fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Folks like Kevin Hart are exactly why I wrote SIN AGAINST THE RACE. Nothing hurts more than when straight, cis black folks turn against their own because of anti-LGBTQ bigotry and hatred. Nothing he has said or done has made up for the vile remarks he made during his comedy routines or in his tweets….
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. -President-elect Donald J. Trump at his campaign launch, June, 2015 I’m weeping for my country. It has stepped decidedly backwards. Change. Hope. Progress. All dirty words. Obstructionism won the day. Now that Republicans are in charge of everything, the White House and both houses of Congress, what…
The other day, I listened to Kate Bush in the car on my commute to and from work, specifically tracks from The Whole Story. This album has a special place in my heart and history. I first heard it, and listened to it obsessively, when I came out 28 years ago. So I will forever…
I’m a long-time reader of the comic strip pages in newspapers. Peanuts and Doonesbury were favorites growing up. Nowadays I like Luann and Pearls Before Swine. And of course I’m thrilled that Berke Breathed has revived Bloom County. Even back in the day, I tried reading myself into some of the characters. I wasn’t so much looking for black characters,…
The homophobia that Joe Morgen, Duke Ellington’s publicist, possessed only reflected the homophobia of the society at large in the late 1950s. Around the time the New York Times ignored Strayhorn in its review of Such Sweet Thunder, a move undoubtedly engineered by Morgen, the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s daily, published a series of articles and…
Self-haters gonna hate. Earlier this week, gay Italian fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana made harsh statements about same-sex couples raising children. We oppose gay adoptions. The only family is the traditional one… No chemical offsprings and rented uterus: life has a natural flow, there are things that should not be changed. They further…
“Love him, and let him love you.” – James Baldwin Out of nowhere, my friend started making loud, “Eww!” sounds. Over and over again, “Eeeeewwwww!!!” I was like, what? He said he saw two men on the TV, kissing. I had missed it. He continued to register his disgust on our eardrums. My other friend…
[Originally published in February 2012.] When I was about 13 I had to endure a week at Reverend Schlep’s Summer Camp for Men and Boys. It’s a right of passage in my family. My grandfather took my father. My father took my older brothers Mark and Karl, Jr., when they reached the right age. Now…
Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece Maus deftly illustrates the slow descent into chaos experienced by European Jews as the Nazi menace took hold over their lives. The nightmare did not hit all at once, but in slow, dreadful paces. During the descent, everyone tried to live as normal a life as possible. They went to the store. …
This is an easy one. On the one hand we have Orson Scott Card, an award-winning science fiction writer, who is also a raging homophobe who lives in his own little world of homophobia-land. On the other hand we have reality. One of Mr. Card’s works, Ender’s Game, has been made into a motion picture….
