I appreciate your asking my advice.

My short answer to what ANY aspiring writer should do: Write.

Any aspiring writer should write, find your voice, find what you have to say, write because you enjoy it, because that enjoyment is what makes you a writer. Practice it like any other skill. Write, and start looking around for the magazines/journals/newspapers/websites/what-have-you that publish things similar to what you write. Look for their submission guidelines, and when you feel ready, send them things.

I have an M.F.A. in creative writing. However, you don’t need school to become a writer. Sometimes writing programs can make you self-conscious about their work, less free to simply do the writing you want to do. Writing programs are better once you feel relatively secure in your writing voice.

The writer/teacher life is a trade-off. I teach part-time, which is less secure, but leaves more time to write. Full-time college teachers are often expected to have a Ph.D. I don’t think this is worth it: 8+ years and too much debt for not enough job security. I know many people who have gotten a Ph.D. and not found work as professors, or found work only in places they’d rather not live (and sometimes live there anyway, unhappily). But some writers do get Ph.Ds, and teach, and write on their breaks. This is probably more suited to those who write scholarly work.

Alternatively, any number of jobs are delighted to have someone who works in words. Editing, copyediting, proofreading, freelancing… Even a receptionist or assistant is more valuable if he or she can dash off a clear letter or email or memo, etc..

Finally, even if you love writing, it need not be your day job. Writers need to have something to write about. If someone is only a writer, do they write about writing all day? Everything you learn and experience makes you a stronger writer, gives you a more developed mental model with which to understand and describe the world.

I hope this is helpful. Keep writing!

Boy, that wasn’t a question you heard every day.
———————

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t find me anywhere near a synagogue or a demonstration – at least not in the last few years – but put them together, and I was intrigued.

How does one prepare for a sacred ritual service that is also a political demonstration? Can these two intentions cohabitate in the same space? Does it cheapen or commodify the ritual to use it for political means; or, is it actually the highest expression of that ritual, making it alive and relevant to the present day?

And why does religious ceremony, at its heart, look so similar to a protest (and theater, for that matter) – create a space, set intentions, enact a ritual and see what happens? What would happen?
————————

The High Holydays – especially Rosh Hashanah and its ten-days-later counterpart, Yom Kippur – are the Christmas and Easter of Judaism. Even the Jews who never go to synagogue, like myself, will sometimes go on the high holydays, or at least feel guilty for staying home. Kol Nidre is the evening service that kicks off Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There is no fun to be had on Yom Kippur: no food, no drink, no sex, and lots and lots of praying. You wear white and hit yourself in the chest for your “sins”. For me Yom Kippur is a dizzy memory of low blood sugar, even fainting a few years running, until I finally declared it inhumane and quit fasting. Let’s just say I have tremendous ambivalence about institutionalized Judaism.

To bend Thoreau a bit, I distrust any religion that requires new (or girly) clothes. Fortunately, since we would be holding services outside in 50-degree weather, I figured my usual pants were okay. I wanted to be able to run. I was terrified of getting arrested.

I had been to only a few protests since being entrapped and arrested by the NYPD at the 2004 Republican National Convention as part of an 1800+ person roundup of demonstrators and passersby. Many of us were housed at Pier 57, a bus garage full of soot and fumes. At Occupy Wall Street, the NYPD were employing the same scare tactics: They would surround a protest, with their bodies or orange netting or both, and then – with no warning, no call to disperse, no freedom to leave – the cops would lock up everyone present. Let’s just say I didn’t have it in me to go through this again.

But I wanted to go. I was tired of being frightened out of my right to assemble. I was tired of feeling like a “bad” Jew, if such a thing is even possible. Finally, holding Yom Kippur services at Occupied Wall Street seemed, in some ways, the perfect place for a holiday that is essentially about reminding ourselves that we are the 99%. The facebook invitation, written by Daniel Sieradski, says it best:

This Friday night begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. On this day, Jews around the world refrain from all physical pleasures (eating, bathing and screwing, to name a few), and devote themselves to prayer and supplication, begging the Lord forgiveness of their sins so that they may be written into the Book of Life.

