The Price of Admission: The Long Way Around Nashville

 

The River City Boys with country music broadcasting icon Ralph Emery

It started with Tommy Black, our high school choral director, and the annual Christmas program. We called ourselves The River City Boys: Jimmy was our bass, Steve held down the lower middle, I stretched up into the high tenor parts, and Tyrone took the lead.

What began as a one-off school assignment quickly grew into something real. After school, we’d gather at each other’s houses, clustering around a cassette player to woodshed four-part harmonies to the Oak Ridge Boys, the Statler Brothers, and whatever Alabama was putting on the charts.

By the time summer arrived, that sound had carried us out of church basements to county fairs around the state, the Point Mallard Fourth of July crowd, and finally, a 5:00 a.m. live booking on WBRC’s legendary early-morning staple, The Country Boy Eddie Show.

Piling into a car at 2:00 a.m. for the ninety-minute drive down I-65 from Decatur to Birmingham is an unglamorous initiation into show business. We arrived at the Red Mountain studios bleary-eyed, running on youth, nervous adrenaline, and whatever gas station coffee could do for four teenage boys.

Inside the studio, the air was cold and smelled like stale cigarettes. Before we could even take our jackets off, a frantic producer rushed up to us, his palm held out in mid-air.

“Where’s your playback track?” he barked.

We stared at him like deer caught in high beams. None of us had the faintest idea what a playback track was.

After a second or two of mortifying silence, one of us realized what he was asking for and spoke up: “Oh, we don’t have one. We sing live.”

The producer froze, lowered his hand, and stared at us with the weary pity reserved for the terminally naive.

“It’s your grave,” he muttered, turning on his heel. “Suit yourselves.” As it turned out, it was even too early for the gravedigger.

We were nothing better than middling, but when you’re broadcasting live across central Alabama before the sun comes up, the bar is set pretty low. My mother was likely one of only three or four people in signal range awake early enough to watch it, and as far as she was concerned, we sounded just fine.

Even then, standing shoulder-to-shoulder under those harsh broadcast lights on Red Mountain, the chemistry was obvious. Jimmy gave us a solid foundation, Steve was quite the looker and a strong singer, I could hit the high notes, but Tyrone had the pipes and the sheer, relentless drive. While the rest of us were content enough treating the quartet as a great run, Tyrone viewed regional fairs and crack-of-dawn variety broadcasts as the bottom rung of a very tall, very steep ladder.

He would climb that ladder out of Alabama soon enough—first to Opryland as the lead for the Tennessee River Boys, then through the televised gauntlet of Star Search, and eventually out to the honky-tonk circuit of North Texas. But the climb in commercial country music has never been just about vocal range or stage presence. In Nashville, the price of admission was absolute conformity to a carefully manufactured archetype of rural, Southern traditionalism.

And for an artist carrying a secret in an industry built on moral surveillance, the penalty for stepping outside those lines wasn’t just a poor review—it was a thirty-year institutional quarantine.

The Machinery of the Closet

Leaving Alabama for Nashville in the 1980s meant entering an industry operating under rigid, unwritten bylaws. Tyrone landed a coveted gig in 1983 as the lead vocalist for the Tennessee River Boys at Opryland USA—a theme park that served as a finishing school and testing ground for commercial country acts. When that group settled into a permanent theme-park residency, Tyrone departed after a year to try his luck on Star Search.

Television exposure, however, did not guarantee an easy path on Music Row. Nashville was notoriously cautious, heavily reliant on radio syndicates, regional gatekeepers, and an ironclad standard of Southern hetero-masculinity. Rebuffed by early recording disappointments, Tyrone packed his bags in 1988 for the honky-tonk circuit of North Texas.

Texas was a different proving ground altogether. It was loud, demanding, and self-sufficient. Fronting a band in cavernous dance halls across Dallas and Fort Worth required vocal endurance and charismatic showmanship night after night. For five years, he ground it out in those clubs, building a rabid local following that Nashville could no longer ignore. By 1993, Epic Records finally came calling with a multi-album deal.

In mainstream country music, the mid-1990s was a gold rush. Garth Brooks had blown the doors off stadium sales, and labels were eagerly packaging radio-ready balladeers. In April 1995, Epic released Tyrone’s debut single, “What Mattered Most.” It rocketed straight to Number One on the Billboard country charts. The album debuted in the Top 10, won critical praise, and secured him the Academy of Country Music’s Top New Male Vocalist award.

To the outside world, it looked like a quintessential overnight success fifteen years in the making. But behind the polished press releases and cowboy-hat promotional shoots, the terms of the bargain were usually absolute: total self-erasure.

Nashville’s commercial engine was never just selling music; it was selling an idealized, rural American fantasy. The industry ran on the patronage of conservative corporate radio chains and family-values marketing demographics. In that ecosystem, being gay wasn’t treated as a personal detail—it was treated as a fatal commercial liability. An artist was an investment, and the closet was non-negotiable insurance.

The industry had developed a quiet lexicon for anyone who didn’t fit the mold. Whenever artists bucked the system, struggled under the weight of living double lives, or fell out of favor with radio station programmers, trade publications and label executives routinely filed it under convenient euphemisms: “personal difficulties,” “artistic burnout,” or “creative differences.”

Those words were convenient code. In that era, “difficulties” was often the industry shorthand for what happened when living behind an impenetrable wall of surveillance and fear finally took its toll.

The Fracture and the Thirty-Year Reckoning

In June 1995, just weeks after “What Mattered Most” reached the top of the charts, it seemed the pressure valve finally failed.

Tyrone was arrested in Gateway Park in Fort Worth, Texas, for indecent exposure and possession of a controlled substance. In the tabloid media and the gossip mills of Music Row, it was framed as a simple tale of reckless personal failure. But when an artist is forced to maintain an absolute, manufactured facade while standing at the epicenter of a multimillion-dollar commercial launch, the psychological freight must be crushing. To an outside observer of the industry, Gateway Park read less like an isolated lapse in judgment and more like the inevitable point of structural failure when the closet demands more than a human being can bear.

The industry’s response was swift and definitive. While Epic released three more albums over the next few years, and he managed sporadic chart appearances, the momentum had been broken. In a genre where radio programmers held veto power over entire careers, the whisper network had done its work. The mainstream machine quietly withdrew its institutional machinery—the promotional budgets shrank, prime tour slots evaporated, and the corporate gatekeepers closed ranks.

To better understand the weight of that quarantine, you need to understand the historical timeline.

Queer country music had always existed on the underground fringes. Back in 1973, Patrick Haggerty and his band Lavender Country released the first openly gay country album, carving out a radical, self-funded niche entirely outside the Nashville system.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, k.d. lang exploded onto the scene as an undeniable force of nature. Her astonishing versatility bridged torch-song glamour, Western swing, and lush pop melodies, immortalized in that soaring, Grammy-winning duet of “Crying” alongside Roy Orbison. Landmark records like Shadowland and Ingénue arrived during formative years for many of us, hitting with deep emotional resonance and critical acclaim. Yet despite possessing one of the finest voices of a generation, she still faced intense friction from a rigid Nashville establishment, ultimately finding her long-term artistic and commercial survival beyond the strict confines of traditional country radio.

For commercial country stars of Tyrone’s era, the rules remained brutal: total compliance or exile. It would take nearly two decades after that park arrest—and more than thirty years after our high school quartet piled into that car for The Country Boy Eddie Show—before Tyrone formally came out in 2014, alongside fellow mainstream artist Chely Wright who had broken ground four years earlier.

Thirty years is an astonishing price to pay for the simple reality of who you are.

