fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
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…
So what have I been doing that kept me away from blogging for about a month and a half? Writing a book. More on that later. Meanwhile, I’ll be reading from and talking about said book, Sin Against the Race, this coming Wednesday as part of Perfectly Queer‘s reading series. Details! You Are the Author! Wednesday,…
Way back when during my waning days at UCLA, not long after I came out, the Daily Bruin did something unconscionable. Buried in the paper appeared a story about the campus police arresting some guys cruising each other in a men’s room. And the paper printed their names. I was mortified. And livid. With youthful, righteous…
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….
“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…
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…
On Salon I found a wonderful coming out essay written by Jean Melasaine in which she recounts the multiple communities she has grown into during her life. She was born to Samoan parents who immigrated to the US. Her parents speak little English. Her family was poor. And they attended the Mormon church, where she quickly…
I saw him sitting in the bleachers looking my way. I rationalized that he’s probably looking at the new computerized scoreboard our piss-poor high school just installed. Everybody does, more in disbelief than anything else. I kept running around the track, eyes forward. Then I ran in front of the billboards. They’re bright and colorful…
Groggy from lack of sleep, I rolled over early one morning just before Get Up time and put on my reading specs then turned on the Touch to read the latest headlines. At the SF Chronicle mobile site I find this: Demographer: US has 4M adults who identify as gay. Really? I thought in…
It sat in a little white building nestled on a small block squeezed by Santa Monica and Sunset. I always had problems finding it exactly, and then there was the parking which was challenging even for a motorcycle. I didn’t drive cars in those days. It was small and crammed, the way all independent, hippy-ish…
