by itabix | May 21, 2013 | Fighting Back
Tim DeChristopher said, in his sentencing statement, “Since [the] bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew...
by itabix | Apr 24, 2013 | Fighting Back
Violence—bombs, guns, ethnic slurs—has been so close to us in Boston this week that it’s been difficult to think. One of the threads of this blog has been the need for us to fight back, and various people have asked me what my books are about, and I’ve said, They’re...
by itabix | Apr 19, 2013 | Courage, Fighting Back
My last post was called “How things work,” published April 7, in which I wrote about my encounter with a young man doing missionary work for the Mormon church, as I walked home after picking up something at Home Depot. The young man was polite and friendly, and I...
by itabix | Apr 8, 2013 | Fighting Back
I was walking back from Home Depot, when I found myself walking almost parallel with a young man in a pin-stripe suit and tie. He wasn’t dressed for Home Depot. We nodded. He smiled. I smiled. We walked on, and then I asked him if he was a Mormon. I pointed out that...
by itabix | Apr 1, 2013 | Fighting Back
All this is getting hard to take. Chris Matthews was just addressing the question, Why have numbers changed so quickly in favor of equal marriage? His answer and the answer of his guests, was that it had to do with the numbers of gay people who have come out. Every...
by itabix | Mar 26, 2013 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
On Towleroad, you can read Ari Ezra Waldman, their resident legal expert, about whom they say, Ari Ezra Waldman teaches at Brooklyn Law School and is concurrently getting his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College and a...
by itabix | Mar 7, 2013 | Fighting Back
At every step forward in this long process, we should stop and consider how we got here. We didn’t get here because we were polite and our opponents were kind. We got here because we were tough, relentless, and fierce. We got here because we knew our stuff and our...
by itabix | Oct 1, 2012 | Fighting Back, Larry Kramer
Before AIDS, people got sick, went to their doctors, were told what to do, and got better—or worse and died—and that didn’t change until HIV had been among us for five years or so. Since the drug companies weren’t coming out with effective medications, and since the...
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...
by itabix | Aug 22, 2012 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
Now it is time to focus on the Supreme Court. Here are the stakes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933, Stephen Breyer in 1938, and Anthony Kennedy in 1936. These three justices were part of the majority in both major GLBT civil rights cases of the last...
by itabix | Aug 5, 2012 | AIDS, Fighting Back
My partner is out of town for the weekend, and this afternoon I went by myself to Dark Knight Rises. Much of the outdoor shooting takes place on Wall Street in pitched battles between the New York police and the bad guys. In the first image, Wall Street is cleared of...
by itabix | Jul 26, 2012 | Fighting Back
When I was thirteen or fourteen in South Carolina—we’re talking about the early fifties here—the Boy Scouts were different from all the other activities a boy could do. We went on weekend overnight campouts to some local “woods,” and I looked forward...
by itabix | Jun 27, 2012 | Fighting Back
Today is June 26th, and tomorrow is June 27th, and after midnight tomorrow night, one hour into June 28th, we will be into the forty-third anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. If you stay up one hour past midnight, it will be exactly forty-three years since Lt. Pine...
by itabix | Jun 13, 2012 | Fighting Back
The mixed news from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, discussed here last post, and the continuing epidemic of gay teenage-suicides around the country—it’s hard to find any positive aspect of that fact—may be what caused some of us to find Gay Pride a...
by itabix | Dec 26, 2011 | SCOTUS
John G. Lawrence is dead. He is the man who gave his name to “Lawrence v. Texas,” the case before the Supreme Court decided June 26, 2003 that invalidated all sodomy laws in the US. Lawrence was in his bedroom with another man, Tyrone Garner, having sex, when local...
