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 | Oct 22, 2016 | Coming to terms with the past, Generational Divide, Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walking wounded
We will get to the place where the President, the Congress, the courts, and the people of the US will acknowledge the fact that the nation has abused gay people. They will apologize for it, and then they’ll pay reparations. Because this is what Americans do. But this...
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 13, 2016 | Courage, Courage, Fighting Back, Orlando massacre, The future, Transgender, Walking wounded
It was one of those surpassingly beautiful scenes in late spring in New England—the sun gone now, the sky at dusk beyond the buildings still glowing white, and the people, residents of Boston, slowing down in crossing Copley Square and joining the group of men 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 | Mar 11, 2016 | APA, books, Coming to terms with the past, Gay literature, Movies, Reviews, Walking wounded
In the flurry of marriages and commitments at the end of Downton Abbey—Edith to her Marquess, Mary to her racing car driver (the week before), Daisy to Andy (prospective), Mrs. Crawley to Lord Merton (promised), and perhaps Mrs. Patmore to Mr. Mason—amid all the...
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 | Jan 27, 2016 | APA, Coming to terms with the past, DOMA & DADT, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walking wounded
I said I didn’t trust psychiatrists, and the man said, “Why?” I said, “Because for thirty years or so of my life, psychiatrists said being gay was a mental illness” on no respectable evidence, and then in 1973 they changed their minds. In the US, there are millions...
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 | Jul 8, 2015 | Alan Turing, Barack Obama, Coming to terms with the past, DOMA & DADT, Life and death, Teenage Suicides, Walking wounded
When the state, or society, or the culture commits a wrong against a gay citizen, there are a number of ways that wrong can be corrected—a new law, a court judgment, a social movement, among others. What usually can’t be corrected are the effects of that wrong on the...
by itabix | Mar 7, 2014 | Walking wounded
The last few days I have been reading a book that clarifies where we are. David Brion Davis, writing on slavery in the west, says “dehumanization was absolutely central to the slave experience.” The New York Review of Books says Davis’ book, The Problem of Slavery in...
by itabix | Jan 28, 2014 | Coming to terms with the past, Walking wounded
I was rooting around in my computer, looking for something, when I stumbled into the junk box and there were pages and pages of emails from a man I knew once, slightly, in school. He has gathered around him a group of our classmates, and these men communicate by...
by itabix | Oct 19, 2013 | Fighting Back, Walking wounded
Many people—both gay and straight people—think because gay people can be married in thirteen states that we have solved that problem, and, at least in those thirteen states, we can move on to other issues. That’s only partly true. Think of the long fight for...