But is fasting and beating our chests really the best we can do to redeem ourselves?

As lower Manhattan erupts with thousands of protesters taking a stand against economic injustice, the words of the prophet Isaiah resonate more truthfully and appropriately than ever:

“Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the fetters of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy healing shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee, the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.”

Thus rather than spending the holiday safe and warm in our cozy synagogues thinking abstractly about human suffering, perhaps we should truly afflict ourselves and undertake the fast of Isaiah, by joining the demonstrators in Zuccotti Park, and holding our Yom Kippur services there amongst the oppressed, hungry, poor and naked.

Not to be cliché, but as Rabbi Hillel the Elder said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Ten minutes before the 7 pm service, Zuccotti Park was a carnival of overstimulation, sounds zinging off the surrounding metallic buildings, drums and cheering echoing from one end of the park, and the buzz of talking everywhere. The block-long park was packed with hundreds of people, many of them the scruffy early twenties boys that hung around the Indy office ten years ago (do they age?) – people holding up signs, sprawled on the ground, dishing out or slurping up food, reading the Occupied Wall Street Journal, sitting behind tables, sorting recycling, talking animatedly (some in Spanish) – but nothing that looked like a prayer gathering.

The other people looking for the service were easy to pick out: They looked much too clean to have been at the park very long, their hair shiny and combed, their white shirts glowing as if under black light. Two college girls with tiny overplucked eyebrows latched on to me as a guide; I led us over to the information booth and found out that services were back across Broadway. That’s how cacophanous it was: so much going on you could miss a thousand people gathered across the street.

Policemen in blue uniforms, and their bosses in white shirts, massed at the corner as we waited to cross Broadway. A car idled in the road as a girl handed a puppy to the driver through the window. This outraged one of the white shirts. “Keep it movin’, keep it movin!” he barked, pounding on the hood. The girl looked scared and instead got in the car with the puppy, and they drove off. The light changed and we crossed through the sea of policemen, exchanging wary glances.

Once across the street, services were easy to spot. A line of food carts, ironically, blocked off the fasting prayergoers from Broadway. About a thousand people sat in a circle, fifteen rings of people around the central speakers – Sarah Wolf, Avi Fox-Rosen and Getzel Davis. (I am deliberately calling them “speakers” rather than “leaders.” Easily a tangent: natural authority vs. institutionalized authority, giving them credit for their guidance of the group while affirming the collectivity of the event, et cetera.) They wore headlamps to light up their prayerbooks, which put me in mind of camping, making the service that much more unreal. They turned as they spoke, a lazy Susan of prayer, trying to engage every sector of the crowd.

My new friends and I ducked behind the big red statue — 25 policemen were just standing there in their blue uniforms, arms crossed, big clubs dangling from their belts. Quickly we skittered back around to the front of the statue. I spied Jess, an old protest acquaintance, and squeezed in behind her; she was sharing her prayerbook with Davi, another queer Jewish acquaintance. I knew them from different places, different New York eras of my life; while it didn’t surprise me that they knew each other, it made me glad that I’d trusted my community and shown up, instead of staying home for lack of a protest “buddy”. [Edit: Turns out they had just met. Proves my point even more.]

The crowd was mostly – but not all – Ashkenazi, largely people in their 20s and 30s but again not all, many older folks among us. The clothing issue was moot because most people had on their coats. Many wore tallises or fringed scarves.

At first I had trouble following the service. It was hard to hear, before I got the hang of the “people’s mic”. Sound equipment is not allowed, so speakers say a few words at a time and the listeners repeat it back through the crowd, like an echo: DIY amplification. I liked not being miked — made it less performative (“the rabbi show”) and more interactive. You actually had to pay attention to what was being said, because you had to pass it on, and in doing so got a moment to consider how you felt about the message. Also, you were needed by the people behind you who couldn’t hear. You were connected.

