“Suppose you listen to me for a change?… I said listen to me! I’m tired of being pushed around. Tired of being told what to do. Tired of writing your god-darned articles. Tired of dancing to everybody else’s tune. Tired of being told whom to marry. In short… I’m tired!” That Barbara Stanwyck tirade from …
My mom and her sister took turns having kids in the 1980s: I was born in ’83, my brother in ’84, and cousins followed in ’85 and ’86. Together we spent our childhoods running around our grandparents’ house, with the exception of a cousin we’ll call Brandon, who rolled. Born without use of his legs …
Boy, am I elderly. If you’re looking for anything new and exciting (TM, A Stranger Among Us), you won’t find it here; perusing my year-end stats on iTunes, I see among my most-played songs of 2023 nothing too recent — across the top 10 entries, shared below, the newest came out almost nine years ago. If …
In the wee small hours of the morning, after I’ve been roused by strange noises, strange intestines, strange movements, or strange music, I often think about my dog. Muriel’s sleep is deep enough that on my own sleepless nights I can (quietly) move around a bit upstairs, as long as it’s not yet 4 am. …
There wasn’t enough room in my recent Twist of Faith review to accommodate ramblings about Weezer, sexy cantors, Toni Braxton’s A Star is Born moment, and whether my great-grandmother abandoned Orthodox Judaism to spend less time in the kitchen. We can do that here instead. I waffled about whether to include a very special “…But …
My former partner bought our tickets to Cher’s Dressed to Kill Tour as soon as the sale went live in the fall of 2013. The show was scheduled for months later, which gave her adequate time to acquire the tank top she wanted that questionably depicted the iconic performer as Che Guevara. Together we had …
It is a uniquely gay problem to routinely awaken to thoughts of Liza Minnelli, but here I stand before you, dark circles under my eyes, affirming that I’ve been afflicted by this condition for years now, since first listening to Results. Several times a year, sometimes for weeks at a time, I wake up with …
“What’s going on down there?” Crankenstein called downstairs from our bedroom one night a couple weeks ago, her tone suggesting more confusion than annoyance. “I’m serenading Muriel as I unload the dishwasher,” I replied of the off-the-cuff (and probably equally off-key) Nat King Cole medley in which I faithfully substituted ‘woo,’ one of Muriel’s favorite …
When you’re told enough times that you’re a worthless piece of shit, you unfortunately start to believe it — particularly when the person doing the telling is someone you love very deeply, who didn’t always treat you like garbage. By the end of my last relationship, I was used to having both insults and the …
There are, to date, two people in my life I’ve loved so unguardedly that ‘the mere idea of them,’ to paraphrase Nat King Cole (or rather, Ray Noble), can almost instantly reduce to me tears if I’m not careful. My grandma is one of them. If Papa, Grandma’s husband and the towering influence of my …