by itabix | Mar 23, 2017 | Courage, Courage, Fighting, Fighting Back, The effects of bigotry
Race Point Light is my third novel, and it is about a man finding out that, when his culture wants to destroy him, his first duty is to protect himself, and his next is to change his culture. Here is an excerpt from Race Point Light. The narrator is Fair Shaw is...
by itabix | Jan 10, 2017 | Adam in the Morning, Alcoholism, Barack Obama, Being gay, Bookstores, bookstores, Ceremonies, Coming to terms with the past, eBooks, Gay literature, Publishing, Race Point Light, The effects of bigotry, Uncategorized, Walking wounded, Winter Rain, Writing
I read an article on Slate today on writing and money, and it compels me to respond. The point of the article is the fact that so few writers actually make any money at their writing. Just about all writers are supported by doing something else, like teaching, and yet...
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 | May 12, 2016 | Barack Obama, Celebration, Fighting, Fighting Back, SCOTUS, The effects of bigotry, Transgender
Amazing things have been happening in the last four days. Last week, the Department of Justice delivered a five-day ultimatum to the Governor and State of North Carolina and the University of North Carolina, and others, which fell due Monday. Instead of giving in and...
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 | Feb 4, 2016 | DOMA & DADT, The effects of bigotry, Walking wounded
Donald Hallman, a veteran from the US Army, was given a dishonorable discharge in 1955 in Frankfurt, Germany, for being gay. He had already served two years. He has now received an honorable discharge and his right to his military benefits reinstated. Sean Mandell...
by itabix | Nov 19, 2015 | Barack Obama, The effects of bigotry, Walking wounded
This is the President of the United States at his press conference in Antalya, Turkey, November 16, 2015: But what we do not do, what I do not do is to take actions either because it is going to work politically or it is going to somehow, in the abstract, make America...
by itabix | Apr 5, 2015 | The effects of bigotry
Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas announced that he was not going to sign the first version of his state’s Religious Freedom Act—the anti-gay version—and said that his son, Seth Hutchinson, had signed a petition on Facebook asking him not to. Many people have assumed...
by itabix | Mar 1, 2015 | Alan Turing, Being gay, The effects of bigotry
Yesterday we found that Leonard Nimoy died. His character gave us the belief that it would be possible to live rationally, and even though many people loved Spock, it is probably true that it was never possible to live totally rationally. The Imitation Game is a...
by itabix | Feb 6, 2015 | The effects of bigotry
It has been reported everywhere (Daily Mail, here) that in the last several days ISIS members in Syria have thrown a bound gay man off the roof of a seven-story building. When he survived his fall, a crowd who gathered at the foot of the building stoned him to death....
by itabix | Feb 12, 2012 | The effects of bigotry
“It is enough to say that Proposition 8 operates with no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians, through the public law, a majority’s private disapproval of them and their relationships.”–from the 9th Circuit’s decision on Prop 8. We already knew...
by itabix | Jul 31, 2011 | The effects of bigotry
For the last few weeks, I have been corresponding with a man I knew briefly at a school in the South in 1957 and 1959, and, as may be usual in such exchanges, we attempt to find out how we remember it in 1957 and—very gingerly—to find out how we are today. It is a...
by itabix | Nov 22, 2010 | The effects of bigotry
I saw a play the other night, a new play about a family in crisis over a question of forgiveness. Can they forgive the man who murdered their daughter? This led me to consider whether a dramatist could write that kind of drama about a gay family. Say, two gay men and...