Today, the terrain has shifted. Decades removed from those living room rehearsals, my high-tenor days are a distant memory; when I try to sing in the shower these days, it sounds considerably closer to an aging croak than anything musical. Still, I find myself whistling along to tracks like fellow Alabamian Ella Langley’s “Be Her,” or following Orville Peck’s brilliant run under the Broadway lights with Cabaret, marveling at the simple, uncomplicated joy of just loving good music—and remembering how much fun four kids in Decatur once had chasing harmony.

While traditional country radio remains heavily gatekept and culturally conservative, the democratization of streaming, independent distribution, and social platforms has broken Music Row’s absolute monopoly. Contemporary queer artists—from Peck’s fringe-masked theatricality and Adeem the Artist to Joy Oladokun and Brandi Carlile—can build sustainable touring audiences, cultivate passionate fanbases, and define their art without first asking a room full of suits for permission to exist.

Tyrone’s road was extraordinarily long, marked by early promise, hard-won triumph, sudden wreckage, and decades spent clawing back his own narrative from the margins. Even now, mainstream country radio remains a notoriously guarded frontier, slow to surrender its old habits and traditional gatekeepers.

The landscape has fundamentally shifted. The monopoly has broken. Between independent streaming, grassroots touring circuits, and artists refusing to bargain away their identity for a spot on a billboard, the walls that once enforced absolute compliance are crumbling. A new generation of queer roots and country musicians is filling theaters, topping independent charts, and claiming their rightful place on the American stage without ever stepping inside a corporate closet.

It took nearly half a century of quiet endurance and public reckonings to get here, but the trajectory has finally bent toward the light. As Brandi Carlile belted out on her own Grammy-winning roots anthem, speaking for every outsider who ever had to outlast the system:

“I have been to the movies, I’ve seen how it ends / And the joke’s on them.”

Echoes of That Sound

 

It is all quiet for now—a fragile peace held together by rigid routine and ninety-three years of survival. It is the heavy silence of her serenity, layered with an ancient, bone-deep exhaustion. I sit beside the woman who has married four and buried four, and then buried her own daughter—a ledger that belongs in a Greek tragedy or a dark Southern myth, not the life of a mother.

In the quiet, I slip on heavy, noise-cancelling headphones. It is an instinctive, almost foolish ritual: pressing foam and plastic against my ears to carve out an artificial sanctuary, trying to filter out a world that has dealt so much ruin. But no frequency inversion can silence memory. Even beneath the manufactured stillness, I still wake hearing the echoes of that Sound.

By her thirties, my mother was consumed by the grueling work of holding a fracturing home together and shielding her children from the rot.

She had started out so differently: a fierce, independent young woman who left her small town, moved to the city, and made her own way. But in Alabama in 1952, the script was narrow and inescapable. She did what every girl was expected to do: she married my father.

After two children and a decade of marriage—the final years frayed by his volatility—she did what desperate mothers have done throughout history: she offered up another child as a peace offering. A clean slate. I was the decade child, the desperate flourish, the attempt to patch the tarnish.

Instead, I was a precocious, effete, almost alien child who drew only my father’s silence and indifference.

She drew me in closer. Consciously. She filled the void he carved.

Years later, she would ask, eyes wide and haunted, “Did I make you?” As if a mother’s love could be the sole engine of such difference.

“No,” I told her. “I was born different. I was a changeling already taking shape inside you.”

Bound together in that difference, we turned the world into our escape. Our first years in Atlanta became a quiet conspiracy against the domestic gloom. Once my father was off to work and my older siblings were safely at school, she would pack me into her 1959 Volkswagen Beetle to outrun the suffocating silence of the house. To this day, I attribute my knowledge of Atlanta’s streets and topography to those endless morning drives—getting lost together in the urban wilderness, and always finding our way home.

Even then, the dread was gathering. The shouting. The days on end when they wouldn’t speak. Then in 1970, the house finally broke open, and I heard that cry for the first time.

Is cry the right word? What do you call that noise that starts so deep inside—a low-frequency moan born of inconsolable loss that crescendos into a shattering, primal wail? Over the years, I would become far too familiar with it, as well as with my own suffocating inadequacy to comfort her in the moments after it tore loose.

We had lived for years with my father’s drinking, but his exit left an indelible stain: suicide by gun, leaving his ruined body for my mother to find. It was an act of terror perpetrated against his wife, his children, and the very walls of our home.

How did she survive the wreckage?

In 1970, a suddenly widowed, unemployed mother of three couldn’t even secure a mortgage on her own signature. She relied on the cold logistics of survival and did what the era demanded: within months, she remarried. It was a practical, desperate reach for stability that brought its own chaos.

In the whiplash of the moves and remarriage that followed my father’s suicide, my older siblings scattered. By age eleven, I was functionally an only child, bound even tighter to my mother’s orbit.

Nine years later, the curse returned in the form of brain cancer. She became an absolute warrior in those shadow-filled years. She worked all day at the bank, drove from Decatur to UAB Hospital to sit by his bedside until visiting hours ended, and then drove back alone into the dark. Sleep, wash, rinse, repeat. For almost two years, she kept the roof over our heads while nursing a dying spouse. In September 1981, in the sterile chill of a nursing home room, I heard the Sound again—the acoustic horror of profound loss. That day, there was mourning in the evening. Yet even beneath the weight of a second burial, she refused to stay broken; she gathered the remnants and forged ahead.

By my thirties, with an entire generation of friends claimed by the epidemic, I moved to New Orleans to rebuild. It was a bewildering transition—cut off from home, adrift in a culture where I didn't know the landmarks, feeling alien all over again. In those lonely months when everything else felt precarious, my mother’s voice over long-distance calls was the steady ground that made the world feel safe.

During that time, my mother found the great love of her life: a retired Air Force officer whose worldly spirit swept her away. Together, they chased horizon after horizon in a motorhome, fleeing the Southern humidity, checking in with my siblings and me from roadside pay phones. But death followed them into the mountains of North Alabama, settling over them in the slow creep of congestive heart failure.

He called her Princess; she treated him like her Prince. She poured her entire being into caring for him with unyielding devotion. When her third husband died quietly beside her in their bed one night, she was shattered—yet, sustained by faith, family, and lifelong friends, she found her footing once more.

Over the next few years, she grew into the woman she might have been in 1952 before convention trapped her. She learned to ballroom dance, played piano gigs with natural virtuosity, and built a vibrant social empire out of a well-worn Rolodex she tended like a garden. She seemed entirely whole in her own skin, needing no ghost beside her to complete the picture.

That made what happened next all the more surreal.

In the late nineties, she made an unexpected announcement: she had reconnected with a high school sweetheart, and they were getting married. I raised an eyebrow—as did many, especially his adult children, given that his wife, a longtime friend of my mother’s, had died only a year earlier. But at nearly seventy, they married, carving out a decade of quiet, loving peace on his farm.

Decades of heavy labor had worn his joints down, leading to what should have been a routine knee replacement. Instead, I sat beside my mother in the glare of the hospital waiting room as the surgical team delivered the news of sudden complications. Later that night, standing with her at his bedside as he drew his final breath, her frame buckled. She caught herself hard against the bedrail, and for the third time in my life, that awful Sound tore loose.

In the quiet aftermath, we moved her off the farm and back into town, packing away the remnants of yet another dismantled life.

Less than a year after standing at her fourth husband’s graveside, my brother and I sat in her den to deliver the unthinkable: her daughter was gone.

Suicide by gun. The exact violence that had fractured our home forty years earlier had circled back through the bloodline to claim her child.

Coming from a woman now frail and hollowed by age, the Sound had changed. It lacked its old volume, but none of its horror—a thin, ragged breath that was even more devastating for how weak it had become.

You cannot comfort someone when the universe has torn out their center; you can only sit on the perimeter and bear witness to the ruin.

