Activity

There was a bar we loved back then. It was red and unhappy, a dour subterranean neighborhood institution where nothing could stop us from being charmed by it. Not its stubborn insistence on overhead lighting, not the rotting pink bar of soap in the bathroom, not an overtly hostile approach to fulfi…

Ferd died in 2007, his obituary describing him as “a veteran of the ‘new left’ ” and crediting him as the cowriter and coproducer of The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd. He hosted the launch meeting for DAGMAR (Dykes and Gay Men against Racism/Repression/the Right Wing/Reagan), the first activis…

As I watched, I wondered if every woman who ends a marriage has to comfort her husband through the pain of saying the absolute worst thing he can to a person he wants to hurt as much as he wants to love. Here they’ve located the pain, but will not admit the reason. The reason it hurts is because th…

I love movies not because they’re like life but because they aren’t. The only thing that is true of movies and life is that they both have to end. I want them most when they are uncanny replicas of life—moments and experiences used like elements rather than reflections. They warp under being watche…

The more I read and watched, the more I wondered what I was doing. What did I need from these stories, or more to the point, what was I avoiding? What feeling or action did they allow me to replace? I believed everything I saw, even though I knew it wasn’t real, or even meant to be interpreted as r…