by itabix | Nov 25, 2018 | Coming out, Earthrise, eBooks, The First Man, The First Man
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...
by itabix | Jul 23, 2018 | AIDS, Ceremonies, Charles Howard, Coming out, Courage, DOMA & DADT, Freedom, inclusive gay community, Nashville, Nashville, Where meaning comes from, Writing
Ceremonies Who were these people? 1 Timothy tells us. He’s sixteen, he’s a male, he’s gay, he’s homeless, he does tricks on “the hill” to get money, he hangs out with an older kid, Bernie, he has sex with Bernie sometimes, he knows Claire who has spiked hair and wears...
by itabix | Mar 31, 2015 | Film, Nashville
I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1963 to 1968. Nashville meant country music, but if you read in the histories of the civil rights movement, you’d know that many of the major advances were led by students from Fisk, the historically black college in Nashville....
by itabix | Mar 7, 2012 | Film
I found a short video on Towleroad today, Man in the Mirror, in which it is said that a “closeted jock faces outing in Joel Schumacher’s short.” It is also on PBS.org. Jason is an athlete, a high school senior, maybe seventeen years old, beautiful, a Puerto...
by itabix | Dec 10, 2011 | Film
Longtime Companion, the film by Norman René; is about a small group of men who know each other from the bars in NYC and Fire Island—that is, some of them know some of them—who are caught for a moment on Fire Island and at work and at home in the city as they digest...
by itabix | Oct 29, 2011 | Film
When I saw Law of Desire, in 1987, I was a couple of years into writing Ceremonies. I think one of the reasons the movie was so exciting to me–so thrilling—was that Almodovar was showing me something that I hadn’t seen before. I know now that Proust had written...
by itabix | Oct 24, 2011 | Film
About midway through Law of Desire, the movie by Pedro Almodovar (1987), Antonio, played by a young and beautiful Antonio Banderas, asks Pablo, a movie director who is very self-centered and seems always to be doing lines of coke, “Who is the boy in the letter, that...
by itabix | Jun 20, 2011 | Film
A friend said, on reading some story I had written, “Your character missed the whole sixties.” What my friend meant was that my character had missed my friend’s idea of the sixties. My character lived through the sixties in a heterosexual marriage, in middle-sized...
by itabix | Jun 16, 2011 | Film
by itabix | Feb 6, 2011 | Film, Night Catches Us
In Night Catches Us, a film by Tanya Hamilton, Marcus, played by Anthony Mackie, comes back to Philadelphia after being away for ten years. His father has just died, and he has come back into a family struggling with the past. Marcus left, and his brother, who had to...
