by itabix | Feb 8, 2012 | Marriage cases
Two good places to go for commentary on the Ninth Circuit panel’s decision in the Perry v. Brown Proposition 8 case are Adam B on Daily Kos and Ari Ezra Waldman on Towleroad. I don’t know what Proposition 8 supporters are thinking right now—I don’t read that kind of...
by itabix | Feb 6, 2012 | Being gay
Nothing in my last post should be read to imply that having children is a necessary part of having a “rich life” for gay people. That’s it for us, and that came about when I underwent a divorce, and then when I worked for the subsequent years with my children, as they...
by itabix | Jan 31, 2012 | Being gay
People say of themselves that they “just happen to be gay.” I think that’s bullshit. I am profoundly, inextricably gay, and being gay affects every single part of me. I didn’t “happen” to be gay. I am so deeply gay that if you took the gay away, there wouldn’t be...
by itabix | Jan 13, 2012 | Freedom
Freedom. We are in an election season, and the word is everywhere, but we don’t usually feel we have to ask what it means. For us, the big gay-rights cases before the Supreme Court place the word in a constitutional context. That’s important, but there are other...
by itabix | Jan 7, 2012 | Freedom
Before 1983, when I announced that my marriage was over, I had always been monogamous. It was not until 1990, as I was beginning another relationship and still in the first bucking, sweaty throes of it, that I felt I needed to say something that was...
by itabix | Jan 2, 2012 | Assimilation
What are we going to work for, after all of us can get married? And what, now that we have DADT repealed? Will they really accept us then? And will we be happy? What about the people who don’t get married? Or who don’t go into the Army? Who don’t want children? What...
by itabix | Dec 26, 2011 | SCOTUS
John G. Lawrence is dead. He is the man who gave his name to “Lawrence v. Texas,” the case before the Supreme Court decided June 26, 2003 that invalidated all sodomy laws in the US. Lawrence was in his bedroom with another man, Tyrone Garner, having sex, when local...
by itabix | Dec 18, 2011 | In Search of Lost Time
Night before last I read something that was breathtakingly beautiful. In Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is sitting in the Opéra, observing the beautiful women in their parterre boxes above him. “At first there were only vague...
by itabix | Dec 10, 2011 | Film
Longtime Companion, the film by Norman René; is about a small group of men who know each other from the bars in NYC and Fire Island—that is, some of them know some of them—who are caught for a moment on Fire Island and at work and at home in the city as they digest...
by itabix | Dec 1, 2011 | Alan Turing
The Boston Globe published a long article on Sunday, titled “A Computer That Thinks Like the Universe,” by Joshua Rothman. It’s interesting—it’s about quantum computing—and along the way to its conclusions, it discusses what the computers we use are and introduced...
by itabix | Nov 27, 2011 | Assimilation
C and I have just come back from the eastern Connecticut shore where we joined extended family for Thanksgiving weekend. We had good food, good conversation, a good sense of belonging—all the things that are expected of such a weekend—and then we returned to Boston...
by itabix | Nov 21, 2011 | eBooks
I hear or read how sad it is that the publishing industry is collapsing. People resist ereaders. “I stare at a back-lit LED screen enough already.” There are a few things to remember. The publishing industry has not worked well for a lot of people. It has not...
by itabix | Nov 15, 2011 | In Search of Lost Time
Marcel, the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is in Balbec, a resort on the north coast of France. We read this: One very hot afternoon, from inside the dining room [of the hotel], which was in half-darkness, sheltering from the sun behind...
by itabix | Nov 6, 2011 | Gay literature
Sometimes a work of art does not present itself so that we know who it is about. Maurice, by E. M. Forster, seems to be about Maurice Hall, and then it seems to be about Maurice and Clive Durham together, and it is only later that the reader discovers the novel is...
by itabix | Oct 29, 2011 | Film
When I saw Law of Desire, in 1987, I was a couple of years into writing Ceremonies. I think one of the reasons the movie was so exciting to me–so thrilling—was that Almodovar was showing me something that I hadn’t seen before. I know now that Proust had written...
