M is for Mystical Moon Mantra,
M is for Mother,
M is for the Man Who Fell To Earth…

It’s been quite a year so far now, hasn’t it?

I really must say that the death of David Bowie hit me a lot harder, and at quite a different angle, than I would have expected; largely this has to do with the parallel/proximity to the anniversary of my mother’s death (as you might have guessed). Continue reading M is for… →

I am about to share with you a dream that I had last night.

I didn’t really remember it, upon starting my day. I had vague recollections of waking in the night at some point to go pee, and thinking as I did so that an important dream had just been dreamt.

As I readied myself for work, Andrew asked me how I slept: Continue reading Beyond a place of words…there is still language →

One week from today marks seven years since my mother died of pancreatic cancer. This winter, I have been struggling more than usual with the shadows and cold of the season, but it wasn’t until the middle of this week that it occurred to me that this phenomenon is linked to the above-mentioned anniversary.

Grief and emotions are strange things. The older I get, the more I realize that I’ve never really understood–much less mastered–them as deeply as I thought I did… Continue reading Into Darkness →

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much a single person can change another person’s life–often without actually actively trying.

I’ve been thinking about the importance of living authentically; of self-examination in the pursuit of personal truth; of embracing and having pride in oneself.

To that end, today I want to write about someone who I owe a great deal of my life’s happiness to, whether he realizes it or not…today, I’d like to tell you a story about Adam Hardy. Continue reading The Power Of One →

I have been HIV positive since January 17th, 2009. I’m not writing today to tell that story.

I’m writing today to tell you about my own personal experiences as an enthusiastically sexually active HIV-positive gay man, and how drastically my experiences have changed in the span of a mere two years. I’m writing today to offer my own anecdotal opinions on PrEP, and the overwhelming cultural shift I have witnessed in the advent of its widespread use, in addition to the increasing awareness of the treatment as prevention strategy. Continue reading World AIDS Day: A Slut’s Perspective →

“And this is magic, is it? This is gonna get them out of there, yeah?…Fucking Polaroid pictures? Bags full of corn?…”
“Stay with it, darling.”
“I mean, I know it sounds a bit fucking crazy, and that, but maybe we’d be better going up against The Army with, like, guns and rocket launchers, don’t you think?”
“It wouldn’t work; they have better weapons than we do. On the other hand, we have the best corn, darling.
The operate within a rigid hierarchy. They can’t even imagine how to flow with chaos. . . ‘Empty-handed insurrection’. They don’t believe that’s possible.
And they don’t have a clue just how good at doing the impossible we actually are.”
–Jack Frost and Lord Fanny, from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles

The above exchange has been in the forefront of my mind, much of the past month. In the story I’ve quoted, Lord Fanny (a Brazilian transvestite shaman) and Jack Frost (a future Buddha from Liverpool), with the aide of some friends, use tribal magic to break into a top-secret and top-security U.S. government base in New Mexico (think “the real Roswell”) to rescue other members of their team of freedom fighters. I’ve long been a fan of The Invisibles–a quasi-fictional epic about the ultimate conspiracy of “good” versus “evil”–but currently, my fixation on the quoted dialogue has been largely metaphorical. Continue reading The Best Corn →

Well I like it. I mean, cute guys, and Liza, and dish–it’s not a cure for AIDS, Jeffrey. But it’s the opposite of AIDS.
–Darius, from Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey

I know that there is more love in the world than anything else because love expands, and fear and hatred and ignorance contract. You should love someone, and you should let someone love you back. It’s the most political act you can make. It’s the only thing that really changes the world.
–Penny Arcade, from Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”

This quote is attributed to the late actor Ken Hudgins (as I myself just discovered via Google), and I believe that it stands as a universal truth. Certainly, it has been a major guiding principle of my own adult life. Continue reading The Opposite of… →

Expansion and contraction: Two universal motions as certain as gravity, responding to varying factors in physics.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Given that I’ve spent so much time and space this month writing about such expansive concepts as love, trust, and hope, I suppose it should not come as a surprise to me that there is now a correspondent shrinking; although this has been touched off by a particular event which I shall not go into here presently, the truth is that this bipolarity has always existed (not just in me but all humans), so experiencing it at the present moment should be of no surprise. Continue reading The Waning Moon Blues →

Note: I missed a day in my daily writing practice, yesterday. The circumstances of my Sunday in LA began with me waking up somewhere in Pasadena and not getting back to Silverlake until around 5pm–with a flight leaving shortly after 8–so trying to squeeze in an entry in that relatively narrow time window was unrealistic (my laptop, of course, had not come with me on my adventures the night before, so I was without my writing tool most of the day), and though I had envisioned writing while on the plane, the truth is that once they pressurized the cabin, I lost consciousness almost immediately. Perhaps it’s all best in the end, as the thoughts I’d wished to write about may not have coalesced so gracefully in my drunken/exhausted state.

Sunday, as I sat on the patio of Basix in the heart of West Hollywood, sipping bottomless mimosas and cackling with laughter in conversation with my four fellow homos–two of whom I’d known for less than twenty-four hours–I was marveling inwardly at how easily connection can sometimes be felt; at how many commonalities there seem to be within the various cultures I am enmeshed with and what a familiar language and anthropological similarity we have. Continue reading Travel Reminders →