fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
April 29, 1991. I was at work in Berkeley. There was no World Wide Web in those days. I checked. The Mosaic browser wouldn’t come out until the following January, over a half-year later. No, I got the news on the telephone when a friend and former roommate from LA called me while I was…
A corner. Just a corner. Not a fancy corner on a tree-lined boulevard with a landscaped median strip. No, it was just an ordinary corner, but a happy corner that saw the sort of traffic a corner would see when bordered by busy thoroughfares. There were streetcars, then buses, and cars, bikes, and pedestrians. Folks…
As soon as Lionel entered the family room, tie undone, shirt untucked, beer can in hand, his eyes fell on the saxophone. It has occupied the same corner, slouched at the same unaltered angle, for the past four days. Dust has settled on its upper slopes. A cobweb draped between one of the keys and…
There are apologies and then there are apologies. Some are spoken in anger, before the true cool down has taken place. “Well, I said I’m sorry!” Reflection had yet to take place. The words ring hollow. A favorite among politicos, actors, and other public figures is the now-famous Non-Apology Apology. The typical NAA takes the…
“The Passion Flower series, Mr. Gale,” he said after a long sip of brandy, “you asked what was the inspiration.” “Yes.” “It was my pathetic attempt at career suicide. I wanted to destroy everything I had built up. I wanted the world to write me off and leave me the fuck alone. But it didn’t…
April 15, 2012 was an auspicious day in North Korea. It saw the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il-sung. North Korea is known for much spectacle and pomp and circumstance, so of course an event like this meant pulling out all the stops. Planning for this date actually began…
(Editor’s note (4/11/2012): A link was added to this piece, in the first sentence, to a CBS News article which quotes Mr. Zimmerman’s now ex-attorney, Craig Sonner, verifying that The Real George Zimmerman website does in fact belong to George Zimmerman. It is on this basis that the gar spot accepts the veracity of the…
We stood in front of a shelf marked 1953. A gap sat in the middle of otherwise tightly packed volumes. He began stroking the dust from the empty space. Again, it felt as if he were stroking my skin. This time I let myself experience it, for a little while. “Where are those volumes?” I…
During the Prop. 8 campaign four years ago, I received a mailer from the Yes on 8 folks which featured black religious figures on one side and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the other. It contained quotes like these: “Marriage is something that is sacred and worth defending as an institution of one man and…
Light, airy, and meticulously clean, attributes that well describe Mr. Horton’s apartment. His closet embodied the exact opposite. As we entered, he reached up and pulled a cord. A single bulb, brown with dust, hung on a thick wooly wire. The light revealed a cavern, cramped, long, and narrow with a pale wall grimed by…