There is a grotesque lack of imagination to this kind of compounding grief—striking the exact place already bruised to the bone. But the human spirit doesn’t shatter like glass; it bends, fractures, and keeps breathing beneath the wreckage.

Against all odds, in that small town, she built a fortress out of routine. She served as the pianist at the church she and her late husband had attended, and accompanied the city and county senior choirs. A protective circle of Southern widows formed around her—women who traded morning phone calls before stepping into the shower and checked back in the second they were safe. She anchored herself in the sacred, ordinary cadence of survival: choir practice, nail appointments, Tuesday morning breakfasts, and weekly visits to the beauty parlor to keep the world tidy and the madness at the door.

But, two years ago, she was admitted to the hospital—the first time since the day I was born. I drove straight from Atlanta, taking my familiar post at her bedside as the doctors spoke of complications. Looking down at her small frame beneath the white hospital sheets, sixty years of shared survival collapsed into that single room.

We are each other’s only constant. People sometimes remark that we are unnaturally close. But would they say that if they knew the ghosts that haunt our halls? If they understood the price of our survival?

Sitting beside her after her discharge, the realization settled over me with absolute clarity: when the pillar finally begins to lean, who stands beneath the weight?

The answer was immediate. Within a month, I dismantled my life, arranged a transfer, and returned home to Alabama to walk whatever runway she has left beside her. My sixties have been defined by this quiet, solemn honor. The script had already been written: when my mother was sixty, she moved in with her own mother to see her through her final season. It is our family liturgy. I am simply stepping into the line.

Looking at her, I catch premonitions of my own future. She talks openly about what it means to grow into the later years—outliving your peers, outliving your lovers, outliving your own child. It is the heavy, sacred work of holding a lifetime of unspeakable tragedy alongside deep joy, fully aware of how few days remain, and finally making peace with the quiet.

What remains is resilience: the unshakable will to live, the scars she inhabits, and the memories of those terrible tragedies. In watching her carry it, I recognize myself.

I am my mother’s son—both the observer and the participant.

Edward Albee wrote: “Writers have this schizophrenic ability to both participate in their lives and, at the same time, observe themselves participating in their lives.”

Maybe that is what this is. This is my attempt to bear witness to my mother—who married four and buried four, who filled the empty space, who loved me fiercely through the chaos and the blood.

I sit here in the dim room, facing away from the noise of the world, wearing my headphones as if silence could be engineered. But I am in the front row now—not just watching, but holding the space around the sorrow, waiting for that inevitable moment when that Sound will one day be mine.

A World Slipping Beneath the Waves

Drowning

There is a particular kind of panic that sets in when you’re trapped in gridlock and you can’t escape. I was marooned in Midtown Atlanta that late August afternoon. With every idle minute, the knots in my stomach twisted tighter, increasingly unraveled by the stagnant crawl of traffic and the heavy, suffocating humidity. When the storm finally hit, it was a deluge. Inside the cabin of my Jeep, the air conditioning struggled to keep up as a rising tide of dread welled inside me. I was exhausted and defenseless, even before the radio announcer’s voice cracked through the speakers with a tense, trembling mix of objective journalism and profound, restrained grief.

He was covering scenes from Hurricane Katrina’s landfall at New Orleans. At the time, they reported that eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, the result of multiple catastrophic levee breaches that left toxic, sewage-filled water swallowing the streets. Reports broadcast the dire conditions at the Louisiana Superdome, where upwards of 20,000 refugees sought shelter. The scenes were horrific: total power failure, sweltering heat, overflowing toilets, and shortages of food and water as the stadium turned into a desperate, overcrowded refuge. In those chaotic, delayed days after the breach, rumors of widespread sniper fire, hospital euthanasia, and extreme violence spread like wildfire across the airwaves. Independent investigations and later journalistic analyses would dispel many of the exaggerated reports of intentional lawlessness, focusing instead on the devastating reality of structural failures and a paralyzed government response.

But that afternoon, stranded in the storm, it was just a wall of pure horror. I sat, frozen through a green light, entirely numb—horns honking from passing cars, but I was simply unable to process it all. It was so confusing. This is 2005, and this is the United States, I thought. This isn’t supposed to happen.

Numb

In retrospect, to look at a disaster and feel it completely, you must first be vulnerable to it. And by August 2005, I had been systematically stripped of every protective layer I possessed.

For forty years, my life trajectory had been a sharp, upward hockey-stick curve. I was “charmed”—a darling of the universe living like the grasshopper in the old parable, dancing through an endless summer, convinced winter was a concept reserved for lesser men. Then came the summer of 2002, and the music stopped.

By 2005, I was functionally homeless, the money and my medications were nearly depleted and there was only one word left for my life: nothing.

They say when you finally hit rock bottom, that’s when you learn the most about yourself. What I learned that summer was that when you hit that wall, it can still collapse on top of you.

That August, within a single week, the remaining knots unraveled. A friend informed me I had until Friday to vacate his extra bedroom. That same morning, the IRS froze my bank accounts—and my mother’s. I was counting pocket change for my next meal, and entirely depleted of adaptive capacity.

Cloistered in that bedroom surrounded by cardboard boxes, I felt paralyzed by my own world collapsing. Across the hall, I could hear my friends making drinks and laughing in the kitchen. It was Labor Day weekend—Southern Decadence. They were entirely consumed by the logistics of the party, boasting of four-hundred-dollar-a-night reservations at the Ritz-Carlton and thousands spent on custom leather gear. I didn’t begrudge them their joy; I just listened in quiet, hollow numbness. Even as the weather reports began to track a catastrophic storm brewing in the Gulf, my friends brushed it off. They were still dancing through that endless summer I had lost, utterly convinced that the universe favors its darlings, operating under the assumption that tragedy only happens to other people.

Then the hurricane turned. The parties were canceled.

Driven out of that room by a suffocating claustrophobia, I got behind the wheel just to keep from completely unraveling. Instead, I ended up marooned in Midtown Atlanta gridlock, my internal ruins entirely exposed as those first reports broke across the airwaves.

Exhausted, unable to process the scale of it, I pulled into a gas station lot, cut the radio, and let my head hang over the steering wheel. I usually refrain from calling it ‘prayer’ because the word has been so cheapened by overused sentiment that its meaning has become trite and hollow. But in that parking lot, stripped of all pretense, I stopped. And with absolute, mindful intent, I prayed—for my former home, my friends, and this city with such a long history and deep, rich culture that was being systematically swallowed by the tide.

In that desperate stillness, my mind was drawn back to my New Orleans roots—to my Mississippi mud baptism and the beginning of my initiation.

Roux

You see, I could have stayed in Birmingham and done quite well for myself—so many of my best friends did. But I took a leap of faith into the unknown when I moved to New Orleans—and I never looked back. It was the first of many moves forward in my life, but moving to New Orleans was what started it all. It symbolized a fresh, new opportunity—the absolute freedom to become the most I could be without the crushing pressure of making those necessary identity changes under the skeptical eyes of family, old friends, and peers.

New Orleans welcomed me with open arms. And, until I arrived there as a resident, I had never considered what it would mean to live, learn, and grow within such a rich, flavorful, and fertile history and culture.

Founded in 1718, the city was a layered melting pot of French Creole traditions, Spanish architecture built from the ashes of devastating eighteenth-century fires, and American ambition. The French Quarter itself was designed as a city turned wrong-side-out. Its most luxurious elements—the lush, tiered courtyards—were hidden in the interior of city blocks, keeping the utilitarian walls flush with the street.

During the years I was splitting my life between New Orleans and other cities, I shared a beautiful, drafty third-story walk-up just off Royal and St. Ann. Originally built in 1832 as part of the grand home of a wealthy French sugar planter, our apartment had once been the third-floor front parlor of the estate. When we first signed the lease, I noticed strange, circular patterns of indentations radiating out across the wide, beautiful cypress plank floors of the living room—deep pokes and prods in the ancient wood.