This was especially powerful in Davis’ sermon. Imagine this being passed back through an echo circle:

According to our myth (“According to our myth”), Yom Kippur is the day that we are forgiven for worshipping the golden calf. What is the golden calf? It is the essence of idol worship. It the fallacy that gold is G!d. How do we become forgiven for worshiping gold?

You know friends, it is hard not to worship gold, or power, or any of the other idols that our society shoves down our throats. I believe that this is why the Torah tells us that there is something else created in the image of G!d.

Us.

Imagine this moving through the crowd, a verbal wave: Us.

Us.

Us.

Instead of the traditional Aleinu, people shouted out resolutions for the coming year. “I love this prayer,” I said. “I wanted to sing it.” “Me too,” said a girl beside me. “Let’s sing.” So we did. It was oddly moving, our voices singing the old words amidst all that chaos, both of us knowing the tune without having to check in.

All the up-and-down of the service is a pain in the butt when you are actually in a shul with an actual seat, but even more of a pain (and hard on the knees!) when you are sitting in a huge crowd on concrete, and have to fight for your two inches of space every time you sit down again.

Overall very surreal: the sacred day, the huge crowd, the scowling cops, the familiar prayers. The smell of felafel wafted over from the food carts; the parade of protesters went by a couple times, replete with whistles, bells and instruments.

Strangest, perhaps, to say the Shma with all those people. It felt too public for such a sacred one-with-the-deity prayer. I had to cover my eyes, and even then it felt strange, too intimate to share, almost a violation.

Afterwards was the usual schmoozing, my favorite part of both shul and demonstrations. Lots of queer Jews and theater people, the JFREJ crowd. Some people seemed exhausted and overwhelmed; some had energy to spare, singing “Lo Yisa Goy” along with a guitar player, god bless hippie Jews. I gave and got a lot of hugs, shana tova, shana tova. A few of the Rude Mechanicals invited me to eat but I wanted to go home, clear out some space, burn some incense, look at the trees.

I wish I could say I had some moment of realization, some magical feeling of belonging, but I didn’t. I left feeling spooked by all the police, annoyed that I didn’t feel like I had more “buddies,” more safety. I didn’t feel inspired to go to synagogue again, nor another protest, though I was glad to have done my combined duty and shown up for both. I was glad to have been there, but I still felt alienated, still felt relieved to come back to my familiar apartment and reacquaint myself with my sacred objects. I fell asleep early and dreamed of dead loved ones; when I woke it took longer than usual to remember that they were gone.

While the setting of Occupied Wall Street was in some ways beautifully in keeping with the spirit of Yom Kippur, in other ways it felt fundamentally at odds. At one point I turned to the girl beside me and said it felt blasphemous to have the service with all these buildings around. “How can you pray to God when you can’t even see the trees, let alone the moon?”

But that’s probably another story.

Amen.

(For Jamie, who said, “I can’t wait to read it!”)

Saturday I set out for a good meandering. Beacon is a steep hill sloping up to pristine Mount Beacon, loaded with trails. I thought about going up the mountain, then went down to the water instead, rented a kayak for a couple of hours.

Kayaking, aka Heaven on Earth: languid drifting punctuated by fits of exertion. I took rowing lessons for a month this summer at the Newburgh Rowing Club, just across the water from Beacon. At the rowing club we never rowed past the Beacon-Newburgh Bridge – only up to it and back, up to it and back, every week – so I paddled under the bridge and down a ways just to see what was there. Mostly trees and train tracks – a stand of pines with a crows’ nest, a flock of seagulls on a piling.

I felt so present to the moment and grateful to be out kayaking. I had never felt that free in a kayak before. At the rowing club they directed us where and how much to row; at Manhattan’s free kayaking you paddle round and round in the man-made basin between the piers, basically a kayak rink. I had never just had a kayak to just go wherever with. I am definitely doing that again, one day in my own boat.

