January 26, 2019


Des Pres on Spotify.

The many-headed illness lifted in what seemed a single second last night. Suddenly I was light and full of purpose again. That was the exact second when I realized I was sick of the intellectual cowardice of my students, their learned dependency, that a new testament of my life was able to begin. With health comes revelation? It is dark morning and I’m feeling the same.

And I want to report the gush of inspired writing after I thought that might be gone. I was just sick. Maybe one looks back on every bad patch and says, “I was just sick.”


Creepy boy from last semester complains about me for using the word “faggot” in class (reproducing a contemporary Dubliner’s reaction to Hugh Lane) My response:

 Since I came to Asheville, I was a member and, for a while, a leading figure in Asheville’s first gay organization. CLOSER. I was a founding member of SALGA, the Southern Appalachian Lesbian Gay Alliance, a far more activist and political organization, which grew out of CLOSER.  I was SALGA’s Hate Crimes Coordinator, and took calls and made reports when a gay, lesbian, or transgendered person reported crimes or discrimination against themselves. In this capacity I was SALGA’s unofficial liaison to both the police and the Citizen Times. In a time when “gayness” was far less acceptable and far more dangerous than it is now, I was a constant respondent to hate letters in the local media, to the point where the CT or WCQS would actually ask me for a response if I hadn’t volunteered it. For this I received hate mail and death threats. Some came to me and some, embarrassingly, to my chairman or the Vice Chancellors, who were the Provosts of the time. Asheville has had 3 gay print publications and I have written, under my own name, for all of them. I am a founding member of Cantaria, now called the Gay Men’s Chorus of Asheville, with which I have performed publically for twenty years. I performed with “Asheville on Broadway”, a gay theater enterprise seeking to raise money for AIDS patients. This lasted, I think, about four years. It was pretty much expected that everyone on stage was gay.  Twice I won the Gay Playwrights Prize given by Sunnyspot Productions, and had my –yes, gay– plays produced successfully in New York City. The next year my gay take on Abraham Lincoln– The Loves of Mr Lincoln–was produced in New York. It is likely this will be done in Asheville in the coming year. My gay play Anna Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges opened the Chicago Theater season one year. I was Board Member of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, a national group based in New York which doled out money to gay theater projects. A collection of gay poetry, A Dream of Adonis, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2012. I have TWO gay novels coming out this year. Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers springs from the artistic life of Asheville in the ‘80's and early ‘90's. The Falls of the Wyona won the prestigious Quill Prize for Queer Writing and appears in May from Red Hen Press. The cover features two boys holding hands in a forest. Have I made my point? I have earned the right use the word “faggot” whenever and however I see fit. 

Yet one wonders how long the Adolescent Inquisition will go on. Probably until someone says, “You know, your feelings are not actually the most important things in the world.”

Cold mostly gone, but lingering is a titanic cough that sometimes doesn’t allow you to inhale, so you cough again and again, hard, without any breath in you. It’s horrible.

Forgot to mention the purple eyes of crocus opened in my yard a week ago.