The Inheritance of a Bush-Cheney Scion — In a March 25, 2023 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie christens Ron DeSantis as the heir apparent to the Bush-Cheney style of Republicanism. As I read the piece, it brought to mind memories of sanitized nomenclatures for violence, both literal and symbolic, instances of narrative appropriation…

We must own who we are, not live their judgment — I don’t sleep much anymore. There was a time when sleep was elusive, a waking dream I would chase every night. I just wanted to rest. Sleep would not come, no matter what I tried, until utterly exhausted, I would drift off for a couple of hours, then the world would restart. That was a…

How can you support what you don’t care about? — Identity is a double-edged sword. It either cuts away your irrelevancies or it opens you up for a stab to the heart. Crucible or crucified, there is no middle ground. To say that I am a particular thing is to stake my ground, to stand unequivocally as a person in…

An emergent property — Being human is not automatic. Not simply sourced in the assemblage of genetic material we each possess, but in the complexities of culture adaptation, both social and biological. We carry our culture, our language, and our resultant prejudices to every encounter we have with others. Usually, our awareness is focused…

And one Christmas I haven’t known — All my Christmases were white. We would occasionally get snow where I lived, but 22 degrees or 72 degrees, Christmas was always white. This may be an odd statement, but white-ness was so aggressively assumed in all cultural events that it is glaring when I look back at them. All my Christmases were straight. Toys…

Processing Club Q feelings I’m sitting here, having read as many of the articles about the Colorado Springs attack on our people at Club Q as I could find, processing feelings only to find I feel nothing. I feel nothing not because it is far from me, not because it…

Exercising our right of self determination is the cure — The realities of the impact on our health from being who we are, from being LGBTQIA+, is an important issue. On the base level of existence, there is a price to pay for simply being. …

Because It Does — I’ve been silent for a while, my energies focused on my graduate work. I write a lot of papers and discussion posts, so there’s not much left to write about life as a gay man in the red semi-rural world of Texas. …

Gaily playing with poetic form — I There are no strands of green at our day’s end. No more pretending our night holds blessings Beyond the ring of shadow bells. Souls tend What time will rend and all the world will sing For sacred things to seal the breach and bring The breaking end to time as the red sun Sets over…