Somewhere along 16th Street, a block or so south of Oklahoma Avenue in Milwaukee, WI, in September, 1958, I took one of my early steps in becoming a sex educator. I do not remember exactly with whom I was walking home from school, but I do know two of three of us were boys. Today…
The research is ambiguous about whether women apologize significantly more frequently than men, though it certainly seems that they do. In the numerous blog posts I have read about the issue, however, I haven’t seen any discussion about men apologizing less than women. It might sound at first like that means the same thing, but…
I vividly recall the summer that I nagged my mother endlessly to let me have a lemonade stand. I know I was under 8 years old, but I don’t recall exactly how old. We lived in a safe neighborhood where people looked out for each other and anyone’s children. Because everyone was poor or working…
This week I have been writing about love in anticipation of Valentine’s Day. I have written about three facets of love as these apply to interpersonal relationships and civic relationships, namely intimacy, passion, and commitment. The particular model of love that I ascribe to differs from the Greeks, Romans, St. Paul of Tarsus, or Santa.…
The pledge taken in marriage is one of the more visible statements of relationship commitment in western culture. Civic pledges, like oaths of offices and the Pledge of Allegiance, are similarly statements of our commitment. We have witnessed the recitation of these promises scores of times, perhaps thousands, by the time we are in high…
My blog posts are sometimes started days before they are scheduled for online publication. This week as I am writing in concert with my friend Tom whose posts appear at One Whole Life, my writing is particularly organized. We have quite consciously outlined what we will include in each day’s posts, not so much to…
Today my friend Tom wrote in One Whole Life, It is unfortunate it took a deadly virus to bring LGBT people into visibility to society. You would have to know Tom even just a little to know that it would be really difficult to be angry with him. He is the kind of guy that…
In 1982 I ended a relationship with a wonderful man who remains a dear friend still. We are both good guys and generous. I was just not able at the time to understand and address the chasm created by our class differences. Because I had been raised poor and working class, his kind politeness and…
In the early-1980s, baby boomers were looking good. At 35, we were running, pumping iron, and discovering organic. We were taking over in so many ways. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when we were crowding into overflow barracks in beyond-capacity schools, in our 30’s we were getting into supervisory roles and management positions that surpassed…
The day after I went to a Patti LaBelle performance last month, I woke with an acute awareness of having lost something. The concert itself was a thing of joy for us die-hard Patti fans. Ms. LaBelle brought it for over 90 minutes. There were people in the audience of roughly 3,000 who had seen…
Creating Community for Everyone 