A gay boy and his deaf uncle connect through the unspoken experience of being outsiders in a family It was a warm evening and we were eating outside on my grandparents’ rarely used patio. We gathered at Nanny and Papa’s, my maternal grandparents’ home for Thanksgiving, the High Holidays, and…

A sixty-something gay man’s visit to Provincetown — I was at the Boatslip, an indoor/outdoor bar in Provincetown’s West End, feeling like I was in a time warp. I hadn’t been to a gay bar in years, had rarely stood in a crowd since Covid. But I was outside in the fresh air, and I wondered how I…

My love-hate relationship with creative writing — Writing is for me both physically and emotionally painful. An anxious, restless man, I find sitting for more than 15 minutes to be extremely difficult. The physical act of writing, my body hunched over notebook or tensed over laptop, leads to backaches, a stiff neck, a tight gut. Am I…

A writer struggles with his inner critic — You should be writing more. You should be writing better. If you were writing more, you would be writing better. Most successful writers have an agent. Most successful writers have published books, and have an agent, long before they are 58. I am over the hill, closer to 60 than…

What I’ve learned in my seven decades on the planet — As I age, I am the sum of my life experiences, a card catalog with ever-expanding drawers — thick, dusty, the cards gone yellow. As I age, memories pile up like sediment, layer upon layer, some of which I’d like to forget but I am blessed or cursed with a…

Hair today and gone tomorrow — Growing up in my Eastern-European Jewish family, I was the son with the “good hair,” thick and wavy like my mother’s. While my two brothers had straight, thin hair, I had a virtual helmet of red-blond locks with a mind of its own. …

Doing the mental math — Over Memorial Day weekend, I found myself sitting in the Great Room in the lodge at Easton Mountain, a retreat center for gay men in the wilds of Upstate New York. A formerly regular visitor, Easton was my second home for almost 20 years, a refuge. Now I’m back, sitting…

Bending toward justice — In the space of 35 years, since I came out in the mid-1980s, nervously tiptoeing out of the closet, life has changed for me and other LGBT people in dramatic ways. In just one or two generations, the arc of the moral universe, (to paraphrase Martin Luther King), has bent…