In a year fraught with painful lessons on life’s fragility, I celebrate Queer Pride by forgiving the ones who have loved me the hardest and failed me the most — myself included.
My last exchange with my eldest brother, a fully professed Carmelite monk and an ordained priest, ended harshly. It was an email parlay that began innocently enough — a basic check-in with each other on our respective happenings. In response to his update I followed a perhaps impetuous impulse to share my joy at the depth and richness of my present partnership — a gay one. It was an unconscious plea for visibility and the fraternal acceptance my display of queer visibility might inspire in my brother.
Growing up, he was one of my closest companions in large part due…
An ode on the joy of cultivating aquatic life
I grew up in a pet-loving family.
By the time I was in middle school, our five-person clan, consisting of my mom and dad and my two older brothers, welcomed a dog (a beagle-hound mix we named Spots), a cat (an orange and white tabby we named Samson) a hamster (whose name I’m forgetting) and, eventually, a school of tropical fish (some breeding angel fish, snails, and a school of tetra) into the fold.
When I celebrated the sacrament of Confirmation in eighth grade at the suburban Baltimore church in which I was raised, I chose Francis as my name…
How archiving my intimate past is a lesson in growth
It’s a love loss / It’s in my mind / It takes me to places I don’t want to find / It’s a cold shock straight to my heart / Feeling afraid of what’s come apart / … Know if tomorrow we shall lie / In the relations of our life / Never thought you would go away / So far away
— Cardia, “Love Loss”
It has been nearly two years since my last relationship ended and I still have a cardboard box filled with neatly stacked piles of mementos — greeting cards, clothing, ornaments, photos and a dried…
I had intended my new website’s first blog post to be a reflection on the phenomenon of sexual nostalgia, currently under research by social scientists at New York University, according to a piece in the February issue of Psychology Today. However, in light of recent events, a topic on negotiating my own penchant to romanticize past partners at the expense of a current partnership seems ill-timed.
Reading about and secondhand witnessing the fatal Capitol police shooting of a Trump loyalist and QAnon devotee during Wednesday’s near-overthrow of a democratically sound presidential election shifts my focus to another strand of nostalgia…
As the Omaha-bred rockers of alternative radio fame commemorate three decades of music making, this 311 Head reflects on growing up with the best band in the land
According to its etymology, which is the same as that of mission, a message is always composed of truths sent (missus) to a person, a group, a period in time, to satisfy an expectation and sometimes to answer a call for help. — Jean Leclerq, O.S.B. in the introduction to Thomas Merton’s Contemplation in a World of Action (1971)
Can you get with / a melding of two minds? / What’s the worst thing you could find? / A paper trail / that prevails / in demystification? / People / want to believe / in mysteries / Is the truth…
A recent study suggests unsheltered are twice as likely to die. What can we do before it’s too late?
As of the time of this writing there were 1.7 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 recorded internationally with a death toll nearing 106,000, according to the World Health Organization. The United States, NBC News reports, now has the lead globally in total deaths caused by the virus with over 20,000 dead. …
As accusations of witch hunting, lynching and inquisition fly among Trump and his Republicans, it is high time white men think more seriously about our whiteness and how we use it
While House Democrats sift through witness testimony to build an impeachment case against Donald Trump, his Republican cronies are rallying with thanatophobic desperation, calling the investigation an “inquisition” and recently interrupting a closed-door inquiry under the purported aim of upholding government transparency.
Keeping in mind Ambassador William Taylor’s bombshell report to House investigators, the irony is striking.
President Trump, true to form, is playing the mouthpiece for his political party’s collective death anxiety, going so far as to call the inquiry “the greatest Witch Hunt in American History” and equating the impeachment inquiry to a “lynching.”
The victimizer is suddenly…
As the meaning of Title VII comes under review, queer visibility is our greatest defense
I was called into the assistant principal’s office of the all-boys Catholic high school where I taught in my mid-20s for a scheduled meeting with two pompous officials from the diocese. They wanted to “discuss” a request for permission I made to host a guest speaker for a schoolwide assembly on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
At the time, around 10 years ago now, I was the moderator of a student-led human rights awareness group on campus and had made a connection with a local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. Through this contact I was…
He is 26 years older than me. We have been going together since June.
He is not the first person with whom I’ve been intimate who could be mistaken for my father. This is how it has always been for me. While not the rule, my sexual preference — whether by brain chemistry or cultural conditioning or both — tends toward men with silver-specked hair or none at all who’ve grown up a generation or two before me.
I know there are plenty others, past and present, just like me (and you). Yet we seem rare breed. Popular depictions of…
