by itabix | Nov 30, 2014 | Being gay
“[Wilfred]’s death was an unhealed wound, & the ache of it has been with me ever since. I wanted him back—not his poems.” The man who writes these words is Siegfried Sassoon, and he is writing about Wilfred Owen. They loved one another. They met in the fall...
by itabix | Nov 25, 2014 | Being gay, Federal Court Cases, Fighting Back
On November 18, 2003 the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts released its decision in the case Goodridge v Department of Public Health, which brought marriage equality to the United States. Mary Bonauto had assembled this case and argued it...
by itabix | Nov 12, 2014 | Being gay
When I was eighteen, in 1957, attending the school in Tennessee, and, of course, not dealing well with my sexuality. I took a course in poetry that included poems that have stayed with me during the fifty years since. One, called “Greater Love,” began, Red lips are...
by itabix | Nov 6, 2014 | Barack Obama
It is Thursday night, at 10:24, and I am watching Lawrence O’Donnell. He and his guests are discovering the one responsible for the disaster on Tuesday night. It was, he says, the Democrats!, and specifically the Democratic leadership, who set the strategy for the...
by itabix | Oct 29, 2014 | The future
On May 8, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to affirm his support of marriage equality. After that time, the Department of Justice announced it would no longer defend the DOMA before the Supreme Court, and, in 2013, the Supreme Court overturned...
by itabix | Oct 21, 2014 | Barack Obama
The recent synod of the church is receiving mixed reviews. Barbie Latza Nadeau, writing in The Daily Beast, says the synod is a victory for Pope Francis, and that all is going to come out well after a year’s discussions and in the conclusion of the synod. Or it may be...
by itabix | Oct 13, 2014 | Being gay
Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, and I would join in the fun but I’m out and everybody I know (who’s in that situation) is out, and the coming out is now for other people. Cheers for them, it’s a big moment. But a comment. Every time coming out comes up—and it...
by itabix | Sep 29, 2014 | Being gay
Publishers are businesses and so need to make money. Nobody disagrees with this. As Dan D’Addario said in Salon last year, “Publishing is not a charitable endeavor.” Publishers choose book manuscripts to publish and market to a public that it hopes will buy, so the...
by itabix | Sep 29, 2014 | Being gay
Ari Ezra Waldman has put up a post on Towleroad discussing what’s happening at the Supreme Court right now (3:35 pm, September 29, 2014). They’re meeting for the first time since June to consider petitions for certiorari. Seven of these petitions concern marriage...
by itabix | Sep 27, 2014 | Being gay
“Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.” Edmund White This is not a new idea: people have written about it before. I wrote about...
by itabix | Sep 15, 2014 | Being gay, Fighting Back
While something like half of the commentariat is predicting that the Supreme Court will choose, in its late September 2014 conference, to take marriage equality cases in some form or other, and will give marriage equality in its June 2015 decision to every mother’s...
by itabix | Sep 5, 2014 | Coming out
Coming out is a big subject, it’s important to just about all of us, it means many different things to different ones of us, and it’s changing all the time. I had a friend in college—we never talked about our sexuality back in 1957—and at first we took the...
by itabix | Aug 19, 2014 | In Search of Lost Time
I have just finished reading Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, in the Penguin edition. It is a novel whose major theme is Time—we age, all of us, and lose our youth, we lose our memories of our past, we forget the people who mattered to...
by itabix | Aug 7, 2014 | Being gay
We had a moment this past week when we were shown exactly how far we have to go before we reach freedom. Anna Paquin, she says, is bisexual, married to the actor Stephen Moyer, and Larry King found out about it, and the result, for several days, has been all over the...
by itabix | Jul 7, 2014 | Charles Howard
On July 7, 1984, thirty years ago, in Bangor, Maine, Charles Howard was murdered by violent, homophobic boys. After his death, people who knew him found themselves rootless, without a clear way to move forward or a clear rationale for living, and without knowing who...
