Steven LaChance

  • The Space Between

    My favorite time in the theater has always been that quiet space between call time and performance. The house is still, the seats empty, the stage lights warming the air with their glow. It is a suspended moment when the outside world falls away and you are left alone with your breath, your body, and

    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 →

  • I woke up this morning missing my dad. The thought of not being able to talk to him leaves this sickening hole in my heart. The grief takes you by surprise and knocks the wind completely out of you. Something good happens and you want to tell him. Something bad happens and you want to

    Read more →

  • For years I told myself I would find a man and build a life that did not have to exist in bars or bathhouses. I wanted something steadier. I wanted a partner I could grow old with, a man I could have a family with, someone who would walk beside me in the ordinary days

    Read more →

  • I first walked down Zombie Road in 2006. I’d heard the stories for years and finally gave in. I thought it would just be a spooky night walk with friends. Instead, it felt like stepping straight into The Blair Witch. I went back again and again. I led groups down there, even filmed with a

    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 →

  • This photo shows Keith Gregory in makeup for A Haunting: Fear House. It’s from the one scene that people always seem to remember. The truth is, I had a very hard time with how that scene was presented. On screen it came across almost like a moment from IT, a full-on horror clown. But that

    Read more →