by itabix | Oct 24, 2011 | Film
About midway through Law of Desire, the movie by Pedro Almodovar (1987), Antonio, played by a young and beautiful Antonio Banderas, asks Pablo, a movie director who is very self-centered and seems always to be doing lines of coke, “Who is the boy in the letter, that...
by itabix | Oct 17, 2011 | Frank Kameny
Some ideas are unthinkable, then they become thinkable. This happens all the time. I suspect that for the vast majority of people in this country, same-sex marriage was unthinkable right up to the moment they had to start thinking about it. They had never seen it,...
by itabix | Oct 7, 2011 | Coming out
I got an email two days ago from a man whose name I haven’t heard in fifty years. The email said, “Are you the Dwight Cathcart that was stationed in Yakima, Washington. 1960-1961?” This man and several others and I were in the Army together and formed a little group...
by itabix | Oct 1, 2011 | Publishing
The direction we should be going toward is toward freedom. We need to remember this at every step, so that when somebody takes us in the wrong direction, we will know it immediately. In the contemporary world—the one outside my window—I am free to walk down the...
by itabix | Sep 21, 2011 | DOMA/DADT
Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is a big one for me. I served in the Army in the late fifties, and I remember condescending sergeants talking about the “pitter patter of little feet in the barracks” and claiming to know everything that happened in their barracks....
by itabix | Sep 16, 2011 | Coming out
“Mommy!” “What? What’s the matter?” “I don’t know how you can say that.” “What?” “That you love me, but you don’t care what I am.” “Well, I do. I love you, and I don’t care whether you like boys or girls.” “But it’s different, liking boys and liking girls. And...
by itabix | Sep 9, 2011 | Publishing
The “long tail,” as it applies to the book industry, is described as a graph of the sales of books. If there are twenty-two books for sale, the one with the most sales would be on the left, with a tall bar. And then, stretching out to the right, each of the other...
by itabix | Sep 3, 2011 | Publishing
Last week, Ewan Morrison, writing in The Guardian, asked, “Are books dead?” and “Can authors survive?” He was writing in the context of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and his belief that the “publishing industry is in terminal decline.” It is an interesting...
by itabix | Aug 21, 2011 | In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, one of the first gay novels by a major writer, was published between 1913 and 1927, in Paris, in seven volumes and 4,300 pages (in the Modern Library translation into English). It is about a young boy growing up and coming to...
by itabix | Aug 14, 2011 | In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust submitted a manuscript of his novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, to the Parisian publisher Eugène Fasquelle, in October 1912. This was the first time the book had been presented for publication. Fasquelle turned it down, saying he didn’t want to risk...
by itabix | Aug 8, 2011 | Coming to terms with the past
Life is tough, but it is tougher if you don’t tell the truth about it. The hardest part of growing up gay in the years after World War II was not knowing what the truth was. People lied to us and about us—people and institutions and organizations, governments and...
by itabix | Jul 31, 2011 | The effects of bigotry
For the last few weeks, I have been corresponding with a man I knew briefly at a school in the South in 1957 and 1959, and, as may be usual in such exchanges, we attempt to find out how we remember it in 1957 and—very gingerly—to find out how we are today. It is a...
by itabix | Jul 20, 2011 | Sexuality
I think the whole idea behind Bear Week is that the community is exploring images of maleness. In the past, maleness has had something to do with images of male beauty—think of anything by Michelangelo or Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Cellini—and bears have...
by itabix | Jul 4, 2011 | Assimilation
There is a range of ways men can array themselves with one another, but most of the traditional forms of relationship depend more or less absolutely on the concept of ownership. The two people in the relationship own each other. They can’t have sex with anyone outside...
by itabix | Jun 28, 2011 | Fighting Back
On Saturday and Sunday morning, the images of the celebrating crowds in front of the Stonewall Inn reminded many of us of the images of the very angry crowds in front of the same inn, almost exactly 42 years earlier. Then, there were no professional photographers, and...
