Charles Alexander
Parting Glances: A Parade to Affirm 49 Times
CHICAGO: This is my tenth trip to the Windy City to take part in its Annual Pride Parade gathering. Since I first started to visit the city in 1959, I've seen its LGBT rainbow community change, gradually move north, and struggle for full human [...]
Parting Glances: How's Your Left Behind For Jesus?
WACCOFF, TX. Source: Lone Star Police Gazette & Badge Polisher. Headline: Under Cover Cops Make Sunday Surprise Restroom Arrests! Mark your activist desk calendar. "While thousands of church members were inside the Hallelujah Handclap of Hope [...]
Parting Glances: A Glimpse of Shocking
There were two newspaper kiosks in once-busy downtown Detroit in the 1960s. One situated at Grand Circus Park. One, at Campus Martius, across from the still-standing, landmark 1877 Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Each month I'd stop at the closest [...]
Parting Glances: Let God's Trumpet Sound!
If little else, Donald J. Trump – who just celebrated his 70th birthday on June 14th – making him fully eligible, and then some, for S.S. benefits – has by inconclusive rhetoric, non-objective facial grimaces, carefree dandruff bleaching, somehow [...]
Parting Glances: Time Marches On. Annoyingly...
After five years of faithful, heavy-duty service, the battery in my expensive gift Shinola wristwatch just stopped on me. I should have known it was going to happen because its second hand for the past several weeks hesitated, stopping completely [...]
WWJD: Number One or Number Two?
An offshoot of concern for so-called spiritually inappropriate transgender use of restrooms is what might be best called "a biblical bowel movement," that for the first time in scriptural exegesis — doctrinal commentary — touches on a subject so [...]
Parting Glances: On Your Scale of One-to-Forever!
There are many experiences that are alien to most people: walking on the moon, winning the big bucks lottery, being gashed by a grizzly bear, doing H, weighing 400 pounds, and having implant boobs. Because my life tends to be introspective, devoid [...]
Parting Glances: Queer Today, Gone Tomorrow
Not too long ago while browsing a cluttered, non-LGBT Ann Arbor bookstore, I spent $20 for a used paperback: #3 of Richard Lamparski's 11 volume series "Whatever became of…?" Now collector items. My purchase originally going for $1.25 is dated [...]
Parting Glances A Meeting: Charles Past, Charles Present
It's been 60 years since I last saw the young man who sits across from me. He has, at 20, what a friend calls "the poetry of youth." An eager freshness that's a joy at my age to see. Once more. He hasn't changed much. Still thin as a rail. Tall as [...]
Parting Glances: BTL and Me (Among Other Things)
I started writing my Parting Glances column in 1999. Its premise was simple enough: choose an important LGB — and occasionally T — historical event that actually changed things for us, or challenged us to speak out on behalf of homosexual human [...]
Parting Glances: Time Flies! That's For Sure!
One of the pleasures for a writer or an artist is to come across an early composition or art piece and experience finding it with a sense of reading or seeing it for the first time. (Like coming across an old Polaroid picture. Oh, my God! Is that [...]
Parting Glances: God Bless Our Tom Tom
Pitwool Tommy lives with his mommy, Wanda-Rose Pitwool. His daddy, Darnell Prince Pitwool. And a pit bull dog named Lazarus. Tommy's home schooled. Living in Topelulu, Alabama, famed sin-free domain of Lou "Lulu" Seldom's Fracas in the Family [...]