After my first few stays, I asked the proprietor of the street-level coffee shop about them. She explained that her shop had originally been the main kitchen for the estate, and that during Prohibition, our living room had been a bustling speakeasy. Those deep indentations in the cypress planks were the physical echoes of women’s high heels spinning and stamping into the wood through long, forbidden nights of dancing. It always amazed me, as I kicked back in my living room to watch TV, that I was literally living among the trappings of 170 years of layered, complicated history.

But my deepest initiation into the city lay far beyond the architecture; it was much more human. It was a thirty-year tapestried affair woven tightly through both my poor times and my rich times. Years earlier, a grand romance—ignited in the Marigny at a fundraiser for Project Lazarus—had pulled me directly into the courts of New Orleans gay society. There was a poetic justice in meeting there, under the banner of a saint raised from the dead; it became my own threshold of rebirth, the moment my old self was left behind so that a new life could begin. I grew to be accepted, befriended, and loved. From that era onward, many of my best friends and chosen family still claimed those streets as home.

I learned that in New Orleans, it wasn’t difficult to find exactly what you were looking for. Through the years, I saw so many men move there, only to fall into the wrong crowds in the wrong places—eventually pulled under by the predatory undertow of the darker and seedier corners of the French Quarter. If you went there looking for trouble, New Orleans would always provide more than you could ever want—or need. Many of those who were lucky enough to survive it returned, tail-between-legs, to the safety from which they came.

But if you were looking for friendship, camaraderie, and a loving chosen family, the gay community there had a seemingly infinite supply of love to offer.

For years, I spent nights and some days standing in the third open doorway of the Bourbon Pub down from St. Ann. On special weekends there, I was ‘Norm’—leaning back against that predictable spot on the steps where every arriving bartender and regular would quip, ‘Where y’at?’ as they passed.

When I lived there, I developed a completely different rhythm with the city. Bar life in the Quarter was a patient, measured affair—nothing like the reckless race to drink and enjoy that defined my time as a visitor. By simply existing within that slower pace, I found endless opportunities to observe the strange mating habits of tourists, especially those in our species who breed.

Walking north from Canal Street—the historic neutral ground that once divided the old Creole and American factions—Bourbon was the quintessential, predictable straight playground of booze, boobs, and jazz. But the moment they crossed St. Ann Street, they crossed the “lavender line,” and everything changed. Suddenly, they stood flanked by three legendary gay bars, music blaring, and men pouring into the streets. From the flung-open, shuttered doorways of the Pub, I used to watch the faces of straight business people and bachelorette parties wandering down from the upper blocks. As they crossed that invisible line, their eyes would dart and their laughter would suddenly falter. They would begin to whisper, then grow silent. You could almost see their collective “spidey sense” trigger as they realized the landscape had somehow shifted. It was delicious.

Yet, the roux of New Orleans wasn’t contained to a single corner in the Quarter; it bled beautifully across the boundaries of a vibrant, brilliant city.

To leave the Quarter was to step into a completely different sensory theater. I loved the Garden District, where the humid air lost its putrid edge and became sweet with the scent of blooming magnolia and sweet-olive. There, the world slowed down to the rhythmic, metallic clack-clack of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line. I loved the ancient, gnarled live oaks of Audubon Park, their massive limbs dripping with Spanish moss like green lace, casting deep shadows over lawns originally laid out for the 1884 World’s Fair. And just downriver, I watched the old industrial riverfront transform. The Warehouse District was completely rejuvenated for urban living after the 1984 World’s Fair by my late friend Leonard Salvato. He turned a gritty grid of fading commerce into a neighborhood of soaring red-brick walls, exposed timber, and massive glass panes that echoed with a new, cosmopolitan energy, while still holding the faint, historic scent of roasted coffee beans baked deep into the masonry.

In this landscape, I learned more about art and art history in New Orleans than I could have ever extracted from a book or a sterile classroom. The city didn’t just give me a place to expand my horizons and improve myself; it gave me a masterclass in beauty as a bit of unexpected lagniappe. The city’s creative pulse was a physical presence. My absolute favorite piece of art in the world sat just outside the Quarter, inside the cool, marble silence of the New Orleans Museum of Art—the massive, breathtaking portrait of Marie Antoinette. Stepping into its gallery felt like stepping into a sanctuary. The painting was a tour de force of light; you could practically hear the heavy rustle of her painted silk gown and feel the tragic weight behind her pale, enigmatic gaze. It was a piece so rich with atmosphere that a very dear friend used it as the brilliant, mystical basis for his first series of best sellers, The Book of Shadows, weaving the portrait’s haunting elegance into the destiny of an orphaned girl in nineteenth-century France.

That creative electricity hummed everywhere. Just down the street in the Warehouse District, the avant-garde thrived within the soaring spaces of the Contemporary Arts Center, while the nearby Ogden Museum of Southern Art captured the visual soul—the bright, chaotic, and beautiful roux—of the very region I called home.

All of these pieces—the leap of faith from Birmingham, the colonial history, the heels on the cypress floorboards, the fierce loves, the trouble for those who seek it, and the brilliant brushstrokes of its galleries—were the essential ingredients of my New Orleans. They were the slow-simmering roux of my life. It was exactly this interconnected world of beauty, grace, and human devotion that was quietly drowning on my car radio while the rest of Atlanta made reservations for Friday dinner.

“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”

— Dorothy Parker, ‘Fair Weather,’ Sunset Gun, 1928

When I was younger, I often questioned if it was normal—the way I didn’t feel things like others did. In fact, I was so matter-of-fact, pragmatic, and unemotional that my friends would tease that my “superpower” was indifference. It disturbed me a little. But I lived with so much disruption and tragedy as a child that the calm of a quiet moment felt far more disturbing.

Later in life, when I threw myself into New Orleans on a journey of self-discovery, it became a conscious goal to practice empathy and compassion.

But did I overshoot the mark? At some point in my journey, did I become too sensitive?

That Labor Day week, during the destruction of the New Orleans I loved, I found my answer. The combination of my conscious work to become more sensitive, coupled with the brutal weathering of my recent life events, had caused an overcorrection. Instead of cultivating balanced empathy, I had unleashed a raw, unchecked sensitivity that left me completely unprotected. For days, I stayed holed up in that temporary bedroom watching the coverage, debating my own sanity.

But why didn’t my friends seem as upset?

Looking back now, a deeper truth clicks. From an insulated perspective, I suppose it looks different. If you aren’t personally facing homelessness, if your bank account isn’t frozen, you possess the luxury of structural insulation. Human beings are wired to seek comfort; we compartmentalize tragedy because carrying the weight of a drowning world while trying to manage a daily existence is entirely overwhelming.

Only with the distance of time did I realize my friends were simply being human. They were utilizing the exact same superpower I had weaponized as a child: indifference, deployed not out of cruelty, but as a vital, desperate defense mechanism to keep from looking directly into the void.

But what frightens me most is that our defensive numbness didn’t end when the floodwaters receded. The collective shrug toward the fate of New Orleans—and, perhaps, the world itself—seemingly continues to this day.

It leaves me questioning the very currency of our compassion. In a world besieged by a relentless cycle of modern disasters, how much can we care? How much worry can a single human heart expend before it simply is overwhelmed? Perhaps we have lived in the chaos for so long that we have forgotten how to exist without it, proving Parker right all over again—clinging to the noise of the storm because we are utterly terrified of what we might have to face in the calm.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

— Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel

Twenty-one years have passed. The city still stands, holding onto its incomparable beauty and culture, albeit with a certain weathered patina. But the slow-motion rising of the waters never actually stopped.

