fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
My mom used to say of Mozart that one can like only a third of Mozart’s music and still like a lot of Mozart. Very true. In his short 30 years of composing he wrote a staggering number of pieces. The Köchel catalog of Mozart’s work, which has been revised many times to accommodate newly discovered…
Two big time apologies concerning gay issues came out this past week, almost back to back. Both were in response to stupid, homophobic or at least homophobic-tinged statements made by the speaker. And in both cases, they were genuine apologies, not those silly, half-assed “I’m sorry if you’re offended” type apologies. First we had Howard…
25 years ago, either this week or next, I wrote a letter to my family entitled “What James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, and Gregory A. Russell Have In Common.” Sadly I don’t think I have a copy of it anymore, though I don’t think the essay itself was as good as the title I gave it….
I have a jingle going through my head that may or may not be from an old Boy Scouts ad. It went something like, “Join the Boy Scouts of America Today, and together we can form a better USA!” A manly male chorus sang it a cappella, with an echo, giving it an almost hymn-like…
We are all friends here. Or should be; for the laughter of Mordor will be our only reward, if we quarrel. -Gandalf, from “The Two Towers” by JRR Tolkien Chortles undoubtedly rose high in Fairfax, Virginia, along with slapping hands and champaign glasses, after a Republican-led filibuster blocked the much negotiated gun reform bill from…
A pressure cooker loaded with nails and ball bearings. That’s what the FBI now says constituted one of the two bombs that went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. A pressure cooker. Seems sadly appropriate. Our world today is jam packed with imaginary demons and boogeymen. All of them can be described…
My first encounter with Roger Ebert, as with many outside of Chicago, came from his TV programs with the late Gene Siskel. To be sure, none of us really went to the movies that much. But we loved watching the two of them go at it, so their program became a TV watching ritual in…
At work a long time ago a former office mate of mine, let’s call him Buster, expressed in hushed tones his disapproval of same-sex couples raising kids. I say hushed tones because another colleague of ours had recently become a mother when her partner gave birth to their daughter. I guess Buster didn’t want her…
Bernard’s mood lightened suddenly and he began shushing Pauline, before lowering his voice and leaning his head over the table. “What you heard is true,” he told her with a mock-serious tone of voice. Then he confided that there really was a secret cabal of gay priests. The more she laughed, the more he furrowed…
Bernard kept a cutout newspaper article folded and stuffed in his wallet. The article’s story went like this: A middle-aged man with mottled skin and ratty clothes pushed his way through the throngs entering and exiting St. Peter’s Square until he stood in a fairly obscure spot between a street vendor and traffic sign just…
