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 | Sep 25, 2018 | AIDS, Anger, Earthrise, eBooks, Gay literature, Gay Pride, Where meaning comes from, Winter Rain, Writing
Winter Rain 1 I set out to write a gay novel about alcoholism, and when I completed it and then couldn’t get it published, I put it in a box on the floor at the back of my closet. It eventually was moved to my first computer, and then moved from computer to computer....
by itabix | Aug 28, 2018 | Adam in the Morning, Anger, Earthrise, gay community, Gay literature, Stonewall Riots, Straight marriage, Uncategorized
Adam in the Morning At one in the morning, 28 June 1969, the New York policemen from the 6th Precinct, led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, on Christopher Street in the West Village in New York. This was normal. The cops had...
by itabix | Jan 31, 2017 | Anger, Courage, Fighting Back, Stonewall Riots
Rachel Maddow often begins a story and makes me wonder Where is she going with this? She began her lead story Friday night with a Harvard scientist working with hydrogen in its various states. She informed us that hydrogen can have a gaseous or a liquid or a solid...
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 | 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 | 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 | Sep 22, 2016 | AIDS, Anger, Courage, Fighting Back, Memory, Queer, Sexuality
Rachel Maddow, last night: “Are the demonstrators free to leave [the area of confrontation]?” The NBC News reporter in Charlotte, NC, Tammy Leitner, “Absolutely. They are free to leave. They are choosing to stay here and engage with the riot police.” Well, no. If you...
by itabix | Aug 24, 2016 | AIDS, Anger, Gay literature, Winter Rain, Writing
Winter Rain is a story of kindness, of grief, of a person’s not being able to tell for certain what he or she is or what has happened, and yet it’s a story of a person’s need to go on. This is a book about people who live tough lives. Respect has to be paid. It is a...
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 | 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 | May 19, 2014 | Anger
I said, “Of course I’m angry. My generation of gay men tends to be angry. We experienced abuse, and we were treated like shit for much of our lives—by the government, by the churches, the State Department, the military, the courts, by our families and by the people we...
by itabix | Sep 12, 2012 | Anger, Fighting Back
I told him I didn’t trust therapists. The young man said he didn’t know why a person wouldn’t trust therapists. I reminded him that half my life the American Psychiatric Association had in its diagnostic manual that gay people suffered from various kinds of mental...
