PARTING GLANCES: Panic! Panic! As Metaphor
Be prepared. What follows will likely upset you. What occurred to me that prompts this metaphoric recounting PG sent me into a total panic when it happened [...]
Parting Glances: Remembering My
I was in the Sunday habit, a few years back, of taking a suburban bus to Birmingham. Riding with me were regulars, most of whom were off to church, or gave [...]
Parting Glances: Past Embraces Present-Tense
It's been 60 some years since I last saw the young man who sits across from me. He has, at 19, what a friend calls "the poetry of youth." An eager freshness [...]
Parting Glances: Once Upon a Time of Terror (Part 2)
Though perhaps unspoken among gay men and doctors nearly 40 years ago when the AIDS crisis started, the presumption of a death sentence was understood. When [...]
Parting Glances: Once upon a time of terror (Pt. 1)
It's been nearly 40 years since media stories began to appear about what seemed the onset of a pandemic among gay men (and drug users). The acronym for these [...]
Parting Glances: Woo! Woo! You, too, Wonder Woman?
Sixty-three years ago, when I was a gay, impressionable teenage DC Comics Book fan, a shrink named Fredric Wertham claimed that the bitter seeds of crime were [...]
Parting Glances: You're Only Gay Once, Mary!
"It's a pity that youth is wasted on the young," said George Bernard Shaw, whose play "Pygmalion" was given a fresh start and a heart pacer as a Broadway [...]
Parting Glances: Dreaming of Tophat's Pink Garters
I was five years old when I had my first vivid dream. Still vividly recalled today. Imagery was induced by counting to 10, drifting off to dreamland, as ether [...]
Parting Glances: Hyde and seek with Dr. Cory
To diddle an old saying: You can't judge a gay author — or his book — by the cover. Case in point: Groundbreaking 1951 sociological expose, "The Homosexual in [...]
Parting Glances: Gone with the Winds of Rainbow Time
Fifty years ago Detroit's Washington Boulevard was a busy setting for exclusive shops, upscale restaurants, elegant bistros, stretching sedately from Grand [...]
Parting Glances: Outing the Stonewall Inn
Back in the days when closets were leased for a lifetime, it was Standard Operating Protection to go by a nickname. Some SOPs I recall are Little Bobby, [...]
Parting Glances: Fog, Er, Log Cabin Redux
A concerned group of Log Cabin gay men — presumably all tie-dyed-in-the-Woolite Republicans — who voted for Donald Trump — are very worried that their [...]
