She meets up with her friend, the one she thinks is gay. He suggests dinner and she wonders if he’ll be generous and pay, even though this is not a date. But he’s older, by fifteen years at least, and he knows she’s a broke college student. She meets up with him at his apartment, finding herself in the East Village where the nightlife tumbles out of doorways and Avenue D looms dark as crime. A is for alive, B is for breathing, C is for comatose, and D is for dead.
Read MoreA few weeks after Indigo came out to us as trans, our family attended a Gender Diversity meeting at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Our fourteen-year-old joined the teens in the big room, and Jason and I opened the door to the parent room where a box of Kleenex was circling. During introductions I spoke for the two of us, as I do, and afterward the group’s founder, Aidan Key, raised his hand to break in.
Read More“One day that building will collapse,” Harry told me as we stood in front of the condominium on 79th Street and Columbus Avenue. It had been just completed that autumn of 1982. “Carbuncle Construction,” Harry called it. He was right. The condo with its shiny glass was a true eyesore nestled next to a row of brownstones. Across the street the American Museum of Natural History seemed to sneer at the new intruder with burnished windows that glowed with gold antique hues.
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