Went up to the bridge and past it a bit, then turned around when the current got strong. Had a blast coming back. That old cliche really is true when you say it non-metaphorically: it is decisively easier to drift with the current than to struggle with rowing against it. Basically got blown back, a sweet rocking breeze, as I nibbled cashews and scanned the mountains for hints of autumn. There were some yellow hints, yes, perhaps even a few red clues, but we are just at the beginning of turning. There’s time yet.

That morning I was headed straight to work, toting my duffel bag from the weekend, hoping my boss wouldn’t chew me out for calling in sick the day before. Verma, a grim-lipped, frosted blonde woman of indeterminate age, ran a tight ship at Periwinkle Publishing, where I was an editorial assistant, one of three hired fresh out of NYU, my first real full-time job.

I actually edited all day, which I was proud of, and enjoyed. What I didn’t enjoy was that Verma had all three assistants working on the same manuscript, a boring self-help book for computer programmers. Gregory, a slightly higher-up editor, had the job of merging our edits. He took most of them out – I know because I sat behind him, reading over his shoulder; all day, as I put in my edits, I watched him take out our edits from the day before. Pretty Sissyphean.

Perhaps because it felt like busywork, I was constitutionally incapable of showing up at the required 9:30 am, arriving five to fifteen minutes late each morning no matter when I woke up or left the apartment. I lived alone in Kensington, Brooklyn, or at least I kept my stuff there. I didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood and I was never home. Most weekends I spent with my parents – my mom was sick with breast cancer – and most evenings I worked late at the Indypendent, a collective progressive newspaper where I did basically the same work as during the day, except that at the Indy no one took out my edits, nor cared what time I came in as long as the work got done.

Still, I tried. So when the train stopped short, jolting me awake, the first thing I did was check my watch. It was just before 9 am. We were stopped for no apparent reason just south of Yonkers, across from the Palisades. We stayed put for about ten minutes – without announcement or explanation – before finally starting up again, going in and out of tunnels, playing hide and seek with the river and the light. It was a gorgeous day, a shame to spend indoors.

We pulled into Penn Station at exactly 9:30. The station was its usual cranked-up insanity, people running everywhere. I jumped on an A train downtown, leaping to a seat on the bench beside a blonde woman loaded with shopping bags. The doors closed, we took off into the dark tunnel – and then this train, too, jerked on the brakes and screeched to a stop, one of the woman’s bags skidding off her lap. We sat in the dark tunnel, again without announcement or explanation, staring at each other in confusion as the minutes added up.

Around 10 am, we jerked into motion again, finally pulling into 14th Street, my stop. I was definitely late, later than I had ever been; I ran down Hudson Street. The sidewalks were crowded and people seemed frantic. All the pay phones had lines halfway down the block. People were frozen in place, staring southward, and I stopped to look.

From here you could see all the way down Hudson Street, to the tip of the island, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. But there seemed to be only one tower, with thick grey smoke billowing from its tip, flickers of orange flame. I know it’s a cliche, but I honestly didn’t believe my eyes. This had to be some sort of special effect, some new Schwarzenegger movie, creating the illusion of the tower on fire.

And then the tower fell. It didn’t fall over, as you might imagine; it fell down onto itself, like a collapsible ladder, like a person with buckled knees, releasing a mushroom cloud of smoke. We all gasped, a collective gasp, a collective experience.

I had to get to work. At least that would be normal. I walked down to 12th Street, over to Greenwich Avenue, to the office. The secretary buzzed me in. I walked up the two flights slowly, almost looking forward to Verma’s lecture.

When I opened the door, everyone was standing there: the two secretaries, the other two editorial assistants, Gregory who took out my edits, and of course Verma. I opened my mouth to start my explanation – the trains, the towers – but Verma cut me short, stepping forward and squeezing me in a vigorous embrace. “Oh, thank God you’re okay!” she exclaimed.

That’s when I really got scared.

