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 | Jul 28, 2018 | AIDS, Alcoholism, Ceremonies, Earthrise, Fighting Back, Gay literature, inclusive gay community, Stonewall Riots, Straight marriage, Where meaning comes from
Race Point Light This novel begins in Provincetown, out on the end of Cape Cod, and ends in Provincetown sixty years later. It has one narrator, who sticks with the task all the way through the novel, and it has one subject—the narrator’s life—and one focus, the...
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 7, 2017 | Ceremonies, Ceremonies, Charles Howard, gay community, Gay kid, inclusive gay community, Stonewall Riots, Timothy, Transgender
When you’re telling a story, before you say your first word, you have to decide how you start. Once upon a time gets you into a certain kind of story, and Call me Ishmael gets you into another. To get into a story about what happened after Bernie Mallett was murdered...
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 | Jul 26, 2016 | Gay Pride, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Marriage, Queer, Sexuality, Stonewall Riots, The future, The Gay Revolution, Transgender
Chris Hayes is said to have said, “Great political theatre,” just after Bernie Sanders proposed that the nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton be accepted by the convention and just after the roll call of states was concluded. But it was much more than that. As Andrea...
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 11, 2016 | AIDS, Celebration, Ceremonies, Charles Howard, Courage, Freedom, Gay literature, Sexuality, Stonewall Riots
Derek is an actor, in Maine for summer stock in the summer of 1984, when a young gay man named Bernie Mallett was murdered by three homophobic teenagers. Bernie’s murder changes the lives of LGBTQ people in Maine—the town is called Cardiff—and makes just about...
by itabix | Feb 12, 2016 | Adam in the Morning, Fighting, Fighting Back, Stonewall Riots, Writing
Last week I bought and watched Margin Call, directed by J. C. Chandor and starring Kevin Spacey and Too Big to Fail, from HBO, directed by Curtis Hanson and starring William Hurt. I started watching a Showtime series, Billions, going back to S1:01, starring Paul...
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 | 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 | Sep 30, 2015 | Stonewall Riots
I can see why Stonewall, by Roland Emmerich, has been widely and thoroughly savaged, even to the point of a call for a boycott. The movie has been attacked for having a white, straight-acting actor who plays Dannie from Indiana. Dannie is widely described as being...
by itabix | Aug 25, 2015 | Movies, Stonewall Riots
The web has been full of comment in the last week or ten days about the trailer for the new movie from Roland Emmerich called Stonewall. People are pointing out that the principal character of the new movie is a young white dude—maybe even a straight one—instead of a...
by itabix | Oct 27, 2013 | Stonewall Riots
At the end of the Stonewall Riots, in my novel Adam in the Morning, four men are sitting on the high stoop of the building just west of the Stonewall Inn. It is eleven or twelve, the night of July 2, 1969, and the men are resting after fighting New York cops for five...
by itabix | Jun 11, 2011 | Stonewall Riots
Today is Gay Pride in Boston. This celebration marks the forty-second commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, and the forty-first Gay Pride march. The first was held in New York in 1970 and was called Christopher Street Liberation Day march. In successive years, other...
