fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
The AIDS Memorial on Instagram and Facebook invited me to write a post about black gay writers during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s. I came out around that time and quickly saw the devastation the disease caused within the black gay literary community. Writers whose works I came to…
For World AIDS Day this past Saturday, December 1, I read an excerpt from my novel Sin Against the Race. The story involves Alfonso Rutherford Berry, III, a young black gay man coming into his own, mourning the loss of his cousin Carlton, a long term AIDS survivor. Here, taken from Chapter 20, Alfonso explains to…
[Update (3/27/17): This is playing again at SF Marsh through April 8. If you haven’t had a chance to see it, run, don’t walk, to check it out.] It’s the early morning hours of January 28, 1986. Hospice Nurse Elaine Magree just pulled an all-nighter, answering calls and visiting dying patients. She’s already tended to…
In 1981, shortly after taking office, President Ronald Reagan nominated Dr. C. Everett Koop for the position of surgeon general. Though largely unknown to the general public, Dr. Koop had gained a reputation within medical circles for his innovations in pediatric surgery. And he also had some cache within conservative and right-to-life circles because of…
Within a couple of months of coming out in 1988, I took my first HIV test. It took two weeks to get the results at that time. Two weeks. They counseled you when they drew blood. And they counseled you when they gave you the results. But for two weeks, you were on your own….
Today I’ve had one word going through my head: GEORGE! GEOOOOORRGE! It’s impossible to represent with letter and words and punctuation the raw emotion evoked when Elizabeth Taylor belched it from her gut in scene after scene of her Oscar winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. She was only 34 at the time, but she…
Ptolemy was an Egyptian-born Roman philosopher and scientist who lived around the First and Second centuries AD. He’s best known for the Ptolemaic System of the universe, an expansion of Aristotle’s view that the Earth laid at the center of universe and all the heavenly bodies, including the sun and stars, revolved around it. Aristotle’s…
