by itabix | May 12, 2012 | Barack Obama
At ten, in 1949, in the fourth grade, I was aware first of what was happening on the playground. I couldn’t play ball. My father tried occasionally to teach me, but he didn’t know how to teach me and didn’t really know what it was he was supposed to be teaching. I...
by itabix | May 9, 2012 | Elections 2012
In North Carolina, returns are in, and we lost, as predicted. Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell both pointed out that some version of this issue has come before the voters thirty times in various states, losing every time. Maddow also made the point that each time...
by itabix | Apr 30, 2012 | Being gay, Teenage Suicides
Another gay teenager committed suicide last week. Apparently, we don’t know details yet. Towleroad has the bare facts. Jack Reese, seventeen years old, killed himself near Ogden, Utah, last week just as his eighteen-year-old boyfriend was about to take part in...
by itabix | Apr 25, 2012 | Coming out
On Towleroad, Krista Tillman, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and is a mother of a young gay man (she’s also a dean of her college) explains why her gay son doesn’t live in North Carolina. “It’s not as open and accepting as other places are.” She tells what she...
by itabix | Apr 16, 2012 | Coming out
When a person is on the edge between in and out, he is not often faced with a binary decision, either in or out. He is faced with a range of possibilities, only one of which is, in the particular situation, coming out. He may decide to do nothing. He may decide to...
by itabix | Apr 5, 2012 | Coming out
Tyler Clementi was in the process of coming out when he died. We can’t know how he felt. Tyler is the only person who could know how he felt and the only person who could know how far he had gone on the process toward coming out. It is appropriate here to...
by itabix | Mar 29, 2012 | Coming out
In Ceremonies, Mickey gives two television interviews. In the first his face is lit so he can’t be recognized, and when he sees the broadcast of the interview, Mickey sees what he has done: The reporter, on screen, is a warm and vibrant person with attractive...
by itabix | Mar 27, 2012 | Coming out
In Ceremonies, after Mickey came out to his sister, and then to his mother the next day, he found he had to come out to his friend at work. He took his friend Charles to a fast food restaurant on the highway. After some preliminary talk about cars and tires and...
by itabix | Mar 26, 2012 | Coming out
In Ceremonies, a young woman is walking down the street, preparing to attend a memorial service for a friend. She turns the corner and sees TV lights focused on the door of the church. If she continues to the door, she will walk past these TV cameras. She says to her...
by itabix | Mar 18, 2012 | Coming out
Ian Parker, writing in The New Yorker, says about Tyler Clementi, “there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.” Writing at the same time, Angus Johnston, of the website Student Activism, says, “‘Out’ is not a binary concept, and it’s not at all...
by itabix | Mar 7, 2012 | Film
I found a short video on Towleroad today, Man in the Mirror, in which it is said that a “closeted jock faces outing in Joel Schumacher’s short.” It is also on PBS.org. Jason is an athlete, a high school senior, maybe seventeen years old, beautiful, a Puerto...
by itabix | Feb 29, 2012 | Federal Court Cases
One result of the recent procession of federal court cases, beginning with Romer v. Evans and including Lawrence v. Texas, and the latest, the Ninth Circuit panel rejection of Prop. 8 in Perry v. Brown and Galinski v. OPM, is that we can now see that the intellectual...
by itabix | Feb 23, 2012 | DOMA/DADT
Today, a federal district court in California declared DOMA unconstitutional in a summary judgment. Adam B of Daily Kos calls this a “big win,” and I recommend his analysis here. Ari Ezra Waldman, of Towleroad, continues his superb job of legal analysis of these court...
by itabix | Feb 20, 2012 | Queer
Queer is permanently outside the culture and therefore in opposition to it. Queer does not look for a time in the future when there will be resolution, when the failures of today will be corrected and those outside brought in. Queer neither seeks nor wishes for...
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...
