life lessons

  • 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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  • Still Standing

    There are times when I wish I could go back to the days before I saw the darkness for what it really is. Before I understood how deep it runs, not just through the world, but through people too. The difficulty comes when once you have seen that darkness, you cannot unsee it. You cannot

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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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  • Living at a Safe Distance

    I left the United States eight years ago. People ask me why, and the answer is simple. Until you are part of a minority that is under attack, it is hard to understand what it feels like to wake up every day in that kind of world. You learn to live with a weight in

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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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  • 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

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  • Seventeen years ago my book The Uninvited was released into the world. At the time, my son Elliot looked at me and asked a question that has stayed with me ever since: “Who would want to read about our lives?” It was honest, simple, and impossible for me to answer back then. What I did

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  • The reality is we are living in a time when our rights can be taken away faster than they are given. If you are a queer couple in the United States, being proactive is not paranoia. It is survival. You cannot wait for a crisis to prepare. Love is worth protecting and so are you.

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