by itabix | Jan 12, 2014 | Adam in the Morning
Bo Ravich, 30, a stage carpenter, is sitting on a roof outside the kitchen window of his apartment on Weehawken Street, off Christopher Street in Greenwich Village in New York, June 30, 1969. During the long, hot afternoon, Bo is talking to Belle, the producer of the...
by itabix | Dec 31, 2013 | Alan Turing
On Saturday, December 28, the Boston Globe ran an editorial comment about the British Government’s pardoning Alan Turing. The comment is entitled Britain: Reclaiming the Hero it Maligned. I wrote about Alan Turing here. In that blog post, I said, “This posting isn’t...
by itabix | Dec 24, 2013 | Gay literature
First New Mexico last Thursday and Utah Friday, making eighteen. Life is good right now for LGBT people, but I am reminded of the long years during which we experienced no victories. I remember what those days were like, and the people who didn’t make it to see these...
by itabix | Dec 13, 2013 | Barack Obama
Barack Obama, speaking in a stadium filled with South African people and representatives of the world’s nations, said Nelson Mandela emerged “as the last great liberator of the 20th century. Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement — a movement that at its...
by itabix | Dec 3, 2013 | Tim DeChristopher
I was on the Red Line here in Boston, going to Cambridge to attend a concert in Paine Hall at Harvard. My husband was playing the harp in the orchestra. The train was crowded because it was rush hour—six o’clock—and when I pushed onto the car and grabbed a strap,...
by itabix | Nov 19, 2013 | Assimilation
I wrote about this briefly the other day. The point was that as we assimilate into the heterosexual world, the gay community seems to pull in its horns, so it speak. It seems to become less flamboyant, less “out there,” less extravagant in the way it presents itself....
by itabix | Nov 14, 2013 | Coming to terms with the past
Gay people have recognized for a long time that learning how to live in a largely straight society presents the possibility of assimilation, and assimilation presents problems, different ones at different times. Over the weekend, I was reading Gay Men at the...
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 | 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...
by itabix | Oct 4, 2013 | Marriage
It is inevitably a political act, for men, for women, regardless of whether they are marrying someone of the same sex or the opposite sex. It is a political act for economic reasons, and, for gay people, it has been a political act since the first gay person asked for...
by itabix | Sep 18, 2013 | Gay literature
“I don’t really think that it makes sense for a work of art to take on a social purpose. Just because there are so many constraints that you’re working under already — what material is available to you, what your capabilities are with the abilities you have, what will...
by itabix | Sep 9, 2013 | Gay literature
What should be the subject of a gay writer? I ask this question seriously. I have read a recent article in Salon by Daniel D’Addario which seems to explain what is happening now in publishing. The headline over D’Addario’s article is, Where’s the...
by itabix | Aug 17, 2013 | Fighting Back
This week the news is out of Russia and has to do with the anti-gay laws there, their effects on Russian LGBT people and on the Winter Olympics 2014, and what the rest of the world is going to do about it. First response was from gay bars around the world dumping...
by itabix | Aug 6, 2013 | Assimilation
There has always been the danger that the more assimilated we are, the more we will become like them and therefore lose what makes us unique. Assimilate us, and eventually we disappear. This has been a danger for Jews, for black people, for women, for Native...
by itabix | Jul 26, 2013 | Sexuality
I had the TV on to MSNBC, listening to the progressive cable channel chew over Anthony Weiner. Chris Matthews was sputtering with (I suppose) astonishment and dismay, talking to two psychologists, trying to understand why Weiner did what he did. In a very brief...
