fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. How many times do we have to live the same nightmare, travel the same dark path, scream the same anguish until our voices go raw? I’m very tired. 100,000+ dead from COVID-19, with African Americans disproportionately bearing the brunt of the pandemic in the US. And then these killings…
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…
[Ed. note: Today (March 3, 2016) is the 25th anniversary of the beating of Rodney King by police officers. No single event of police violence has had a greater effect on me. I still can’t watch the video anymore. Before Twitter, hashtags, and #BlackLivesMatter, there was Rodney King, recorded old-school on video tape. It gave the world a glimpse…
A long-lived urban legend states that cities have a quota system in place for parking enforcement officers. One retired traffic officer in LA recently said that this is no legend, but a hard fact. In particular, says the retired officer, at the end of the year, when the LA Department of Transportation is preparing to close…
During the Trayvon Martin tragedy, one question lingered in the back of the head: what if his killer, George Zimmerman, had been a police officer? Now we know. There have been exceptions to the narrative, where an officer had to go to trial over a killing committed under shady circumstances. There was Johannes Mehserle, the…
We all hide from monsters sometimes. Part of the Doctor Who legacy continues to be its penchant for sending its younger fans hiding behind the relative safety of the sofa, terrified of the monster of the week. We all hide from monsters, but sometimes for different reasons. I haven’t written a word about Ferguson or…
In one of my Civil Rights History classes way back when, the professor explained why the NAACP very specifically took up the case of Rosa Parks as a means of challenging the Jim Crow era bus segregation laws. She had been a secretary for the organization for a number of years and had an unimpeachable…
At a long forgotten antiwar demonstration around 20 odd years ago, I stood tense as the atmosphere grew dank from humidity and angst. We were gathered in front of the federal building on Golden Gate Ave. in San Francisco. We wanted to take the steps, but a police line blocked it off. They were in…
