family

  • Meet Me in St. Louis

    Meet Me in St. Louis

    Every year, for as long as I can remember, I watched Meet Me in St. Louis with my mom. Every Christmas. That was our tradition. She loved that movie. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was teaching me something. About music. About warmth. About how certain stories quietly become part of who

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  • A Season for Ghosts

    A Season for Ghosts

    I often think of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when I think about ghosts this time of year. December has always felt like the most haunted month to me. Not because it is frightening, but because it brings the past closer. Dickens understood that. He tapped into something deeply human when he wrapped a ghost story

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  • Walking With My Father

    Walking With My Father

    I had a dream last night that stayed with me long after I opened my eyes. It felt real in that quiet way some dreams do. In the dream I was walking with my dad at Christmastime. We were at Northwest Plaza in St. Louis, going to see Santa, and I was maybe four years

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  • Gratitude, Without the Myth

    Gratitude, Without the Myth

    Thanksgiving is a time to understand the meaning of gratitude and thankfulness.

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • Making a Scene

    There is a difference between living straight and living queer. That difference follows us everywhere even when no one speaks of it. Straight people rarely notice because the world already belongs to them. They see themselves reflected on every screen, in every commercial, on every billboard, in every book. Their stories are told without question.

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  • To be a gay father raising three children in the nineties was to live in quiet. Only the closest people to me knew the truth, because protecting my children mattered more than my own openness. I came out at twenty-nine, but even then it was carefully measured, told only to those who needed to know.

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  • Why do you hurt me?was the prayer I never said aloud.It lived in my mouth like a dying bird,fluttering, breaking its neckon the cage of my molars. You looked at me likesomething ungrateful.Something wild you forgot to tame.I didn’t understand.Not when I still thoughtblood meant safety,that family meant shelterand not war dressed as tradition. Later—I

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  • In the quiet French countryside, in a town most people have never heard of, my family’s story begins. The place is called Bréban, France. It sits in the Aube region, surrounded by fields that know the rhythm of harvest, the hush of snow, and the silence of centuries. Bréban is the kind of town where

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