Charles Alexander
Moon me once, Jamie Franco
Parting Glances For whatever reason of over-the-hill desperation I've just paid $10.95 for a copy of Flaunt, this month featuring on its cover the talented buns of actor James Franco. No doubt without question a publishing first. I might not have [...]
Faded rabbits, empty hats
Parting Glances Shortly before retiring from the digitally enhanced adventure called teaching 14 years ago I chanced across a bound volume of back issues of news about students, teachers, education, circa early-50s. Flipping through the collection [...]
Parting Glances: Polish your golden plates, Mitt!
Parting Glances It was once said of George Romney, former Michigan governor (1963 to 1969), "There but for the grace of God goes God." The quip was made in response to photogenic Republican brashness, but there's a grain of theocratic truth to the [...]
Gay youth becomes a god
Parting Glances Almost 125 years before the birth of Jesus a handsome youth named Antinous was declared a god by the Roman emperor Publius Aelius Hadrian. Antinous was born to a Greek family in Bithynion-Claudiopolis, in the Roman province of [...]
Suffer the little kids, etc.
Parting Glances I was five when I had my tonsils clipped at the long-vanished Burt Shirley Hospital at Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit, followed by wonderful weeks of tapioca pudding, ice cream, no school, playmate hero worship. I remember [...]
What's past is prologue
Parting Glances Back in the mid-70s I met Stephanie Cranford, introduced to me by Gordon Petersen, then Assistant Concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Stephanie was Michigan's first male-to-female transgendered person. Slender, [...]
With Bruce and Dickie at home
Parting Glances I'm not one to indiscriminately name drop, but I had dinner with the Wayne-Graysons, celebrating their 75-plus years together. I flew Delta to Gotham City for the gala event, staying at the Crusader City Y. I'm pleased to report [...]
Gays who alien abduct
Parting Glances Carl Jung, a colleague of Sigmund Freud in the creation of psychoanalysis – that costly, seemingly unending, mental probing of troubled couch potato egos – broke with Freud over Freud's hangup on libido, the sexual energy [...]
Candle queens remembered
Parting Glances "I'm burning my candle at both ends. It will not last the night. But, oh, my foes, and, ah, my friends. It gives a lovely light!" These words are by bisexual poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), the subject of the fascinating [...]
A real hum jobber ...
Parting Glances I've occasion to escort friends Roger and Lloyd, visiting from summer-sweltering Florida, to what's euphemistically known among dance mavens as "the Windsor ballet." Our much anticipated cultural outing, because of family [...]
SOS Greets St. Peter
Parting Glances It must have been a slow news night, midweek, last week. Either that or the powers that be behind the scenes in the TV newsroom have a warped sense of human interest priorities. Five minutes of air time was actually devoted to the [...]
H2O! (HOPE to Order)
Parting Glances The temperature Friday, 1:30 p.m., is a sun-bleaching 85 degrees. I could use an ice-cold bottle of water. Free. Handed out with a smile by six young, white, twenty-somethings. They are eager in their facial expressions. Eager to [...]