fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
March 3, 1991. Rodney King led officers on a high speed chase that ended in Simi Valley, California. When he finally surrendered, police took him out of the car, tasered him, and, as the now infamous video shows, kicked and beat him repeatedly as he laid on the ground. The officers claimed he resisted arrest…
“Listen, why are you here?” Startled, I looked up from my notepad. “The lifetime achievement award, Mr. Horton. My magazine wanted an interview.” “No! Why did they send you?” I had no immediate response. “You’re awfully young, you know that? How the hell do you even know who I am? What work of mine have…
Dr. Demento, every single Sunday, KMET radio…yeah! Back in the day, Angelenos heard four hours of the good Doctor, from 6-10 Sunday evenings. I played it while cleaning the kitchen, scraping roly poly fish heads into the garbage under a soundtrack of Weird Al Yankovic, George Carlin’s “Ice Box Man,” Cheech & Chong’s “Sister Mary…
I can’t look at his face. It’s too young and too fresh and too new. I can’t look at his face. It’s untested, unchallenged. There are so many first lights he did not get to see, so many mountains he did not get to climb, or even envision, so many triumphs he did not get…
I received some nice feedback for my short story “Clyde” published a few weeks ago. Thank you for that, and thanks to everyone for reading my stuff. I truly appreciate it. A friend asked if “Clyde” was in fact a true story. I said quickly, unequivocally, and publicly (on Facebook) that it was a work…
The circumstance behind Tyler Clementi’s death sickens me to the core. A young man with a shy smile and a whole life ahead of him ended his own life after his homosexuality was posted on the internet for all the world to see. How was his gayness placed on the internet? His roommate at Rutgers, Dharun…
Hello, this is Richard Foote-Long again. Now, you little ladies out there scoffed at the sentiments of my last little commentary about the necessity of protecting My Sacred Sperm. You demonstrated your disdain for my beliefs by the way you treated that great soldier of the cause Rush Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh finds himself fighting to hold…
The magic, they say, happens after the lights dim and the images begin to flicker on the screen. In this case, though, for most, there would be little magic as the story was already known. But for others who were young like me, black like me, and torn asunder by my queer loins like me,…
February was a remarkable month for marriage equality. Three state legislatures passed bills to allow same-sex couples to marry: Washington, New Jersey, and Maryland. In Washington and Maryland, the bills passed by an average of 54%. This jibes with a Gallup poll from May of last year which showed, for the first time, majority support…
