life

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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 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

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  • The Kind of September

    “Try to remember the kind of September.” That line has been echoing in my head all day, and maybe it is because September once carried a very different meaning. When I was young, Labor Day was not just a holiday. It was the last day of freedom before school began again. In St. Louis, we

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  • There is a case to be made that Frankenstein is not just a gothic novel or a cautionary tale about science, but also one of the earlier works of queer literature. Mary Shelley wrote it at nineteen, surrounded by the radical thinkers of her time, many of whom challenged the norms of love, gender, and

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  • To Outlive Them All

    Death itself has never been the thing that frightened me. What terrifies me is the thought of losing everyone I love before my own time comes. That fear has been stitched into me over the years, thread by thread, through loss after loss. When you are young, you believe there is time. You imagine decades

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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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  • One Life

    The world is restless.The walls speak in riddles of decline.I have lived enough unfairnessto know it rarely gives back what it steals. But I am not alone.I sit in the quiet with Rick’s laughterstill echoing in the room,a thread of warmth that refuses to break.Happiness is not a thunderclap.It is the brush of his hand

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  • In 2025 censorship in the United States is not a distant threat. It is happening right now. So far this year more than 10,000 books have been banned in public schools across the country. About 44 percent of those books feature characters of color and 39 percent include LGBTQ+ themes. These removals are not stemming

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