Literature Category
Pandemic Habits: Quarantine Reading, Quarantine Writing
Posted on April 13, 2021 Leave a Comment
It’s been hard to keep a partition between reading for work and reading for pleasure. If it’s something that might have bearing on the content of my book, I want to take notes. Reading for pleasure should be, well, more pleasurable, but the eyes and brain weren’t having it when I’d try to pick up a book in the evening for the fun of it.
From Bar Outreach to Aspiring Biographer: A Reintroduction
Posted on November 1, 2020 2 Comments
When people ask about my project and I say the name “Randy Shilts,” they almost never know who I’m talking about. When I say “And the Band Played On,” if they are of a certain age, there’s often an emotional reaction. Then, they tell me about someone significant in their lives: the uncle who’d moved out west, but then came home to die with lesions on his face; the roommate in New York, who they took care of in his final months; or the older cousin from Milwaukee, whose funeral they weren’t allowed to attend.
The Summer I Bought New Pencils
Posted on January 11, 2018 1 Comment
The experience of putting hand to paper stimulates an entirely different writing experience for me. Back in 2016, I found this to be true as I started writing long hand at times to break through the long, dreadful periods of staring at the glow of my expectant laptop. I’m not sure why, but it took […]
Just the Beginning
Posted on July 16, 2015 Leave a Comment
When I started running last spring, I could manage about 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile nonstop before I would pause to walk for a stretch. By late summer and early fall, I had pushed that distance up to a mile, maybe slightly more. In the spring, I steadily extended that distance to 1 and […]
Back to San Francisco (Revisiting Shilts)
Posted on March 23, 2015 Leave a Comment
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City brought my first real attraction to San Francisco. Although still a couple years away from coming out, as a rural Midwestern teen in the early 1990s I sensed something about that miniseries—aside from curiosity about gay culture of the 70s— which drew me to a city that I had […]
Disappointment and Rededication
Posted on December 2, 2014 Leave a Comment
Fifteen years ago, I was a senior English major, on the verge of graduating with honors from Michigan State University. I had co-founded Q-News, MSU’s first literary magazine for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied students, led its staff to a well-received presentation at the national “Creating Change” Conference, and was close to finishing a […]
Finding Randy, Part 3
Posted on April 8, 2014 1 Comment
There is so much to say about my time in California last month, and I’ve had so little time and energy to say it. I meant to get to this post sooner, perhaps even while I was out in San Francisco, getting intimately familiar with boxes and boxes of Randy Shilts’ personal papers. Sometimes life […]
Finding Randy, Part 2
Posted on March 10, 2014 1 Comment
I’m not intending this discovery process to become the sole focus of the blog, but when I’m writing about things that interest me (and are interesting in my life), well, right now this is at the top of my list (dissertation notwithstanding). San Francisco and Randy’s papers are less than a week away, but in […]
Finding Randy, Part 1
Posted on February 17, 2014 3 Comments
“Introducing Randy Shilts.” There he was, younger than I’d ever seen him, staring up at me from the weathered pages of a long-ago publication. The seed of an idea dropped into my mind two years ago, when I was poring through old copies of The Advocate for a historical research project in my Doctoral program. […]
Returning to Stories
Posted on January 15, 2013 Leave a Comment
It’s that time of year when scholarship applications come due, which has given me an opportunity to revisit parts of my own story as it has evolved over the course of my adulthood. In some ways, my work has been closely tied to storytelling ever since my early years at Michigan State, where I co-founded […]
Days of Wine and Proses 