It’s been a year since my very best friend — and the light during most of my life — died. I still can’t quite wrap my head around that. I definitely can’t wrap my heart around that. Sheri Roberts Tennant was my counterpart in so many ways: we really got along like Will and Grace in most respects, down to being a nearly undefeatable team in board games because we knew and could read each other so well.
One of the most over-whelming aspects of losing Sheri for me was the practically crushing weight of being the sole witness of all the memories we lived together in the course of our 40 years. The secrets she confided, the things she believed, the dreams she dreamed, as well as each Read the rest of this entry
At the Gay Christian Network conference in Houston in 2016, the theme of most of the break out sessions that I attended was recovering from shame. Brené Brown’s name was big that year. She is an expert in studies on vulnerability and shame, and her statements were espoused by session leaders and struck deep chords in so many of the thousands of LGBTQ Christians who were present. Spending your life hiding who you are, believing you are a mistake and forsaken by God, being told endlessly that you are an abomination, a blight, the thing that makes Jesus puke, that the only way to live and be loved is by denying how you were made by that same God, being promised loving acceptance that will be snatched away and replaced by rejection and condemnation if what you strive so hard to bury ever sees the light of day, is a universal experience for those of us who were raised and lived in the evangelical Christian church.
So I’m working on a revision of the stage parody we produced 2 years ago, Go On With Your Wind. It was a huge undertaking and a ton of fun, but the show clocked at a good 3+ hours. It needs tightened and trimmed, but I was told by an objective someone whose opinion I value: this show needs to be published. One of the best parts about revision: making it better, funnier, sharper.
In my high school senior English lit class I loved the writing assignments. I wrote essays and short stories, poetry, and wrote my thesis on Wonder Woman. We also had reading assignments and wrote conclusively about what we read, and I did just fine. Until Miss George assigned Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. For some reason I’ve never examined too closely, I took an immediate dislike for the novel, and I could not bring myself to read it. Every day in class we were assigned new chapters and I was supposed to write answers to questions about this classic dreck. So based on the