by itabix | Mar 21, 2011 | Fighting
Barney Frank thinks gay marriage is a wedge issue for the Democrats, and ABC reports that 52% are in favor of gay marriage. People say this is a water-shed moment for gay people.So, we sleep well at night, believing as we do that if you hang in there long enough, the...
by itabix | Mar 11, 2011 | Coming out
I read it again last night on Towleroad. The story is about Adam Lambert’s track “Aftermath” and quotes Adam’s words “about finding the courage to be honest with yourself.” We hear this so much that it doesn’t raise any comment. We even say this, without thinking what...
by itabix | Mar 5, 2011 | books
There are two great areas that are subject to the changes brought by the ebook. First, we now have the ability to publish books without moveable type and without paper, which means we don’t need the elaborate methods of shipping and storage that paper books need. We...
by itabix | Feb 27, 2011 | Stonewall Riots
Today, here in Boston, I was at a rally at the State House supporting the demonstrators in Madison and supporting our unions and theirs. It was not very big, somebody said a thousand people, and it was orderly. Everybody seemed to agree on the basics—unions and...
by itabix | Feb 20, 2011 | Adam in the Morning
Bo Ravich opens Adam in the Morning lying on the steps of the theatre where he works, on Sixth Avenue, and in the next two or three hours he becomes a different person. Narratives—stories—seem to require that characters change in some way, either suddenly, like Bo, or...
by itabix | Feb 12, 2011 | Gay literature
A friend wrote this morning to say that he is frustrated by the state of gay publishing. Most gay books that come out are humorous essays about gay life and gay romance novels. I’d like to read something heftier, in which the kinds of things that affect me also affect...
by itabix | Feb 6, 2011 | Film, Night Catches Us
In Night Catches Us, a film by Tanya Hamilton, Marcus, played by Anthony Mackie, comes back to Philadelphia after being away for ten years. His father has just died, and he has come back into a family struggling with the past. Marcus left, and his brother, who had to...
by itabix | Jan 31, 2011 | Adam in the Morning
Joseph Roche was active in voter registration drives in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, in 1964. He was from Los Angeles, and in 1961 he volunteered for Freedom Rides after he saw the first one on TV and saw young people beaten by racist mobs. His mother had taught...
by itabix | Jan 25, 2011 | books
People in chat rooms say the movie of A Single Man, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, is “completely different” from the book. The small group of lines from page 28 in the book—where George is thinking of what the neighbors must be thinking about him and...
by itabix | Jan 21, 2011 | A single man
I read A Single Man—about George Falconer’s grief—when I was in school in the late sixties, and I don’t think I liked it much. At twenty-five I didn’t know what grief was, so I didn’t know it when I stumbled on it. I also didn’t know what this story had to do with my...
by itabix | Jan 15, 2011 | Race Point Light
My novel, Race Point Light, is about a guy who knows from childhood that he likes men. He never wavers about that, all of his life. He has a magical affair with another soldier in 1959 in the most beautiful meadow on earth, on the higher slopes of Mt Rainier. He goes...
by itabix | Jan 12, 2011 | Stonewall Riots
Like many men and women of my generation, I was interested in the Stonewall Riots. Like most men and women of my generation, I wasn’t there. I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, during the summer of 1969, but I read the initial reports in the Times, and then I watched the...
by itabix | Jan 7, 2011 | Writing
There are, I guess, as many reasons for writing a novel as there are novelists, but one of the principal reasons is to tell what it was like there—in Atlanta in 1864, in Meryton in the early nineteenth century, in Yoknapatawpha County in 1928. What was it like for a...
by itabix | Jan 1, 2011 | Writing
But if there is suffering that cannot be forgotten, there is heroism, too. The mythic narrative that we tell ourselves is that we suffer, and then we rise up and refuse to suffer any longer. This is the great narrative of the American Revolution and of all subsequent...
by itabix | Dec 29, 2010 | DOMA/DADT
Saturday, December 18, 2010, the Senate of the United States voted twice on the Lieberman-Collins bill, once to bring cloture to the debate on the bill, and therefore to end the Republican filibuster, and once on the bill itself, at 3:00 pm. The first passed 63-33,...
