While coming out as gay man 56 years ago is associated with lots of crap that happened back then and regularly since, coming out has never been the source of the crap itself. Coming out actually launched a world of good for me. At age 16, I got honest with my parents in ways that…
Blue, green, or brown were okay on Thursdays. But not yellow, red, or orange. Those were fruit colors and spoke volumes about you if you wore them on the wrong day. The thing is, when these rules dominated parts of my life in fourth and fifth grade, there was no one to tell how important…
In the past couple years, I have noticed a shift among some friends when talking about the births of their babies — actually about babies they call theirs, like I call William mine, even though he is Patrick and Jason’s son. These babies are, as often as not, community babies, young people in whom many…
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that can not fly.” — Langston Hughes Finding two people who appreciate performance artists on stage and in recording studios and also hold a deep understanding of culture and community is infrequent but not particularly rare. Finding two such men in one…
We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings…
This week I participated in a story telling event at the university where I taught for more than three decades. It is the same place where I earned a bachelors degree, a masters degree, and a doctorate. I earned certificates in teaching and in school psychology. I earned a fellowship in rehabilitation counseling. I worked…
Eleven years ago, Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment that banned marriage between two people of the same sex. Religious organizations that hold tax exempt status engaged in de facto lobbying and campaigns to influence voters. Though there were decades of evidence to support the perspective that marriage was generally beneficial to the social, emotional,…
I have been thinking about this date almost daily for months. Last July I wrote, When hundreds of Brown and Black LGBT people went to a nightclub in Orlando last month to celebrate Pride, graduations, new jobs, new loves, recent successes, the weekend, and old times, they had already been taking the pulse of many other…
In the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic prompted me to take the pulse of rooms for a different reason than I had as a pre-teen before I first came out or as a young adult when I first went out as a gay man. I had earlier tested spaces to decide if I could come out and…
River Queen, Castaways, Circus-Circus, The Factory — these were the names of bars I went to when I first started socializing as a gay young adult. They were not the first gay bars I went to, however. Oddly, my first encounter with one of these was with my mother who was naive to the fact that…
Creating Community for Everyone 