At any time I can count my gay friends on one hand. Attrition stays high — disappearance, permanent fallings-out, deaths. Don’t be deceived by television’s sunny portrayals. The waters of gay life are cold, choppy, and polluted.

I realized this morning that I had no cream for my coffee. Rather than walk a block down to the store, I took out a tube of white face paint from my makeup room and then painted an upside-down “milk mustache” above my upper lip. I made a sign on a piece of 8.5″ x [...]

In my loud bouquet of divas to worship, Tina Turner is like a hot-orange Callandria.

Ertha and I are working on a way to swipe everyone’s FB passwords so I can post links to my stories on all your walls without having to ask you. Guerilla self-marketing. With a social purpose.

I don’t write enough and I talk too much. That’s the God’s truth. I had just come out the other end of the nastiest, saddest, most traumatic chapter of my life. Now I was safe, living at my brother’s house. He had a gate spanning the driveway, and one sunny weekday at noontime I was [...]

Shortly before Grandma C. died she brought out some photo albums I had never seen in my life, though I had spent a lot of time with her. We looked at pictures of her when she was a young, pretty strawberry blonde. Skin cancer had ravaged her face by the time she was old; it’s [...]

When the temperature dips below 50 in D.C., everyone says it’s “freezing.” And when it’s “freezing,” they all want to take the bus, even if they’re only going one block. They’ll wait 40 minutes in the “freezing” 45-degree wind for a bus to come along that takes them 500 feet. Like the rest of the [...]

1986 Up in my bedroom sitting on the floor playing an audiocassette I got for $2 called “Gospel” by Aretha Franklin. Very lo-fi recording of her when she was a teenager (like me!) singing at church, New Bethel Baptist in Detroit, and accompanying herself on piano. I am horrified by what I think I hear [...]

I still have a Yahoo! email address, okay? It’s not as bad as still having AOL or Hotmail. Plus, I have a Gmail one too. So shut up. Anyway, so that I can check my email quickly first thing in the morning, Yahoo! is my homepage. They have very carnivalesque top-news stories, lots of self-help [...]

I am and always was a total grandma’s boy. They’re my favorite kind of family member. Like most humans, I had two grandmas, both of whom are gone now from this earth but I hope are waiting for me somewhere. Obviously I inherited different genetic traits from each of them. But I ended up having [...]