Recently, a landmark study published in the journal Nature Sustainability warns that New Orleans has officially passed a scientific “point of no return.” Due to rising sea levels and catastrophic coastal erosion, up to 75% of the remaining wetlands will be lost by 2070, pushing the Gulf of Mexico up to 62 miles inland. By the end of the century, the French Quarter—the historic, romantic heart of my youth—will effectively be an island surrounded by open ocean. The report explicitly advises that a managed, systematic relocation of residents should begin immediately to avoid a disorderly, market-driven displacement before the city becomes entirely uninhabitable.

When I read these climate reports, the exact same 2005 cynicism washes over me because the societal script hasn’t changed. I look around today and see the exact same casual indifference; people offer a polite nod of acknowledgment when the news breaks, a brief sigh of concern, and then seamlessly pivot back to the logistics of their day. Other than that superficial gesture, only a few seem genuinely fazed.

Perhaps we aren’t intentionally hypocritical; perhaps we are simply inundated by a media machine that chums minute-by-minute for sensation and outrage. I recently overheard a friend declare that the development of a local data center is “the greatest threat to mankind today,” a hyperbolic echo of the weekly alarms my peers sound over everything from Western fascism to cultural erasure.

We are caught in a theater of Pavlovian response—a flicker of outrage, a spasm of fear, and the digital machine earns its next impression. Because our capacity to absorb a screaming world is fundamentally limited, we bounce from topic to topic, flag to flag, chasing the latest manufactured panic just to keep from looking down at the water line. It is the collective delusion of the grasshopper played out on a global scale—a frantic, hyperactive dance through the final days of an endless summer, loudly debating the trivial, because we are utterly unprepared for the winter that has already arrived at our doorstep. We offer lip service to the apocalypse, then turn our backs to the rising tide and pour another drink.

Admittedly, I can’t conceive of the whole picture either, and if I am being completely honest, it is likely just my own quiet version of the same coping mechanism. It is my way of refusing to watch the winter arrive. But does that mean I’ve surrendered to the slow march of death?

My friends tease that I live like a child wearing noise-canceling headphones to avoid dealing with things, a comparison I willingly accept. But more accurately, it is my vital defense against overstimulation. I retreat to my small, sunlit patch of the garden, tending only to the immediate geometry of human connection that I can actually keep alive.

Yet, when that recent headline flashed across my screen—New Orleans: Climate Scientists Declare All is Lost—the noise-canceling headphones failed. The digital alert cut through the quiet like the cry of an old corner news barker, forcing me to sit down, ponder, remember, and write this testament to the most unique and magnificent world I’ve known, that’s slowly slipping beneath the waves.

Ode to New Orleans

It occurred to me that there are other cities. It occurred to me so violently that I said, “Very well, if New Orleans is going to be like this, with its impossible heat and its slow-motion heartbreaks, I’m going to live somewhere else.” And I do—that’s the funny part of it. I unpack my boxes in cities with straighter streets and cooler air, telling myself I have finally outrun the spell.

But then, on some ordinary afternoon, there comes to me a sharp, sensory remembrance of the French Quarter at its best. I see it on a heavy, indigo summer evening, with the multi-tiered iron railings stretching across weathered brick facades like black lace against a darkening sky, carrying the lonely, silver echo of a jazz cornet drifting from some hidden courtyard. I see the straight neat avenues of the lower blocks suddenly give way at St. Ann Street, crossing that invisible lavender line where the straight world’s laughter falters and the music of the Pub blares out into the streets, delicious and defiant.

I see it in the Season of Epiphany—under a cloudy humid sky, when the city transforms into a grand, living theater for carnival season and Mardi Gras. I see a kaleidoscope of revelers spilling into the streets, a sea of vibrant purple, green, and gold masking the world’s worries for a few glorious days. I see the magical chaos of the walking krewes, their handmade, satirical costumes glistening under the streetlamps, thrown together with hot glue, feathers, and pure wit. The air is alive with the rhythmic clatter of plastic beads hitting the pavement and the distant, booming brass of a marching band turning a regular corner into a midnight cathedral of sound.

I see it on a spring morning, when the air is thick and sweet with the powdered sugar of Café du Monde, the rich steam of Creole kitchens, and the briny, ancient scent of the Mississippi River churning past the French Market. I smell that enchanting, intoxicating undertone—the sweet, slightly putrid odor of wet Mississippi mud mixed with day-old Hurricane drinks spilled onto the warm asphalt. I see it—by this time, already maudlin with nostalgia—even in that drafty third-floor parlor at Royal and St. Ann, looking down at the wide cypress plank floors, tracing the circular indentations where the heels of Prohibition-era women stamped and spun through long, forbidden nights of dancing.

So I go back. And it is always better than I think it can be.

I suppose that’s the thing about New Orleans. It is always a little more than you dare hope for, because it survives more than any city has a right to. Each day there isn’t a clean slate; it is a layered, complicated history that you can literally walk through.

“Laissez les bon temps rouler,” it whispers from its shuttered doorways, “come on, let’s dance while the music is still playing.”

On Wind, Water, and Intent

For me, magic happens where wind meets water.

Anyone who’s sat at the tiller of a sailboat knows the sound: the rush of water against the hull and the steady hum of breeze in the canvas. It is all at once meditative, deeply calming, and wildly exhilarating, but always entirely honest.

My path to the wind and the water wasn’t planned. Decades ago, while coaching track and cross country at a private prep school here in Birmingham, two brothers from a local sailing family asked if I would sponsor a new school sailing club. Having never set foot on a sailboat, I hesitated. I told them I couldn’t sponsor a club for a sport I didn’t know; I had to learn first.

That decision opened the door to a whole new world. Every Saturday morning for over two years, from Labor Day to Memorial Day, I showed up at the docks of the local club. They raced under PHRF—a handicap system that allowed entirely different types of boats to compete on the same course, using calculated times to determine the winner. Week after week, I volunteered as crew for whichever captain was short-handed. Because PHRF racing brought together everything from heavy-displacement cruisers to nimble racing sloops, I learned the art of sailing on a wide variety of vessels. Adapting to different rigs, sail plans, and tiller responses taught me seamanship at its core—how to handle a boat regardless of the hull under my feet, absorbing tactics, wind-reading, and strategy from the best skippers on the lake.

Eventually, an opportunity came to buy one of the fastest boats in the club. I took the helm as skipper, using the collective wisdom of every captain I’d crewed for to eventually beat them all on the water. I named her Aeolian. After a few years of lake racing, my friend Jim, my crew and I would step the mast, trailer Aeolian down to the coast, and put our skills to the test in full-day bay and ocean-based races. I was hooked.

When taking friends out on open water, I loved handing them the tiller and laying out a simple choice, governed entirely by their intent:

“We can go with Option A: pick a specific destination, plot our course, and execute a series of calculated tacks and jibes. That means constantly trimming the sails to every shift in the breeze, factoring in currents and the tide, then taking rigid control, and forcing the vessel to serve our purpose of reaching our pre-determined port.

Or, we can choose Option B: set the sails and trim the sheets—and then surrender to the elements. You let go of the need to dictate where you land, using the tiller simply to yield to the wind and the water, guiding the boat wherever the two together fill your canvas.”

For me, there is a raw, exhilarating freedom in keeping her powered up while allowing the currents and breeze to set the course—to feel the boat heel leeward and listen to the water rush along the rail. When you surrender to the elements, there is no 'wrong direction’ and no clock to beat.

They say the two happiest days in a sailor’s life are the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. At 63, my boat is long since sold, but the lessons of the tiller remain.

