"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (b. 1920), novelist and visionary.
Email: It's Hot in Topeka
The mad musings of a working writer
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (b. 1920), novelist and visionary.
"One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read."
— John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), economist and author.
"Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period."
— Nicholas Sparks (b. 1965), author.
"Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than virtue."
— Robert Wright (b. 1957), journalist and science writer.
"If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?"
— Lois McMaster Bujold (b. 1949), writer.
"A man can't ride on your back unless it's bent."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), activist.
"Stupidity gets up early."
— Karl Kraus (1874-1936), Austrian author and satirist.
"The younger gay men — and scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the Village because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe to be who they were.
Stonewall 'wasn’t a 1960s student riot,' wrote one of them, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York Public Library in the exhibition '1969: The Year of Gay Liberation.' They had 'no nice dorms for sleeping,' 'no school cafeteria for certain food' and 'no affluent parents' to send checks. They had no powerful allies of any kind, no rights, no future. But they were brave. They risked their necks to prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that 'the mystery of history' could happen 'in the least likely of places.'
[...]
"No president possesses that magic wand, but Obama’s inaction on gay civil rights is striking. So is his utterly uncharacteristic inarticulateness. The Justice Department brief defending DOMA has spoken louder for this president than any of his own words on the subject. [Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Equality Council] noted that he has given major speeches on race, on abortion and to the Muslim world. 'People are waiting for that passionate speech from him on equal rights,' she said, 'and the time is now.'
"Action would be even better. It’s a press cliché that 'gay supporters' are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren't just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places."
— Op-ed columnist Frank Rich, "40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans" (NYT, June 28, 2009)
Forty years ago this weekend, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, a group of gay men, drag queens and other patrons of the Stonewall Inn, fed up with systematic police harassment, fought back. The Stonewall Riots over the next several days birthed the modern gay rights movement.