———
We sat like zombies at our computers, pretending to work but straining to hear Verma’s radio. She finally freed us around 1 pm. I picked up my duffle bag and headed straight back to Penn Station.

A train to Albany was boarding, and I jumped on. The conductor said it was the first train out all day; I was surprised it wasn’t more crowded. Once we were safely north of the city, headed back up the Hudson, I borrowed a woman’s cell phone (this was before everybody had one).

Mom, I was just calling to let you know I’m okay. I’m on a train, I’m on my way back up to see you.

I’ll have cereal, okay? Listen, I have to go. I have to give this woman back her phone.

——————–

I got laid off from Periwinkle Publishing two months later. Apparently Velma had hired three editorial assistants to see which one of us she wanted to keep. She chose Paul, here on a work visa. If he were laid off he might be deported; the rest of us would just get unemployment.

My mother died in February 2003. And yet her death and 9/11 have become folded together in my memory, the same experience in feeling if not in truth. The unimaginable becoming real. Life no longer safe.

Most everyone agrees that Bert and Ernie love each other.

The popular puppet pair has made a home in that basement apartment on Sesame Street, hanging a picture of themselves on the wall, sleeping in the same room. Furthermore, Bert and Ernie have a congenial intimacy, sharing food and feelings, talking late into the night, exasperating and comforting each other. They have a commitment, a longevity – after all, they’ve been together for over forty years.

But how we interpret Bert and Ernie’s relationship tells us very little about the characters – and volumes about ourselves.

In light of New York state legalizing gay marriage, nearly eight thousand people recently signed a petition urging Sesame Street to “let Bert and Ernie get married“.

When Bert and Ernie were introduced in 1969 – played by Jim Henson and Frank Oz – the characters were presented as friends. This is still Sesame Workshop’s official position. Many consider the duo to be modeled after TV’s The Odd Couple, the famous 1970s roommates who got on each other’s nerves. Back then, on adult television, gay people were mostly invisible. On children’s television, they were unthinkable.

Invisibility was such that this 1977 Sesame Street magazine cover – eminently queer to today’s eyes – could be seen back then without irony or camp. “Fly with us to Fairyland!” Do they mean San Francisco? Also notice this 1980 cover, with Bert and Ernie walking across a rainbow. Gaaaay!

Yet, oddly, queer invisibility gave popular culture – as represented in its cultural productions like our puppet pals – more freedom to act queer, more room to be intimate and homosocial without tripping anyone’s homosexual alarm. Oscar and Felix could fight with the passion of lovers, Bert and Ernie could fly away to Fairyland, and no one would point a finger.

Invisibility also forced the creation of gay culture, replete with theater and ritual. Of necessity, we sought each other out, making a community that went beyond coupledom, the proverbial army of ex-lovers that could not fail. In the 1980s, this network proved invaluable when the AIDS crisis hit. “This is our disease and we must take care of each other and ourselves,” Larry Kramer wrote, and the queer community rose to the task, founding advocacy and activist groups, clinics and hotlines, raising money and awareness, gathering and sharing information, taking care of its own.

Mainstream culture finally noticed queers in the early 1990s, and Bert and Ernie quickly came under fire. Reverend Joseph Chambers, a “crackpot preacher” from North Carolina, said in 1994:

Bert and Ernie are two grown men sharing a house and a bedroom. They share clothes, eat and cook together and have blatantly effeminate characteristics…. If this isn’t meant to represent a homosexual union, I can’t imagine what it’s supposed to represent.

Besides being rife with inaccuracies – Bert and Ernie have neither shared clothes nor cooked together – Chambers’ perspective is telling. To the religious right, effeminacy, same-sex intimacy, homosexuality, and probably puppetry are all the same thing. Chambers recognizes the intimacy between Bert and Ernie, but has no way to interpret it other than as a “homosexual union”. He simply “can’t imagine” what else their love could mean. It’s all or nothing. If they love each other, they’ve got to be gay.

