Shouts & Murmurs by Jenny Slate: Tonight I will eat a burned-up bird and drink liquefied old grapes. I’m so excited that I put skin-colored paint on my face and pasty red pigment on my lips.| The New Yorker
This was 1972 and gay sex was definitely taboo. Not only was it against the law, the president of the university, a rabid segregationist, also hated queers. He had a network of spies on campus, those he either paid or blackmailed into aggressively turning in fellow students suspected of such aberrant behavior. You had to be careful. I was. Mike wasn’t. He was reported for coming on to the wrong person. There was to be a formal hearing. ...| Memoir Magazine
I don’t remember a time when men, young, elderly, or middle-aged, stranger, or familiar, didn’t randomly confide in me the most traumatic horrors of their reality. Is there something about my bespectacled face? My half-broken nose? Is it my beard? Is it too philosophic, should it be more fundamentalist? Or maybe it’s something subcutaneous, a subconscious sense, a kindred recognition.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction