Gay Rights

  • Recognition

    Recognition

    I want to start this quietly, because this is not a reaction piece. It is me trying to place a current moment inside a much longer human story. When Donald Trump hosted a prayer breakfast, stood in front of cameras talking about faith and values, and then later that same night shared a racist video…

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  • Paperwork Instead of Bullets

    Right now, the United States is using a practice that allows asylum seekers to be deported to third countries. That means people are not necessarily sent back to where they came from. They can be sent to any country willing to accept them. For LGBTQ+ refugees fleeing persecution, this has life or death consequences. People…

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  • We the People?

    We the People?

    I keep thinking about how different things might feel if we actually lived in a country of ideas. A place where “We the People” meant everyone. Not some of us. Not the protected. Not the powerful. Just all of us. But we never have. And that truth stings more than I want to admit. What…

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  • Did We?

    You know, they say every generation of LGBTQ+ people stands on the shoulders of the accomplishments of the one before it. That is true, at least in part. And yet lately, it can feel as if we have faltered some along the way. I catch myself in those darker hours of the night, when sleep…

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  • Grace: A Conversation with Steven LaChance

    Grace: A Conversation with Steven LaChance The bestselling author on fire, survival, and the fierce humanity behind his most daring novel yet

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  • The America We Were Sold

    I wish I still believed in the United States of America we were sold when we were kids. You remember the one. The country built on the solid foundation of freedom. The place where all men were said to be created equal, and where anyone could achieve the American dream if they worked hard enough.…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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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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