A night of sailing down the Rio de la Plata brought us to our first port of call, the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo. The morning was as bright and as placid as the sun that adorns the Uruguayan national flag. Until that morning, Montevideo meant not much more to...
Our time in Buenos Aires was unluckily short: we got there on a Sunday, and left on the ship on Tuesday. But we did have the good luck to get there in time for Sunday's bustling, carnival-like San Telmo flea market, where amid browsing through the many booths and...
I'm so glad to be back home after a fun, interesting, and badly-needed vacation to South America. Dan and I flew to Buenos Aires on Sunday, Nov. 17, and spent two nights there. Then we got on a cruise ship that took us down the coast of Argentina, around Cape Horn,...
The election already seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? All that worrying over whether voters would deny same-sex marriage rights in the states of Maine and Maryland and Washington? When I was writing last week's blog, I told myself, but didn't dare say out...
It's been four years since I woke up on the Wednesday after Election Day, 2008, to learn that California voters had approved a consitutional amendment to deny marriage rights to same-sex couples. I remember how hollowed-out I felt on that day and the days that...
As I was saying last week, I've learned that for reading from your work at an open mike, it's important to put yourself out there. So last Wednesday, at the Magnet event in the Castro, I stepped to the mike and read a passage that included the following gay...
Last Wednesday night, on a night so unseasonably warm that I drank a cold lemonade at an outside café beforehand, I took a turn reading aloud from my work at Smack Dab, the open mike hosted by the inimitable Larry-bob Roberts and Kirk Read and held at Magnet, the...
Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing a few of my favorite details from "You Are Here," and I can't think of a better way to start than the novel's beginning, where the hero, Peter Bankston, who works the register at a fictional coffee shop, is standing on a...
I just wanted to extend a warm thank-you to everyone who stopped by my ironing board at the Temescal Art Hop last Friday night. (I got word from my husband that the lead actor from "Entourage" was there, but I never saw him.) I had gone into the event thinking I'd...
Although I wrote the first draft of You Are Here in the late 1990s, I didn't really kick my writing into full gear until 2008-2009, the novel's final time setting. As any good gay marriage historian knows, 2008 is the year that a slim majority of California voters...