Looking back, I realize that for decades, my career was an exercise in that Option A racing mindset—defining fixed coordinates, optimizing performance, trimming the sails for maximum speed, and navigating the handicaps to cross the finish line ahead of the fleet. It took sharp focus, and it served its purpose for that season.

But living with joy in my later years requires a fundamental shift in how I navigate. It isn’t about stepping off the boat, dropping the sails, or backing them and aimlessly drifting; it’s about continuing the sail, but making a conscious choice to trade the stress of holding a rigid course, for the quiet, calm wisdom and exhilaration of the simple act itself.

Option B still takes active effort—doing what I can do each day, staying engaged, managing the heel of the boat, and keeping the canvas full—but it allows me to truly surrender to the greater wisdom of the elements of life.

Listening again recently, it struck me that Christopher Cross captured much of this beautifully in his classic anthem, Sailing:

“Well, it’s not far down to paradise

At least it’s not for me

And if the wind is right you can sail away

And find tranquility

Oh, the canvas can do miracles

Just you wait and see, believe me...

Sailing

Takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be

Just a dream and the wind to carry me

Soon I will be free”

To sail without a final destination isn’t about being lost; it’s about the serenity found in trusting yourself, letting go and believing that in the end, as my mother would say, “everything always works out for the best.”

The Ghosts in the Archive: On Permanence, Revision, and the Storyteller’s Mind

Catch me telling the same story twice, and you’ll likely hear a slightly different version, a sharper punchline, or an extra character who wasn’t there before. Friends call it “spinning yarns.” My standard shield is to quote Mark Twain: “I never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

It gets a laugh, and it serves as a reliable conversational buffer. But behind that easy deflection lies something far more deliberate. Modifying a story when I retell it isn’t dishonesty or memory failure; it is the natural mechanism of the living voice. The oral tradition has always understood that a story is a dynamic interaction between speaker, audience, and moment—a fluid truth tailored to the room it inhabits.

When I published twenty some-odd essays on Substack at 63, I committed those fluid narratives to a static medium—capturing them in service of current cultural topics that grabbed my attention. In doing so, I surrendered to that ancient Socratic trap: turning living thoughts into static text. They became fixed snapshots of my mind at 63, locked in ink and incapable of growth.

I spent the better part of forty-five years in corporate strategy and academia, and nowhere is this tension between static text and evolving reality more conspicuous than in the 'publish or perish' world I left behind. The cynical truth, of course, is that the system is built for immediate returns. In the moment of publication, the university or corporate entity collects its prestige, the research and writing teams slap each other on the back, and we marvel at our own brilliance, silently thinking, “What a smart boy am I!” Hardly anyone in the room cares whether, when, or how significantly those facts might eventually be overturned. And if they are, and someone corners us twenty years later, the defense is effortless: “Well, of course—that was written back before anyone knew better.”

But this trap isn’t unique to academic careerism or corporate strategy; it happens just as quietly in personal prose. When we write in a diary or draft narrative essays, we are captive to the emotional weather of that specific afternoon, blinded by recent circumstances or current fires. Years later, looking back over those pages, we can often hardly recognize them. We don’t just remember the facts differently—we see with a broader, more mature perspective. The underlying timeline remains constant, but the way we tell the story changes.

The em-FASS-iss falls on different sih-LAH-bulz.

As it turns out, human biology insists on this fluidity. Neuroscientists call it memory reconsolidation. We tend to imagine the mind as an archival vault—like Holmes’ mind palace—but the brain doesn’t store memories like fixed video files. Every time we pull an old memory into conscious thought, our brain renders that neural circuit chemically fragile again. In the act of recalling it, we update it—weaving in our updated perspective, thoughts and beliefs. When the brain stores the memory back away, it saves the revised version.

Evolution didn’t design our minds to be passive hard drives; it designed them to adapt. Reconstructive memory allows us to extract evolving meaning from past experience so we can survive the future.

This is precisely why being confronted with a dead text—a bound paper from grad school days, an old diary, or a published essay—feels so strangely awkward. The written word refuses to participate in this natural biological loop. It holds us hostage to past facts and neural states, demanding that we defend a frozen, obsolete version of ourselves long after our living minds have moved on.

The trap is not that written prose, oral storytelling, or even machine-synthesized ideas are inherently untrustworthy; it is that we routinely mistake the medium for the truth. We treat the static page as an infallible oracle simply because it stands still, while the living voice is considered suspect simply because it breathes. Yet the spoken word remains our most direct path to a thinker’s true intent. When we listen to a living voice, we don’t just receive information—we encounter an intellect in real time. We can query it, challenge it, and ask for expansion. The page gives us a monologue frozen in time; the voice offers a dialogue that can answer back.

The resolution to this paradox is not to stop writing, sanitize past written entries, nor to stop orating our knowledge. It requires a fundamental shift in how we view the archive.

Those twenty essays—and every piece of fixed writing that follows—are not unyielding manifestos or permanent claims on absolute truth. They are historical markers in a growing legacy. They document who I was, what I knew, and what I believed at the precise moment of their making. The archive holds the ghosts of past iterations, preserving them as honest snapshots of a living mind.

There is a quiet comfort in the old idea that we live on as long as people retell our stories. By setting these pages free into the world, they become raw material for all to enjoy, remember, and pass along. This written page holds the permanent record, but the living voice—whether mine today or yours—retains full permission to adapt my stories to future moments.

The archive is static, but the story remains alive.

Civil Disobedience at 120 BPM

“3 A.M. Eternal” came up on my Spotify mix while I was in the shower this morning, and the iconic, machine-gun-style sample opening yanked me straight back thirty-seven years—to June 1989 at the largest gay dance club in Birmingham, staging a sit-in with my good friend Doug.

Our casus belli? Stadium house music.

Specifically, it was that very track by The KLF. The British electronic duo—Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty—had just released the song as a twelve-inch import in May. Before they burned a million British pounds as performance art or permanently deleted their entire back catalog from the face of the earth, The KLF were pioneering sample-heavy, rebellious sonic collages that felt less like conventional club tracks and more like transmissions from a better, stranger future.

Doug and I were utterly obsessed. In our hours together between work, organizing meetings, and the heavy atmosphere of the late 1980s, we spun that record until the grooves deformed.

Naturally, when we walked into The Rage on a sticky Saturday night, we believed the rest of the world deserved to hear the future, too.

***

Climbing the stairs to the elevated DJ booth felt entirely routine. The man behind the decks was an acquaintance, someone we considered part of the shared fold.

As we reached the top, he had one headphone clamped to his ear, the other cocked toward the ceiling, bopping in rhythm as his hands finessed the crossfader between two turntables. He gave us the universal, one-finger “hold, please” salute. Once the transition settled and the second track kicked in, he dropped the headphones around his neck, dialed down the booth monitors, and turned to us with a grin.

“Have you heard the new KLF record? ‘3 A.M. Eternal’?” Doug and I asked in eager unison. “Do you have the import? Can you play it tonight… please?”

The DJ’s face went dead. He turned away, staring blankly over the sea of sweaty, undulating bodies on the floor below. Seconds stretched out.

“Well?” we pressed. “Will you?”

He turned back, visibly annoyed that we were still standing there, and delivered his verdict without missing a beat:

“If you want to hear that kind of music, you need to go to the n***** bars.”

Doug and I froze. For a half-second, we actually let out nervous, stunned giggles—the involuntary brain-short of hearing a naked, ugly slur dropped inside a sanctuary by someone you thought knew better. We stood there, paralyzed by adrenaline, trying to formulate a devastating comeback.

He didn’t wait around for one. He slipped his headphones back on, scowled, and turned back to the crowd. Audience dismissed.

