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…
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…
My friend Tom and I have talked about the “lobster effect” of religious upbringing. Initially the environment feels pretty good, safe and protective. Then eventually things heat up until self-doubt and self-hate come to a boiling point. Then, like a lobster in the pot, you are a goner. I think of my early days in…
Fictions are remembered, too, and they are not stored any differently in the mind from other experiences. They are experience. Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays For many years I have wondered how poor and working class people in the U.S. can be so regularly persuaded to vote against their own self-interests. Election after election we…
She had known that they were all bored by him, but it had never occurred to her that he was equally bored by them. He was as ever kind and subdued, but the sad perspicacity which she had learnt in suffering suggested to her that, though he probably never acknowledged it to himself and never…
When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, “My father died, my father died.” My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I…
So you get this sort of ambivalent response – we’ll embrace the idea, but we will not embrace the reality. – john a. powell, A Civil Conversation with Krista Tippet, On Being, March 10, 2015 This statement by john a. powell has been haunting me since I read it a week or so ago. My…
There’s also the language of personal responsibility, which suggests really that there’s no institutional and structural responsibility. There’s no collective responsibility. If you’re not doing well, it’s not because of anything that we in society have done. It’s not because of our history, our legacy of Jim Crow, segregation, exploitation and subordination; it’s all personal.…
Creating Community for Everyone 