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Parading
Several years ago I wrote descriptions of three parades I’d attended in Seattle. The Seafair Torchlight Family Parade had been full of drunkenness, near-nudity (and more than a few flashed nipples and...
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Fear, itself
In December, 1999, a U.S. Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington became suspicious of one passenger driving his car off a ferry from Canada, and asked him to step out of the car. While she was...
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Surplus Population
In A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge is trying to get rid of the men soliciting charity donations, he declares, “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population!”...
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Repost: Living for 9/12
On another blog, I posted this a few days before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I re-post now because, well, I haven’t come up with anything wiser in the years since: Living for...
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Not the cool one
I love The Big Bang Theory. I didn’t expect to. In fact, when I read about the show before it first aired, I was convinced that not only would it be horrible, but that it would obviously be a...
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This time it’s (not so) personal
When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic...
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Romanticizing the exotic
My Great-uncle Lyle used to tell the story of how his grandparents (my great-great grandparents) married. Great-great-grandpa had been raised a good Irish Catholic boy. He wanted to marry a Native...
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Abyss gazing
It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my...
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Forgotten or Unknown?
Our collective memory can be frightfully shallow. Take, for instance, an on-line discussion I was in recently where there were people who weren’t aware that not that many years ago it was illegal to be...
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Skewed polls and secret money
A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them...
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Which came first, the bunny or the egg?
Which came first, the bunny or the egg? It is a question which has baffled philosophers1 since the dawn of time4. The real question is: which came first, the quaint custom surrounding a particular...
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Not so recent
Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone...
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Frothy!
Ten years ago yesterday, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum gave his infamous “man on dog sex” interview. Most people focus on those comments and how they apply to the gay rights debate, but...
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History is longer than you think
I have complained before1 about fantasy authors whose world-building includes statements like, “the peace didn’t last long, because 400 years later…” because history isn’t just a time line, it’s also...
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A good day to die
Readers can be like addicts. Once they fall in love with a fictional character, they want to read more, and more, and more about the character. A good-selling series of books can set a writer for life....
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All in the (video) family
My dad didn’t like All in the Family. I think he and Archie had way too much in common, and seeing his own opinions laughed at rubbed him the wrong way. So we only watched it occasionally in the first...
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Why I marched the first time
Why did I march in my first Pride Parade? Because for years I was deathly afraid that people would guess. I was certain that, if people knew I was gay, that everyone would despise me. Why would anyone...
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Why I marched the other times
Oh, the many reasons one continues to march in Pride Parades after that first exhilarating time… One reason I marched in so many parades was because I was a founding member of the (now defunct) Seattle...
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The Last Founding Father
Unlike certain former governors I could name, I can name my favorite Founding Father: Thomas Jefferson. Not only do I have a favorite, I have gotten into debates with friends about why he was the best...
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Future events such as these
Jared attending an editorial meeting via FaceTime. (Click to embiggen)I like living in the future. We had an editorial board meeting last night, and it being busy, crazy summertime, we almost didn’t...
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