by itabix | Apr 29, 2013 | Books
Three days after the bombing at the finish line, something happened of a very different kind, but which got little attention in the press. The Digital Public Library of America opened online and is now available—even if in a limited way—at URL dp.la. Type in those...
by itabix | Apr 24, 2013 | Fighting Back
Violence—bombs, guns, ethnic slurs—has been so close to us in Boston this week that it’s been difficult to think. One of the threads of this blog has been the need for us to fight back, and various people have asked me what my books are about, and I’ve said, They’re...
by itabix | Apr 19, 2013 | Courage, Fighting Back
My last post was called “How things work,” published April 7, in which I wrote about my encounter with a young man doing missionary work for the Mormon church, as I walked home after picking up something at Home Depot. The young man was polite and friendly, and I...
by itabix | Apr 8, 2013 | Fighting Back
I was walking back from Home Depot, when I found myself walking almost parallel with a young man in a pin-stripe suit and tie. He wasn’t dressed for Home Depot. We nodded. He smiled. I smiled. We walked on, and then I asked him if he was a Mormon. I pointed out that...
by itabix | Apr 1, 2013 | Fighting Back
All this is getting hard to take. Chris Matthews was just addressing the question, Why have numbers changed so quickly in favor of equal marriage? His answer and the answer of his guests, was that it had to do with the numbers of gay people who have come out. Every...
by itabix | Mar 26, 2013 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
On Towleroad, you can read Ari Ezra Waldman, their resident legal expert, about whom they say, Ari Ezra Waldman teaches at Brooklyn Law School and is concurrently getting his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College and a...
by itabix | Mar 21, 2013 | Coming out
Will Portman came out to his father, Senator Portman, Republican of Ohio, in 2011, which caused his father to announce this week that he had changed his beliefs on marriage equality. Since then we have had a heated debate over coming out and over whether Senator...
by itabix | Mar 14, 2013 | Writing
Reading Moby Dick when I was seventeen made me want to write novels. Absalom, Absalom! had the same effect. I majored in English literature in college, and I went to New York and wrote for a year. A friend said, “The trouble is, you don’t know anything about what...
by itabix | Mar 7, 2013 | Fighting Back
At every step forward in this long process, we should stop and consider how we got here. We didn’t get here because we were polite and our opponents were kind. We got here because we were tough, relentless, and fierce. We got here because we knew our stuff and our...
by itabix | Mar 1, 2013 | Assimilation, Victory
I lived in New York for most of 1963, and one of my best friends was an actress, three years older than I, who had a major part in a major soap broadcast from New York. She was my cousin, and we had much the same background in South Carolina—conservative family and a...
by itabix | Feb 22, 2013 | eBooks, Uncategorized
The papers and the web have been full of news about Barnes & Noble—they’re cutting back on the number of their bookstores—with analyses on why that has happened and what this means for the future. I went by B&N today and was told our local, intown B&N is...
by itabix | Feb 12, 2013 | Race Point Light
Race Point Light doesn’t end when the narrator comes out. Like most LGBT persons, the narrator of Race Point Light still has at least half a lifetime to live after he moves into the gay community. He has things to do. He has to find a way to live. He has to support...
by itabix | Jan 29, 2013 | Barack Obama
The press has not gotten over it. The president, in his inaugural address, included Stonewall in the short list of significant moments in the great civil rights movements in this country. He said, “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.” Seneca Falls, New York, was a...
by itabix | Jan 21, 2013 | Barack Obama
Barack Obama said this today: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided...
by itabix | Jan 20, 2013 | Coming out
First everybody jumped all over Jodie Foster for waiting so long to come out and for not saying what everybody thought she ought to have said, because there were all those people she could have helped (see here, and here), and now there is the mystery around Manti...
