The One Who Mumbles

His Candide Overture is perhaps the singular most joyful piece of brilliantly scattered, wickedly intractable music ever written, with its c...

Five years ago today, a massive derecho—a Category 4 inland hurricane defined by its straight-line winds, which exceeded 140 miles an hour h...

F. Scott Fitzgerald was arguably ahead of his time when he published his novel The Great Gatsby in 1925. America was still too deep in the ...

Maybe Happy Ending first appeared on my radar in a dismissive review that said it’s about two robots who go on a road trip to see fireflies...

For some reason I’ve never seen the Death Becomes Her movie. I’ve seen enough clips of it that I’ve gotten the general gist, but they clear...

I can’t remember if I’ve ever read or seen The Outsiders (a 1967 novel adapted into a movie in 1983), but the plot seemed vaguely familiar ...

I want to be Cole Escola’s best friend.   They—meaning Cole—wrote Oh, Mary! in response to the idea that maybe Lincoln’s assassination wasn...

A one-woman play about a battered wife in rural Louisiana who escapes her trauma by writing poetry, Call Me Izzy doesn’t give itself much r...

We’re proud because despite decades and decades of relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and c...

I didn’t really know anybody by the time the first pride parade happened soon after I moved to Chicago. So I went by myself to watch it. And...

Fifty-six years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn—a mob-controlled gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered most...

Ten years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples are guaranteed the right to marry under both the ...

Virtually every pride parade and public LGBTQ+ event draws a crowd of hate-filled, mouth-frothing religious bigots carrying massive-lettered...

Until this year’s brutal backlash, every June companies across America and around the world have added rainbow stripes to their logos and th...

Five years ago today, the Supreme Court ruling protecting gay and transgender workers from job discrimination and outright firings kicked th...

Though I was living in Chicago at the time, I was in Cedar Rapids 17 years ago today to visit my folks for their June 14 anniversary. My boy...

The right-wing privileged majority loves to claim oppression when any minority inches toward achieving any level of equality. Read any right...

In 1983—at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the United States—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration instituted a lifetime ban on b...

Cisgender heterosexuals—how many times have you: Gathered with other straight cisgender friends while people with bullhorns held giant signs...

Before the 1969 Stonewall riots, virtually every aspect of the lives of gay people was illegal to varying degrees in America: being openly g...