Though it comes from a sweeter place, the petition to marry Bert and Ernie shows a similar lack of imagination, creates a similar zero-sum game. If they love each other, they’ve got to be gay, and now they’ve got to be married. You could say that Bert and Ernie find themselves in the same boat as many domestic partners in New York State – suddenly, the relationship must be elevated to the status of marriage or lose all status. As Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer wrote this week,

Don’t tell me the gay rights movement hasn’t become conservative. Now they’re pressuring Ernie and Bert to get married. Because the only legitimate domestic relationship, even for puppets, is marriage.

Now, as elements of gay culture become more visible, Bert and Ernie’s relationship loses much of its complexity – a loss for straight and queer viewers alike. Yet Sesame Workshop’s response to the petition is also problematic, reiterating its position that Ernie and Bert are just “best friends.”

Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics…. they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

Steve Whitmire, Ernie’s current performer (Eric Jacobson now plays Bert) agrees, “They’re puppets! They don’t exist below the waist!”

However, as a second petition reminds us, this is a clear double standard:

There are Sesame Street Muppets™ who do, in fact, have significant others (Oscar the Grouch has Grundgetta, Forgetful Jones has Clementine, and Count von Count has been linked to several women during his tenure on the show). If Sesame Workshop is truly committed to the idea that puppets do not have a sexual orientation, they should make it a policy across the board. None of the puppets should have romantic relationships on the show.

The elephant in the room, of course, is sex. Really it’s a red herring. This double standard is garden-variety homophobia: gay relationships are about sex, while straight relationships are life as usual. I sometimes get this response when talking about Richard Hunt, whose biography I’m writing, whom I often conveniently shorthand as a “gay Muppeteer”. In many people’s minds, this means I am writing some sort of seamy sexpose, rather than inscribing Hunt into gay culture and community, history and heritage, a generation of talented men lost to AIDS. But Hunt, at least, existed below the waist.

Personally, I don’t want to think about Ernie leaving anything but cookie crumbs in Bert’s bed. But it is not talking about sex to say that a lot of queers grew up watching Sesame Street, and saw something of themselves in Bert and Ernie and their bond. Perhaps they saw something of the life they wanted to live one day, something they didn’t see on, say, The Brady Bunch. Role models are hard to come by, particularly for the LGBTQ community during the decades of not being seen, not being named. Perhaps there is power in naming Bert and Ernie as a romantic queer pair. (Which, still, is not the same as marrying them off.)

Yet I resist defining Bert and Ernie’s relationship in this way – or in any way, really. To flesh out the characters like this limits their complexity. As my friend James V. Carroll says, “Bert and Ernie, like so many classic muppets, are abstract concepts that are intended to reflect the audience’s experience.” Let’s leave Bert and Ernie open for interpretation. Bert and Ernie spark such easy controversy – as well as easy affinity – because so many of us see ourselves and our loved ones in their relationship. We don’t want to lose this connection, don’t want to be told what to make of the affection between them.

And there have been so many lovely interpretations of Bert and Ernie’s relationship, each with its own “evidence.” They have been seen as kids; sometimes they remind me of my dad and uncle as young boys, whispering into the wee hours in their adjacent twin beds. Michael Davis, a Sesame historian, calls the pair “a projection of the real-life friendship between Jim Henson and Frank Oz,” a fitting tribute. And in Ernest and Bertram, a 2002 mashup with Lillian Helman’s The Children’s Hour, Ernie and Bert become closet cases, with a tragic end.

Ideally, what this sort of speculation comes down to is self-identity. Let’s let the characters speak for themselves. In a 1983 pageant, directed by Ernie, Bert plays the role of Cupid. Ernie tries to give Bert a prepared script on the topic of love, but Bert prefers his own words. His perspective is pretty spot-on, in my opinion:

Love’s a simple thing to see

Why go on for hours?

With oatmeal in a bowl to love

Who needs hearts and flowers?

