Diversity

  • The Chosen

    My relationship with God is not a complicated one. I live on very even ground with Him. We have an understanding, a quiet agreement that I am who He made me to be. Sometimes I believe that being gay has actually made me one of His chosen. Think about it. You come into this world…

    Read more →

  • Grace: Born from the Ashes

    There are moments when fiction stops being fiction. When the story you thought you were writing to escape the world suddenly becomes the mirror that refuses to turn away. Grace was born out of one of those moments. I first began the story in 1992, in the shadow of the Rodney King verdict. The country…

    Read more →

  • The Last Chorus

    The door to the bar opened and light flooded in. The sun was rising outside but we didn’t care. We sat at the bar, still half-dreaming from the night before. Roy was behind it, wiping glasses, humming along to the sound system. I can still see him smiling at something silly Anni had just said…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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,…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →