The term “McCain Mutiny” is the invention of my father, Victor H. Clausen, who, along with my mother, visited me in New York during the run-up to the May 19th Madison Square Garden donnybrook and not only tolerated but encouraged my hectic round of organizing … [Read more...]

In his memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, Samuel Delaney uses the metaphor of parallel columns to refer to the ways in which the parts of our lives that might variously be labeled “private” and “public,” or … [Read more...]

Today was all green and blue and pink and white like a present waiting to be unwrapped. The lilac in my back yard, planted a dozen years ago as a tiny slip of a bush, has gotten so tall I have trouble reaching to cut the blossoms, but I love looking down on them … [Read more...]

I’m teaching Samuel Delany’s memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction in the East Village to my undergraduate class (“Reading the Queer Renaissance”). This is only the second time I’ve read the book; the first was last summer, when I was … [Read more...]

I was going to write about June, about June Jordan, I wanted to write about what it’s like to watch, to watch your contemporaries complete themselves in death so there will be no more, no more words, so every word becomes so much more valuable than when it was just … [Read more...]