Category

Gay

AIDS, Deep Songs, Gay, History, My back pages

Dread aught

A few nights ago at dinner out with new friends, our getting-to-know-each-other small talk circled around to coming out to our families. Our stories all had variants, but one thing seemed universal: how the presence of AIDS smoked the edges of each instance. Mine came at the end of a most challenging year, one spent…

Continue reading
Art, Criticals, Deep Songs, Gay, Literature, Museums/Galleries

Man on Fire

I was finishing a late-aborning BA when a professor introduced me to the works of David Wojnarowicz. No doubt she fathomed that he could be a model for the writing I was attempting—autobiography of a frank, sexual nature that also had very much to do with loss and the times in which I came of…

Continue reading
Criticals, Film, Gay, History, Short Cuts, Theater

Oscar Bait!

It isn’t true for every child that grows up in a large family, but it was true for me: I wanted to be seen. There I was, a middle child (one of ten) convinced of his invisibility, and fighting like hell to rectify the injustice.  From where I sat, recognition came either by way of…

Continue reading
Current Affairs, Gay, Sports

The Jackie Robinson Moment

First Jason Collins and now Michael Sam: the pro-sports glass ceiling has been broken, ushering in waves of support and (no surprise) standard-issue good ol’ American homophobia. Check out the media weigh-ins on CNN and the New Yorker, and don’t forget: when you express your happiness by kissing a loved one, by all means “think…

Continue reading
Current Affairs, Gay, History, Museums/Galleries, Theater

Blood Count

To draw comparisons between the current Broadway production of Macbeth and the New York Historical Society’s just opened exhibition AIDS in New York: The First Five Years seems a reach.  Yet after seeing both in the same week, my thoughts drift to issues of mortality, not to mention body counts.  Anyone who lived in New…

Continue reading
Film, Gay, History, Music, Vespers

Death Letters

 No time for visits or pleasantries with friends. Not meaning to be rude, I am all in my head and heart, completely consumed, driven to record as much as I can before you fade from me. I know this behavior is futile. You are gone and my efforts will not bring you back but somehow…

Continue reading