fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Last May, to celebrate our 25th anniversary together, my husband and I took a trip to Germany. It was our first trip back in nearly 12 years. We went with a group organized by Dr. Marion Gerlind and JB of the Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies. We had studied German at the institute many years…
Thirty years ago, October 6, 1989, the Castro Sweep happened. And I was there. What started as a fairly routine ACT UP demonstration turned into a police overreach of epic proportions. I wrote about the Sweep a few years ago in a review/critique of a book by Paul Krassner (RIP), where he wrote about his…
In 1988, I wrote an article for 10 Percent, the former LGBTQ news magazine at UCLA about Christopher Street West. The article also included a bit of history about the Stonewall Rebellion. As I had learned in my Civil Rights History classes, Stonewall did not just up and happen. Stonewall happened in the context of…
Alexandria’s library still burns in my heart. If we had not lost the accumulated knowledge of that ancient temple of wisdom, would we have a cure for cancer today? Would we have warp drive? What would our world look like now if we hadn’t taken those sixteen thousand steps backwards—if we haven’t had to retrace…
1939 was a good year for a composer/arranger to join the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Several important musicians joined its ranks around this time, adding to the band’s considerable aural palette. Jimmy Blanton freed the bass from its simple time-keeping role and made it a fluid, melodic instrument. This is best heard on the track “Jack…
Spring 1985. UCLA. We named our protest encampment Mandela City. I was lying on a sleeping bag in a tent on a grassy field in front of Schoenberg Hall, a sitar that I borrowed from the Music Department on one side, my shortwave radio on the other. I took the shortwave and extended the telescopic…
April 29, 1991. I was at work in Berkeley. There was no World Wide Web in those days. I checked. The Mosaic browser wouldn’t come out until the following January, over a half-year later. No, I got the news on the telephone when a friend and former roommate from LA called me while I was…
