquess, Mary to her racing car driver (the week before), Daisy to Andy (prospective), Mrs. Crawley to Lord Merton (promised), and perhaps Mrs. Patmore to Mr. Mason—amid all the...
by itabix | Feb 25, 2016 | Barack Obama, Coming to terms with the past, Federal Court Cases, SCOTUS, The future
At first, writers found good things to say of Antonin Scalia. From the day of his death (February 13, 2016), TV commentators took the he-celebrated-the-rule-of-law-despite-his-conservatism route when writing obituaries or appreciations of him. They said he was...
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 | Jan 27, 2016 | APA, Coming to terms with the past, DOMA & DADT, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walking wounded
I said I didn’t trust psychiatrists, and the man said, “Why?” I said, “Because for thirty years or so of my life, psychiatrists said being gay was a mental illness” on no respectable evidence, and then in 1973 they changed their minds. In the US, there are millions...
by itabix | Jan 12, 2016 | Adam in the Morning, Barack Obama, Being gay, Ceremonies, Coming to terms with the past, Freedom, Freeing yourself of it, Race Point Light, Sexuality, Words and their meanings, Writing
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...
by itabix | Dec 30, 2015 | AIDS, Coming to terms with the past, Compulsion of time, Courage, eBooks, Fighting Back, Gay literature, Generational Divide, Race Point Light, Sexuality, Stonewall Riots, The future
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...
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 | Oct 31, 2015 | Coming to terms with the past, Freeing yourself of it, Save the raw material
The past. It’s important because of us. That is, whenever the LGBTQ community gathers, as it does on Boylston on Pride Day, we have around us men and women who came to adulthood—and frequently to their sexuality—in all the different decades since World War II. And...
by itabix | Oct 25, 2015 | Barack Obama, Books, Coming to terms with the past, DOMA/DADT, Don't Tell Me to Wait, The future, The Gay Revolution
Two books on LGBTQ subjects have been published in the last few weeks that respond to an LGBTQ need to study ourselves and our past. Lillian Faderman’s The Gay Revolution, September 2015, covers the period between 1945 and May 2012, and Kerry Eleveld’s Don’t Tell me...