***

We hadn’t even reached the bottom steps before the shock hardened into pure outrage. This wasn’t just bad taste in music; it was casual, unrepentant racism inside a space that existed solely because its patrons were outsiders everywhere else. It could not stand.

There were roughly 150 people packed into The Rage that night. In the pre-digital era, organizing wasn’t done via group chats; it was done through physical proximity and whisper networks. Doug and I launched an analog game of Telephone, fanning out across the room to recount the DJ’s ugly slur and deliver the directive: At 11:30 sharp, we’re all sitting down on the dance floor. Tell the next three people you see what he said, pass it on, and when the hands hit the half-hour, sit down and look right up at the booth. Word moved through the cigarette smoke and strobe light like a burning fuse.

At 11:30 precisely, the magic happened. Donna Summer’s “This Time I Know It’s For Real” was blaring through the sound system, the motorized ceiling spinners were throwing kaleidoscopic beams across the room, and the mirrored disco ball was scattering points of light over dozens of upturned faces.

Almost the entire club sat down cross-legged on the sticky floorboards.

We didn’t yell. We didn’t throw drinks. We just sat there, looking up at the DJ in silent, unified defiance, while the bartenders stood behind the counter with their mouths agape.

For about ninety glorious seconds, we owned the room. The silence of our posture cut right through the deafening bass. The message was unmistakable: We are not dancing to your rhythm.

Then the track transitioned.

The opening synth hit and the beat dropped into an irresistible, four-on-the-floor groove—Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” In the center of the seated crowd, our friend Dot suddenly popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

He threw his hands over his head with an ecstatic “Woot!”

One hundred and fifty heads whipped around to look at him. Dot froze for a fraction of a second under the glare of collective judgment. He looked down at Doug and me, shrugged unapologetically, and announced to the entire floor:

“Well, I don’t know about y’all, but I’m not gonna sit down all night.”

With that, he launched into a joyous twirl.

Within thirty seconds, another person stood up. Then five more. Within two minutes, the entire sit-in had dissolved into a roaring, sweaty dance floor once again. The rhythm had won; righteous indignation had run out of steam.

***

Decades later, I think about Dot often whenever refrains from boycott-cultures past flare up—our collective muscle memory for boycotts of Chick-fil-A, Anheuser-Busch, or Cracker Barrel. We declared those moral embargoes years ago with total conviction, convinced our abstinence would bend the arc of commerce. So when someone announces today that they’re still holding the line, it catches me off guard.

I understand the impulse. I used to guard those battle lines fiercely myself. But with time, my idealism gave way to reality. Today, I eat the chicken sandwich, sip an occasional cold Bud, and savor the biscuits and gravy without an existential crisis. I’ve come to recognize the human condition: sooner or later, someone gets hungry, an irresistible bassline drops, or basic convenience wears down our grandest resolve.

Back in the early ’90s, though, I was still a fundamentalist. On a trip to Alabama to visit Mom, she suggested Cracker Barrel for lunch. I recoiled and replied, “Haven’t you heard how they treat their gay and lesbian employees? We aren’t supposed to eat there.”

Without missing a beat, she patted my hand. “Sweetheart, that’s your hill to die on, not mine. And they have such good biscuits.”

She wasn’t wrong; their buttermilk biscuits with gravy are undeniable. Sitting across from her, I felt the first hairline fracture in my own certainty. Dot’s spirit was alive and well.

That DJ went on to enjoy a remarkably durable career, never once having to test his repertoire beyond the safe confines of Birmingham’s gay nightlife. Meanwhile, the world moved on: Cracker Barrel eventually adopted sexual orientation protections and scored a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index; Chick-fil-A’s profits continued to shatter records every year; and I still find myself in the drive-thru line every couple of weeks for a chicken sandwich and waffle fries.

Did our ninety-second sit-in dismantle racial prejudice in Southern nightlife? Did it permanently reprimand the DJ?

No.

But it did something equally vital. For ninety seconds beneath that spinning disco ball, we refused to pretend everything was fine. We disrupted the script. We reminded the man behind the turntables—and ourselves—that dignity has a baseline, even if human nature eventually calls us back to our feet.

Sometimes, the triumph of a protest isn’t measured by whether you stayed seated forever. It’s measured by the courage it took to sit down in the first place.

I’m Gay and Queer. And It All Matters: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

The Question at “Shady Pines”

Tucked into the Birmingham mountainside, the water in our pool offers a cool, quiet retreat from both the Southern heat and the noise outside. In a state dominated by deep-red politics, our pool is a stubborn, joyful blue dot. Most of us call our complex “Shady Pines”—a half-serious, half-loving nod to The Golden Girls—and over the years, it has become a sanctuary for older adults across the spectrums of sexuality and political alignment.

For many of us, that Golden Girls connection runs far deeper than simple sitcom nostalgia. As members of a community where so many are aging alone, the show offers a blueprint for chosen family. It portrays a group of distinct, opinionated individuals who share a roof to live, laugh, and care for one another through life’s later chapters.

Mornings during the summer, a 55-to-85-year-old contingent gathers for water aerobics—part exercise, part neighborhood council and part 70s Yacht Rock trivia contest. After class, a few of us stay behind, bobbing in the deep end. That was where my neighbor—a sharp, spirited woman in her mid-seventies—brought up her granddaughter, who was working at a new downtown spot called the Pink Lantern.

“I saw some pictures. It looks really fun,” she said, floating on her pool noodle. “But... what kind of gay bar is it, exactly?”

“It isn’t a gay bar,” I replied. “It’s a queer bar.”

She looked at me, genuinely puzzled. “What’s the difference?”

One of the old-guard gay friends floating nearby chimed in, “Yeah, John—why not just call it what it is? A gay bar.”

At Its Core

That simple question, asked while floating in our pool, revealed a fault line I’ve watched widening for years—one that has sparked more than a few spirited debates of my own.

What is the difference? And why does the answer feel less like a gentle shift in vocabulary and more like a civil war?

To understand it, you have to look at two distinct philosophies. One group fought for the right to be ordinary, legible, and protected under the law, where legal protections and societal acceptance were urgent matters of physical survival. They called themselves Gay or Lesbian. The other group believes in the deconstruction of binaries altogether, rejecting assimilation and demanding radical liberation outside normative structures. They call themselves Queer. For many who remember when that word was hurled as a street slur, the name itself creates an immediate wall—making it easier to get stuck on a painful pejorative than to engage the human beings and concepts behind it.

While this divide often falls along generational lines for older gays and lesbians, it is not strictly a matter of age. There are elders who proudly claim queer as an anti-assimilationist stance forged in the radical street politics of the 1970s, just as there are young people today who ground their identity firmly in traditional gay and lesbian liberation. Yet, the friction between these two worldviews remains very real.

And then there’s me.

I handcuffed myself to fences. I protested and marched. I lost friends. In 1994, I spent six months in Manhattan working alongside Gilbert Baker to unfurl a mile-long, 7,000-pound rainbow flag carried by 10,000 people up First Avenue to commemorate Stonewall 25. I am, squarely, a Gay. But today, as a sexual and gender minority scholar, a lifetime non-conformist, and someone who celebrates the fluid, boundary-pushing art I see at the Pink Lantern, I also claim Queer.

So I suppose I would like to identify as both. Is that allowed? Or does the modern ideological purity test demand we choose a side in a battle over our own history?

The Mechanics of Revolution

To understand how a word like queer can spark a quiet civil war, look at the debate playing out across national opinion pages. In June 2026, Matthew Vines wrote in The New York Times (”I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters”) asserting an identity grounded in traditional gay liberation. Weeks later, Dr. Chase T. M. Anderson responded in The Advocate (”I’m Queer, Not Gay. It Matters”), arguing that “queer” is an essential reclamation for true liberation.