He winds up the song by declaring his love, as well as his exasperation, for Ernie:

Even though his silly tricks can drive us far apart

I’ll always have a special place for Ernie in my heart.

And really, isn’t that all we need to know?

Cross-posted to The Bilerico Project on August 12, 2011.

And what better place to make this grand gesture than Niagara Falls, an iconic “natural wonder” in a ruined rust belt city “whose history has been deliberately obscured” to preserve illusion, greed and over-the-top “camp spectacle“?

Or, as a friend said, “This is possibly the gayest thing I have ever seen.”

The LGBT community was well-represented at the Moving Image event, with local City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer citing Henson-as-Kermit’s version of “The Rainbow Connection” as helping him come to terms with being gay, and guests including out puppeteer John Tartaglia (of “Avenue Q” and “Imaginocean“). Mayor Bloomberg also made a special appearance – in puppet form – performed by longtime Muppeteer Dave Goelz, perhaps better known as purple, big-nosed “whatever” the Great Gonzo.

The exhibit has a lively selection of Henson’s early drawings, TV commercials and experimental films, as well as artifacts from his more well-known work such as Sesame Street and The Muppets Take Manhattan, including Miss Piggy in full wedding finery. I would have enjoyed more attention to the collaborative aspects of Henson’s work, beyond his puppet partnership with Frank Oz. The show runs through January.

Speaking of rainbow connections, former Muppeteer Brian Meehl recently released a charming, quirky LGBT-themed young adult novel, You Don’t Know About Me.

The rollicking, road-tripping homage to Huck Finn features Billy Allbright, a born-again Christian who “puts the freak in Jesus freak,” geocaching across America in search of his long-lost father. His companions along the way include his fundamentalist mother, who claims Tickle-Me-Elmo dolls “introduce kids to the sin of ‘unrestrained pleasure’”; Ruah Branch, a closeted baseball star on the lam; and two tricky hipsters who drag him to an Oregon Burning Man offshoot.

Though the book’s tone is deceptively breezy, with quick quips and inventive slang, its portraiture is nicely nuanced; Allbright is relatable even when not very likeable, and Branch shows far more complexity than his Huck Finn counterpart of “sho-nuff” sidekick Jim.

“You Don’t Know About Me” is dedicated to the memory of Richard Hunt, who makes a kind of cameo as Jerome Silks, Branch’s “first real boyfriend,” who died of AIDS. He shows Allbright a picture: “It was of a white guy with dark wavy hair and a friendly face. What made him look extra friendly, and maybe funny, too, was a gap between his front teeth.” This hidden reference made me happy.

Finally, I’ll be commemorating what would have been Richard Hunt’s 60th birthday on August 16th at Bluestockings Bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Come join us for a sneak peek at my biography-in-progress, “The Rainbow Connection: The Life and Times of Richard Hunt,” as well as plenty of Muppet clips and rare behind-the-scenes footage. Looks like there’s more than one way to make a rainbow connection. The lovers, the dreamers… and maybe you!

Please enjoy my eyewitness account from the Stonewall Inn on the night gay marriage came to New York state, “Does Gay Marriage Endanger Queer Community?” While gay marriage is a great step forward for many families, let us never forget that we are family.

And a bonus article! Has Dan Savage’s fatphobia finally gone too far?

“Reluctance About Chaz Bono,” explores Bono’s recent media bubble, and received a lot of attention, with over 2,000 hits and over 50 comments!

And in honor of the rapture that wasn’t, “Let’s Celebrate Non-Judgment Day“! Or at the very least, let’s watch the Blondie video for “Rapture.” “Don’t stop, do punk rock!”

Other articles include “Building Queer Community” (or, The Queer Migration Myth, Redux), a follow-up to my post on the “Great Queer Migration Myth”, as well as “Vote for the Old Guys in the Muppet Balcony,” about the role of Muppeteer Richard Hunt’s characters in an unnervingly neck-and-neck fan competition.

Happy reading!