by itabix | Jun 20, 2011 | Film
A friend said, on reading some story I had written, “Your character missed the whole sixties.” What my friend meant was that my character had missed my friend’s idea of the sixties. My character lived through the sixties in a heterosexual marriage, in middle-sized...
by itabix | Jun 16, 2011 | Film
by itabix | Jun 11, 2011 | Stonewall Riots
Today is Gay Pride in Boston. This celebration marks the forty-second commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, and the forty-first Gay Pride march. The first was held in New York in 1970 and was called Christopher Street Liberation Day march. In successive years, other...
by itabix | Jun 6, 2011 | Fighting Back
Hamlet, to set things right in Denmark, kills the king. Whatever he has going on in his life with respect to his mother and her second husband, and to the woman with whom he has fallen in love, he has to act against the king, and that is regicide. The audience to that...
by itabix | Jun 1, 2011 | Fighting Back
Mitzi, fifteen years old, transgender, homeless, a fierce fighter, has always known that the private, intimate details of her life seamlessly become public every time she goes onto the street. “I think,” Mitzi says, “every time I go on the street I’m giving the finger...
by itabix | May 29, 2011 | Gay literature
I intended that the three novels of the Stonewall Triptych be gay novels. When I was writing them, I imagined writing for men and women who had experienced what I was writing about, or something similar. I was going to tell the story of what was happening to the gay...
by itabix | May 19, 2011 | Fighting Back
What’s important is how hard we had to fight to get where we are now. There was fighting on Christopher Street very early—from one A.M. to about four A.M.—on Saturday morning, June 28, 1969. And then again that night, and then light skirmishes Sunday, Monday and...
by itabix | May 13, 2011 | Stonewall Riots
Around 2:00 AM, on June 28, 1969, the crowd in front of the Stonewall became a mob. They threw things at the cops and at the Stonewall—rocks, paving stones, bricks, empty cans, glass, full cans, trash can lids. There were only ten cops now, facing a mob of five or six...
by itabix | May 9, 2011 | Stonewall Riots
At about one o’clock in the morning, June 28, 1969, the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a seedy gay bar on Christopher Street, which was run by the Mafia, the second time this week. The cops checked the ID of everyone in the bar, and those who had proper...
by itabix | May 3, 2011 | Fighting Back
The Stonewall Riots have been in the news. PBS ran the documentary, “Stonewall Uprising,” on American Experience last week. I got out my copy of David Carter’s Stonewall, originally published in 2004, to compare notes. It’s cool seeing gray-haired men, talking about...
by itabix | Apr 24, 2011 | Coming out
I don’t remember being bullied for being gay when I was a kid, but I do remember being given a hard time because I was a sissy. This happened when I was less than ten. I was pretty and wasn’t any good with a ball on the playground, and other boys didn’t want me on...
by itabix | Apr 19, 2011 | Coming out
Today, the paper and the blogs carry the news of the Oregon Study out of Columbia University, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Fenway Institute in Boston, and published in the journal Pediatrics. The study, by Professor Mark Hatzenbuehler,...
by itabix | Apr 10, 2011 | Being gay
Fair Shaw, who is narrator of Race Point Light, finds that each new phase of his life is not what he expected. Shaw has an education, and he has some experience—he was in the Army and on the fringes of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement—but each time...
by itabix | Apr 2, 2011 | Being gay
Last Sunday night I attended a concert by the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus whose title was Our True Colors. The concert was influenced by the It Gets Better movement, and during the concert four different men told stories of their youth and coming to adulthood and of the...
by itabix | Mar 28, 2011 | Adam in the Morning
When the four principal characters of Adam in the Morning, who are, many of them, connected through a local repertory production of The Tempest, come off what is for them a world-transforming moment, they sit on the roof outside Bo’s bedroom window and watch the sun...