This clash follows the classic mechanics of revolution: a movement overthrows an oppressive regime, builds an institutional fortress to protect the peace paid for in blood, and eventually faces a new vanguard that views those protective walls as a cage.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, the battlefield of revolution became human bodies. The Sexual Revolution, NOW and the early Gay Liberation movement applied the mechanics of political revolt to personal autonomy.

Stonewall wasn’t a policy debate; it was a riot against state violence. When the AIDS pandemic hit a decade later, survival demanded an even fiercer, pragmatic political mobilization. Out of that trauma came a strategy centered on integration: We are born this way, we are citizens just like you, and we deserve equal protection. That strategy secured decades of landmark victories, culminating in the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

When younger activists—or older radicals—accuse the old guard of enforcing respectability politics, it strikes an open wound. What looks like gatekeeping is a protective, trauma-informed reflex. Elders who buried a generation view their sanctuary as a fortress bought in blood—and panic when anyone reopens the gates to an angry mob. They aren’t trying to be bullies; they remember the wilderness.

The Vanguard and the Lineage

I have to be honest: in the late 1970s, I looked at my own gay elders with a sharp, uncomfortable embarrassment.

Standing in the bars as a conservative kid, I’d watch men in their late forties and fifties with bushy mustaches and leather harnesses, smelling of poppers, or dancing with castanets while shouting, “Can you feel it?!”

To my young eyes, it felt hyper-sexualized, unhinged, and hopelessly far outside the mainstream. I wanted safety and legitimacy; they represented a wild subculture I didn’t yet understand.

So when I see people today roll their eyes at traditional gay and lesbian organizing, I get it. It is the necessary arrogance of youth—or the unyielding drive of the free spirit to whom assimilation has always felt like compromise.

In 1980, I wished my elders would tone down the radicalism so the rest of us could fit in. Today, a new vanguard attacks my generation for the exact opposite: being too eager to fit in, too respectable, and too suburban.

Here is the quiet irony we so easily miss: today’s activists possess the safety, language, and freedom to demand radical transformation only because an unbroken chain of movement builders—the survivors of the ‘Fabulous Fifties’ who kept camping it up through relentless persecution, the uninhibited free-love pioneers of the seventies, the pragmatic survivors of the AIDS crisis, and the visionaries of recent years—forged a sanctuary sturdy enough to shield them as they grew.

Today’s vanguard stands on the shoulders of an unbroken lineage of elders, rebels, pragmatists, and visionaries who built the very house they are now redecorating.

Younger queer, trans and non-binary individuals are not tearing down the fortress!

They are fighting on an expanded front line for liberation for all, confronting healthcare bans and mounting political hostility aimed at those in our community who have been marginalized for far too long. To them, a movement that stops at marriage certificates feels dangerously complacent. Where elders see chaos in shifting acronyms and redesigned flags, the new vanguard sees an ever-expanding table. They are not ungrateful, they simply refuse to let the revolution stop where their elders left off.

Our Infinite Rainbow

This entire cultural civil war—between the old guard holding the line and the vanguard demanding a broader horizon—can be seen floating above us in a single piece of fabric: Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag.

When Gilbert stitched together the original eight-stripe flag in 1978, he didn’t assign each color to a specific demographic group or political identity. He chose precise Pantone shades to represent universal human conditions: Hot Pink for sex, Red for life, Orange for healing, Yellow for sunlight, Green for nature, Turquoise for magic and art, Indigo for serenity, and Violet for spirit.

The flag’s power was its abstraction. It belonged to no single niche because it belonged to the human spirit itself. When practical production realities forced the removal of hot pink and turquoise—leaving the iconic six-stripe banner we carried up First Avenue in 1994—it didn’t lessen the symbol’s meaning. It consolidated it into a universal shield.

In recent years, that banner has evolved into the Progress Pride flag, adding chevrons for trans and non-binary pride, racial and ethnic marginalization, and intersex identity. It raises a fascinating philosophical question: When a symbol shifts from universal human abstractions to specific demographic representation, where does the addition end? How many stripes and chevrons can we add before our flags become so fragmented that they lose their power to unify? Is the infinite addition of colors and symbols a dilution of the original vision, or its ultimate fulfillment?

And that debate isn’t just happening on flagpoles; it’s playing out across dining tables and bar tops over who owns our history. A friend recently insisted to me: “Ours has always and only been about sexual orientation, not gender politics. What frustrates me is that the trans community just hitched their train to ours—and now they’re ruining it for the rest of us.”

When I asked him to think back to our youth—to the drag queens, the street kids, the gender-defying regulars, and the effeminate men who always asked to be called by their girl names—he paused, then shrugged: “Well, yes, but they were never close friends. They weren’t really part of my core.”

That exchange made the real issue instantly clear: we aren't arguing over two different communities—we are looking at the exact same history through two different lenses. Those who moved in neat, assimilationist circles saw a gay male movement. Those who looked toward the margins saw that gender non-conformity was there when the very first brick was thrown. The train was never "hitched" after the fact; some passengers were simply sitting in seats others chose to ignore.

Perhaps the resolution to this friction lies in science. A glass prism does not split light into seven neat, distinct boxes; it refracts white light into a continuous, unbroken spectrum of infinite wavelengths. There are no hard borders between hot pink, red, or violet—only an endless gradient of light. We don’t have to choose between a universal shield and an expanding rainbow because light itself has always been infinite.

What we need now is something far simpler and much harder: 

we have to start talking across the divide.

A friend recently invited me over for what I thought was a casual drink. But the moment the Pink Lantern came up, the cocktail turned into a heavy pour of disdain and bitterness. At one point, exasperated by the debate, he blurted out: 'Don’t tell me I can’t have such strong opinions if I’m not fully informed. I am informed! I watch the news!’

That exchange stayed with me because it exposes the real tragedy of our current impasse. When our opinions are formed by twenty-four-hour news cycles, algorithmically driven outrage, or even national opinion pages rather than open dialogue and human interaction, we mistake reactive noise for real understanding.

Without real-world connections across generations and viewpoints, the older guard will continue to see disrespect, and the vanguard will continue to see only complacency. We lose the vital transfer of wisdom, history, and institutional memory from those who survived the fire—and we deny elders the vibrant, expansive hope and fresh perspectives of those who are designing the future.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

If we want a world where we can all grow old safely together—where our community includes the 75-year-old lesbian, the 50-year-old gay man, and the 22-year-old non-binary performer—we have to start talking with each other instead of at or about each other. We have to sit by the pool, share the story of the six-stripe flag and the progress chevrons, and listen.

Which brings me back to “Shady Pines.”

The reason we love The Golden Girls isn’t just because Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia were funny. It’s because they offered a radical model of community: distinct, opinionated people choosing to share a home, weathering life’s struggles together rather than facing the world in isolation.

That is the ultimate dream I hold—not just for my fellow retirees floating in our pool, but for my younger LGBTQ+ friends, too. Thanks to the breakthroughs of recent years, our younger generations are far more likely to reach old age than my peers were in 1984 or 1994. They will grow old. And when they do, they will need the exact same thing we need: a chosen family, a sanctuary, a place where we can all be different, yet still live, laugh, love, and hold each other up through the storm.

Revolutions do not have to devour their elders, and elders do not have to disown their children. The older gay man floating on a pool noodle in our sanctuary and the 22-year-old performer taking the stage in body glitter at the Pink Lantern are not enemies. They are two points along the exact same continuous lineage.

In a world where hostile political tides still threaten to erase us all,

we cannot afford to burn the house down from the inside.

We can honor the hands that sewed the original six stripes while making room for new chevrons. We can protect the hard-won victories of our history while daring to imagine a broader, wilder, and more loving future.

It turns out, there is room for all of us under one infinite rainbow.