Parting Glances: Black, Gay, Detroit Friends (Pt. 4)
For decades, a seeming legitimate requirement asked for admission to Detroit gay bars was three pieces of ID, including one with photo selfie (in or out of [...]
Parting Glances Black Gay Detroit Friends (Pt. 3)
I had my picture taken a year ago with actress Lily Tomlin, who was in Detroit — her native city — as speaker for an LGBTQ fundraiser. I was wearing a [...]
Parting Glances: Black Gay Detroit Friends (Pt. 2)
The year I graduated as a commercial art major from Detroit's prestigious Cass Technical High School I did not attend my senior prom. As a gay male I had no [...]
Parting Glances: Black Gay Detroit Friends (Pt. 1)
As a teenager in the mid-1950s, I listened faithfully to country and western music radio — especially Patsy Cline — and later 'Senator' Bristo Bryant's rhythm [...]
Parting Glances: When Arts' Gay Fleet Scuttlebutted!
Back in the "good old days" of Great Depression No. 1, following Stock Market Crash '29 years and years – well, at least a galloping few – before my time, the [...]
Parting Glances: Memories of a Near-Forgotten Past Pt. 4
For five dynamic years — 1940 to 1945 — Detroit was America's Arsenal of Democracy, a vital source of war materials and weapons. First for England's defense. [...]
Parting Glances: Channeling Rainbow Creativity in 2019
As an artist, I'm fascinated with the mental phenomenon known as channeling. In the mid-'90s channeling was a cultural fad with many fans. Channelers brought [...]
Parting Glances: Christmas with Liberace
My grandmother Lottie Lee Alexander lived with my parents and me from the time I was five until she died in 1954 when I was 18, and had just finished Cass [...]
Parting Glances: Two times A Mary Christmas!
There are paths that by strange chances on Christmas Eve mix up in time, space, thought, crazy activation. Some fact. Some fantasy. Who knows? So it happened [...]
Parting Glances: Don We Now Santa's Gay Apparel!
'Twas New Years Eve and "Santa Closet" – lavender quill pen in hand, Gucci trifocal sunglasses on his merry nose – was double checking his private list to see [...]
Parting Glances: How's your sugar plum fairy, Mary?
I hate to play the gay Grinch who stole Christmas, but there's a movement afoot by the Southern Comfort Baptists to do away with all suspected gay references [...]
Parting Glances: Two Kings and a Presidential 'Queen'
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1965 historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for African-American voter rights changed the South forever. (Or, did it?) Few [...]
