Archive | Queer Matters

Getting Fired, NYC Style

Of the many, many things I love about NYC is the fact that there is a bar I go to specifically when I want strange men to pay for my drinks while I mourn a fresh breakup with a woman. Tonight, I am sorry to say, I had occasion to visit said bar. On the docket: Mexican firing squads, a tequila cocktail that takes no prisoners and is named all too aptly. Note that I drank two and paid for none, my kind of new math. There’s something so wonderful about male chivalry when it comes without strings, and what could be less promising for a young man-about-town than a 40something broad mourning the woman who just sent her packing? (Send greasy carbs. And new love interests.)

Of Homographic Utopias and Dowager Chic (The Sound Inside, Terminator: Dark Fate)

Critic drag with co-panelist Jack Rico.

Yesterday was kind of brilliant. The boys and I taped an episode of Talking Pictures, and for the first time since the show migrated from Spectrum to PBS achieved the right balance of jocularity and specificity. Which is to say: I got my points across with some style and minimal manterruption, and we all laughed a lot.

Link to come shortly.

Afterward I had enough cash in my pocket to eat out properly, so I joined up with my friend Little Lisa. In generosity of spirit and strength of mind she is no way little, but as we share a first name and I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood where people of the same name are distinguished by the prefix “Big” or “Little,” Little Lisa she is. To be fair, LL is 7 inches shorter than me and a good 16 years younger.

Big of heart, though, believe me.

Once upon a time we worked together at NY1–she was often the only other broad in the studio when I was on set–but these days she’s a fancy lady producer at a major network and I’m, well–that’s a good question. What am I right now? Continue Reading →

Every Day Is Coming Out Day in Middle Age

There are no pictures online of Adrienne Rich (above) with partner Michelle Cliff, which says a lot about how recent LGBTQ visibility really is.

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
Did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listened here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
–Adrienne Rich, from 21 Love Poems

It‘s been almost a year since the Legend and I left each other, and we were right to do so. We were doing each other no favors and much harm. But this poem fell out of a notebook today, and it made me cry in the middle of a busy morning. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy