by itabix | Jun 10, 2014 | Marriage
I think we ought to get our language straight. The Wisconsin federal district judge Barbara Crabb ruled on Friday that Wisconsin’s same sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. A good, short, description of the principal legal aspects of the event are on Slate,...
by itabix | Jun 2, 2014 | Marriage
Jay Michaelson, writing on The Daily Beast, wonders what’s going to happen after we get marriage equality. Will the future be what gives conservatives nightmares—impermanent and non-monogamous marriage? Or will married people in the future be pretty much what marriage...
by itabix | May 27, 2014 | Larry Kramer
Before I arrived in Boston in 1984, I didn’t know anything about AIDS, or, as it was called, Gay Cancer, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), before AIDS was settled on in 1985. Nobody else did either. We knew that it was fatal. And we knew that they didn’t know...
by itabix | May 25, 2014 | Larry Kramer
Tomorrow night, at nine, HBO will carry The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about the first years of the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1984. It was originally produced in New York by Joseph Papp. Kramer’s play is about one of those times in the lives of men when there...
by itabix | May 24, 2014 | Marriage cases
Tuesday was Pennsylvania’s, Monday was Oregon’s. I understand that Wisconsin and Florida and other states are in the near future. I went to a sandwich shop when I left the Y on Tuesday, and I found a copy of the decision from Judge John E. Jones III declaring...
by itabix | May 19, 2014 | Anger
I said, “Of course I’m angry. My generation of gay men tends to be angry. We experienced abuse, and we were treated like shit for much of our lives—by the government, by the churches, the State Department, the military, the courts, by our families and by the people we...
by itabix | May 11, 2014 | Bookstores
Recently in Salon, Steve Berman commented movingly on the closing of Giovanni’s Room, the LGBT bookstore in Philadelphia and the loss to Philadelphia. In his lament, he looks for the cause of these closings—lack of community support, competition from amazon.com,...
by itabix | Apr 22, 2014 | Man eating chicken
The Guardian had a story a month ago about a photograph of a man eating chicken out of a pot on the steps of the New York Public Library. The man eating the chicken told the photographer that he could take his picture if the photographer would “help [him] deliver a...
by itabix | Apr 16, 2014 | Tom of Finland
I was a kid twelve or thirteen in the seventh grade, and I had fallen in love with another boy a year older than I. That is, I had developed an intense lust for him. I couldn’t see him but once a day, when he walked past me on his way to his classroom. We didn’t have...
by itabix | Apr 11, 2014 | 10th Circuit, Marriage cases
OK, the marriage cases are beginning to reach the appeals courts. In the most important case since the Supreme Court decided United States v. Windsor last summer, the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit was the scene yesterday for a hearing of Kitchens v....
by itabix | Apr 6, 2014 | Sexuality
The only person who can tell what sexuality a person is, is the person involved. Everybody else is clueless. I was searching for something yesterday on the web when I stumbled on an interview with Kirstie Alley, from a couple of years ago. She was talking about...
by itabix | Mar 30, 2014 | The future
My classmate from the school in Tennessee and I exchanged letters recently. We’ve been writing occasionally about relationships—gay, straight, and otherwise—and looking to understand differences. (For a straight therapist’s take on all this, see here.) I had written...
by itabix | Mar 27, 2014 | The future
Last night I was going to write a post to this blog, when I found that the whole blog had been erased. Simply not there. This morning, after a tense night, I went to Blogger, and to the help forums. A half-hour later, after one query from another user of 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...
