DEI

  • It Only Takes One

    The danger of what lies ahead feels familiar to anyone who remembers Kent State. On May 4, 1970, in Ohio, a group of college students gathered on the Kent State University campus to protest the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. They were young. They were angry. They were unarmed. The National Guard had…

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  • Dracula: Icon of Secret Desire

    Dracula has always walked with shadows, but some of those shadows are cultural rather than supernatural. From the moment Bram Stoker penned his tale, whispers have followed that the Count himself is a coded figure of forbidden desire. Stoker, a man who lived in Victorian England at a time when homosexuality was criminalized, poured into…

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  • If you believe in free speech and the First Amendment, then you also have to believe in the right of others to speak their minds, even when what they say clashes with your own beliefs. That is the hard truth at the center of democracy. Free speech was never meant to protect only the voices…

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  • The Zeitgeist of Hate

    I came to an understanding recently. What we are dealing with in the United States is not political and should not be framed that way. It runs deeper than red or blue. Yes, people often line up that way and the extremes on both sides dominate the noise. But most Americans live in the quiet…

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  • When I first began writing Grace, it was not because I wanted to predict a future. It was because I was watching the horror of hate and how fast a city and a nation could ignite into flames. The story began for me in 1992 after the Rodney King verdict when I saw how quickly…

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  • Examining the gap between the Constitution’s ideals and lived reality Many will tell you the United States is a great country. In some ways, they are not wrong. There is a difference between the ideals written on paper and the reality lived by its people. For some, especially those who are white, straight, and Christian,…

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  • I Am Not the Secret

    I am not the secret,though they tried to make me one—hiding truth behind closed doors,feeding silence instead of love,teaching bitterness as inheritance.I was the boy they blamed,the brother they resented,the son who stood in the shadows of lies. I am not the sin,though they laid it on my shoulders.I am not the weight of their…

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  • I can’t even begin to tell you the scope of my new book Grace. It feels vast and uncontainable at times, yet it remains grounded in the most intimate way possible because the story is always brought back to people and their lives. That is where the true terror and the true beauty reside. At…

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  • The Gay Day of Truth

    There may come a time when the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans are pushed so far backwards that silence is no longer an option. When that day arrives it will not be corporate policy changes or legal filings that shake the political landscape. It will be people. Ordinary citizens who have lived quietly with extraordinary truths.…

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  • The reality is we are living in a time when our rights can be taken away faster than they are given. If you are a queer couple in the United States, being proactive is not paranoia. It is survival. You cannot wait for a crisis to prepare. Love is worth protecting and so are you.…

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