America is not immune to chaos and autocracy — Originally published in Philadelphia Gay News on March 23, 2022 After 9/11 and January 6, it is odd that Americans so often think of our country as inviolate. Granted, there are significant differences in scale between those incidents and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As shocking and grievous as the…

The most important memorial lives in us — “At Babi Yar there are no monuments,” wrote poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in 1961, “only the wall of the ravine rising like a tombstone.” If you were here I would sing that for you in Russian; I remember it from a National Symphony Orchestra performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s setting in his…

Dealing with a far-right takeover — Sitting here sipping my hot chocolate on a Sunday morning, I’m having a hard time thinking of a good reason why the Treason Party will not try to take away all the rights LGBTQ folk have won in a string of Supreme Court rulings, if they get a chance. Oh…

The desperate quest to keep children ignorant — I would like to claim that I turned gay when I developed a crush on LeVar Burton while watching Reading Rainbow as a child. Sure, I was twenty-seven when the series began, but I was highly impressionable. The loudest professed champions of personal liberty (including the right to carry…

Shifting the lens from whiteness to witness — Saying the quiet part out loud is the 45th president’s malign gift to our national discourse. It is not as if racist remarks were never heard in public prior to Mr. Trump’s arrival in Washington. But for several decades before that, most people inclined to make such remarks in mixed…

Put down the phones and take up the fight — “Don’t feed the trolls,” my friend Mark Thompson tells me after watching me cross words on Twitter with some right-wing genius patriots, as they appear to regard themselves. Of course he’s correct. Whenever we respond to provocations on social media, we are diverting our attention from more productive efforts. Still…

Getting our fight on can be fun — On Christmas morning I counted my blessings over breakfast in a hotel restaurant. It was a balmy day, so afterward I sat at one of the chess tables on Dupont Circle. Much of the park was fenced off, the fountain surrounded by scaffolding. …

More than policy fixes, we need a leap of faith — Our current challenges make it hard to remember how quickly the LGBTQ cause advanced. It is equally hard to imagine our landmark victories being reversed by a right-wing Supreme Court. …

Our cultural clashes can teach us new ways to see — Recently there was a commentary in the Washington Post titled “Hanukkah isn’t ‘Jewish Christmas.’ Stop treating it that way.” I happen to know Hanukkah’s origins in the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire twenty-two centuries ago, the reconsecration of the second temple, and the miracle by which the oil for…