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In the dream, half real life and half Broadway show, I'm literally laying in the middle of the street, kicked and beaten.

(How I got there, I have no idea.)

Suddenly, they're looming over me: a shoulder-to-shoulder chorus line of men in army boots and black jock straps, rainbow flags hanging like breastplates over their bare chests.

My friend M, one of the line, tosses me a black jock strap of my own, and extends a hand. I take both, and climb to my feet beside him.

The army boots, I'm already wearing. I fumble with the waist button to my trousers. Time for a little on-stage costume change.

“Pretty Fierce”

Because it tells the story of two South Florida high school seniors—one Jewish, one Hindu—falling in love, chances are Jared Frieder's 2022 film Three Months will end up getting slotted into the “Queer Cinema” box.

If so, that's a pity, since the film addresses larger and more universal issues as well, including the nature of being an outsider.

“What's it like, being Jewish?” the Hindu boy asks.

“There are seven kinds of Jews,” answers the Jewish boy. “Three of them are pretty fierce.”

Quantification aside (read: symbolic), that's surely about as naff a response as one could hope for.

So, what's it like, being a witch?

Angered by Garland Death, NYC Homosexuals Riot.

That was how I first heard about the Stonewall Uprising.

The long, hot summer of 1969. Judy Garland was dead.

In conservative suburban Steeltown, USA, a skinny, tow-headed stripling, who knows that he's different from other people and is trying to figure out why, hears the word “homosexuals” on the radio news.

His ears immediately prick up.

Angered by Garland Death, NYC Homosexuals Riot.

Nothing about centuries of deadly, Biblically-sanctioned oppression.

Nothing about decades of unjust, targeted police harassment.

Judy Garland, a known homosexual icon (Why?), was dead. Therefore, the homosexuals were rioting.

Takeaway #1: Nothing that these people do makes any sense. Therefore,

Takeaway #2: These people are not to be taken seriously.

Believe me, trivialization is nothing new to gay men. We've seen it for years. We see it still today.

When we and our experience are reduced to a single letter in an ugly, ever-expanding, and increasingly-unwieldy non-acronym, what is that but trivialization?

When we and our experience become just one stripe in an ever-increasing, ever-more-meaningless, ever more ugly “rainbow” flag, what is that but trivialization?

54 years have passed since that Summer of Stonewall. Much has changed. Much hasn't.

A Pride Moment

There was once a woman who had three sons, each more handsome than the next.

It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? In fact, it's a true story, and one of my favorite Pride moments: up there, in fact, with my first dorm-room kiss from my first boyfriend.

Scene: The community Beltane Pancake Breakfast.

(I live in Paganistan; things like that happen here.)

I'm sitting at a table, talking with the woman with three beautiful sons. Across the table from us, her youngest sits in his boyfriend's lap. They're kissing.

The room is filled with festive pagans. No one even notices the passionate same-sex lip-lock.

A bubble of happiness expands to fill my chest. “I've worked my entire life to get us to a place where two boys can make out in a crowded room, and no one so much as blinks an eye,” I think. “And here we finally are.”

Of course, in the gold of the human heart, there are no unalloyed emotions.

Oh, that lucky, lucky boyfriend.

Out of the blue one night I get a call from my first boyfriend. We haven't spoken since our explosive break-up decades before.

(A convert to Catholicism, who would eventually enter the priesthood, he told me once, “I love you more than I love God,” and then promptly freaked, because it was true. Poor benighted Christian, it never occurred to him that one best does the one precisely by doing the other.)

As we reminisce about our times together, he confirms something that I had long thought I remembered about that very first wine-fueled kiss.

There really were fireworks going off in that room that night.

He saw them too.

Not a Review of Kim Joel Booster's Fire Island

I am pagan. Therefore, I support the right to discriminate

As pagans, we understand the importance—not just the importance, but the value and, in fact, the cultural necessity—of any given self-selected group's right to exclude non-members while associating freely within itself: with the necessary proviso, of course, that such a right cannot be universal, but always (by necessity) time- and place-bound.

If this is so, then Kim Joel Booster's Fire Island may well be the most pagan movie of the summer.

Can't stand feel-good movies. Don't like rom-coms, especially gay ones. No big fan of Jane Austen, whom I really can't help but suspect would, if she weren't a woman, be read today only by English Lit grad students.

Here's what I really liked about this summer's gay feel-good rom-com, the newest iteration of the Pride and Prejudice franchise, though: with the exception of one nightmarish flashback scene, there are no straight people in the film. None.

A group of gay friends go to Gay Island for one last dizzying swirl of what passes for gay male “culture”, in all its shallow, abs-obsessed dysfunctionality.

Gods: how incredibly refreshing.

One lesbian. (Margaret Cho's character, though, is anything but token.) No straight characters. No (current media darlings that they are) trans characters. Not even any bisexuals. Just men for men telling our own story, for a change, with lots of gratuitous nudity, sex, and good-looking guys.

The Horned One be praised.

Not that I have nothing against trans folk, straight folk, or lesbians, mind you. Those stories, too, I value. It's just that everyone deserves a chance to talk about themselves every now and then. Enough about you: let's (finally) talk about me for a change, OK?

 Sexual Content

The Marinos Poems

Three Lost Epigrams from Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology

I

You turned down Marinos?

Marinos the Golden, heart-throb of Athens,

muse to ten thousand epigrams, this one included?

Well, Daphne fled from Apollo, they say,

fairest Olympian, gayest of gods,

for whom boys dance naked.

More the fool her.

II

"Bet you a blow job," said Marinos.

Now that's what I call unfair.

Convenience is no excuse.

Goodbye, LGBTQIA+.

I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you.

The ugly, unpronounceable, ever-expanding, increasingly-meaningless-in-its-generality ("Allies"? Seriously?) alphabet monster deserves to die with a stake through its heart.

I hate that it 'disappears' gay men, reducing us to one letter in an impenetrable line-up.

I hate that it makes it easy to generalize about a population of sexual and gender minorities who—quite frankly—often have very little in common with one another except for the fact that other people hate us.

I hate that it gives everyone else credit for the triumphs, tragedies, and accomplishments of gay men.

Back at the beginning of covid, a screamer walked onto a subway car in New York, and started, at the top of his lungs, blaming—as the radio interviewer euphemistically put it—'the LGBTQ community' for the pandemic.

But we all know that that wasn't what the screamer really said, of course. We also know that he wasn't blaming lesbians, or transsexuals, or the intersex, for covid.

He was blaming fags.

As gay men, we bear a outsized burden of cultural hatred. Reducing us to one letter among many negates our story.

I'm all for solidarity, but not at the expense of identity.