Article first appeared in The Orlando Sentinel, June 4, 2018 Circa 1979, I walked into a lesbian bar with a friend who fit that profile. Once inside, roughly 50 lesbians glanced at me — a man — before turning back to their drinks. I became invisible. But this isn’t about lesbians. It’s about racism. And […]
Read More →Monuments are artistic things that we, the living, put up to honor our past. A big tombstone suggests that the dead guy was important. Medium-sized tombstones mean a person was loved. Tiny tombstones suggest a pauper passed on. How important was someone? Look at the size and expense of his monument. As a result, the […]
Read More →Every Christmas movie worth its salt has a single underlying message: The only important thing in life is the way we treat each other. It has Biblical references in the golden rule, and it’s the core concept of anti-bullying campaigns. It’s also the underpinning of any solid society because a how-we-treat-each-other philosophy is the glue […]
Read More →A laser focus on bigots misses the point. Hate drives most of today’s problems. We spend too much time talking as if hate and bigotry are the same thing. Imagine two people: Ida Mae Everton, who just happens to have the first name of my great-grandmother, loves all God’s creatures. She has cats and dogs, […]
Read More →The unexpected dinner guest, for me, is a six-foot drag queen with two-inch eyelashes and head-to-toe body glitter. But first some background. In 1967, Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn welcomed their daughter and fiancé home for dinner only to discover that the young man was black – a “shudder” mixed-race couple in the movie “Guess […]
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