Charles Alexander
Parting Glances: One Thankful Day at a Time
I had my first drink when I was 14 or 15 in the basement of the apartment building that my friend Donny Well's parents managed. Donny was my age, and the half empty bottle of cheap wine was 'borrowed' from his folks ample supply. The few gulps that [...]
Parting Glances: P, as in Peeping Tom
I was eight years old when I was exposed to my first pornographic glossy 8" x 10" photo. It was of a muscular naked guy and a curvaceous woman, shown to me by a ten-year-old neighbor. How Tommy Jones came across it I have no idea. I couldn't have [...]
Parting Glances: Blue-Eyed Winks at T
With all due respect (and a plethora of apologies) to my manifold, religiously eclectic, catholic — as in universal — PG readership, I spent my 2017 St. Patrick's Day observance in Mar-a-Lago, Fla. It was a first for me. If the resort name seems [...]
Parting Glances: Sequins and Wedding Rice
On the topic of marriage screen legend Greta Garbo boasted, "There are some who get married and others who don't. I have never had an impulse to go to the altar. I am a difficult person to lead." What she really meant is that she had no interest in [...]
Parting Glances: What's Past Is Unfortunately Prologue
During the Nazi reign of terror that ended only in Germany's defeat by the Allies in 1945, about 15,000 gay men were incarcerated in concentration camps, where an estimated 60 percent were brutally worked to death. Those pink-triangle gays who [...]
Parting Glances: Color Code Penguins Blue
A group called Noah's Angels is spending big bucks to provide shoreline dolphins with bodysuits to stop gay activity among this frisky, highly sexually active species. (Dolphins are one of 450 animal groping, er, groupings known to enjoy same-sex [...]
Parting Glances: Whap! Thud! Kick! Kill! Shazam!
An oft-quoted U of M study of juvenile couch-potato-derangement-in-the-making blames adult violence on TV programs that feature heroes who are admired for bravery but imitated for violent acts. (Watch now. Wallop later.) Not everyone agrees. Dennis [...]
Parting Glances: A Drag In Time
In the sixty-some years I've been out, I've seen more female impersonators than you can shake a rhinestone tiara at. Some great. Some talented. Some gone bonkers. Some now gone bingo. I was celebrating my 21st birthday when I saw my first drag show [...]
Parting Glances: Detroit's Black History Month Celeb
When Detroit-born, Cass Tech graduate Bernard Johnson died, age 60 in 1997, the New York Times carried a quarter-page obit celebrating his life as "a Renaissance man in dance." Little bigger than a metronome minute – at 5-foot-4 – he started [...]
Parting Glances: 1933 Hate Who? This is 2017
Within months of Adolf Hitler's appointment as Germany's Chancellor in 1933, Nazi S.S. thugs in Berlin stood menacingly in front of Jewish owned businesses. They held up signs in their grubby, beat-opponents-to-a-pulp hands. Kraft night bei juden! [...]
Parting Glances: Let's Show Our Woodies
Woody Allen — who takes religion, God, get-saved theology with a grain of salt (Epsom, no doubt) quips, "I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear." (Woody adds, "I believe that there's somebody out there who [...]
Parting Glances If Ever a Wiz that Wasn't!
Contrary to rumors circulating for years in Story Bookland Weekly Tabloid there never was any real friction between Dorothy, Cowardly Lion, Tin Woodsman, Scarecrow.(And those horrid pictures of an aging Dorothy are photoshopped.) Although the [...]