I grew up in the West End of Saint Paul, Minnesota in the 1940s and ’50s. Back then, the West End—it was also called West 7th Street–was a solid, upstanding, church-going, white working-class community. All of us went to Monroe High School (named for James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president, 1817-1825), grades 9-12, on Palace […]
In the 1952 American presidential election, Republican Dwight Eisenhower ran against Democrat Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower was a five-star general in the army and Stevenson was the governor of Illinois. I’m so old I was in grade school back then and my teacher Miss Kelly, who was big for Stevenson—as I think about it, this may […]
On August 10th, 2018, Richard Russell, 29-years-old and married, a baggage handler at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who had no training as a pilot, and who as far as anyone knows had never flown a plane before, took an empty 75-seater twin-turboprop Bombardier Q400 plane and flew it for about an hour over Puget Sound, executing […]
Back in 2008, I wrote an essay/review—I called it a review at the time, but it was as much an essay as a review—of the book Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy by Michael S. Sherry (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). The book was informative and personally helpful. It got […]
The only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes you recognize to be base. All civilization is founded on [man’s] cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. Men will never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose—fighting for an […]
