CHICAGO CARLESS

Recently, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Center in New York profiled GLYNY Again in its monthly video features program, Out at the Center. That’s the alumni group for Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York, America’s first-ever gay youth group, of which I was an active member from 1986 through 1990.

[Read more →]

(Photo: An honest look of shock as I sit amidst one-third of my surprise 37th birthday party.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I turned 37 this month in my hometown. And while August continues to merge into seemingly one exceptionally and unexpectedly long trip to Gotham to interview and apartment hunt, it was turning 37 that I found most informative. Purely for narcissistic reasons. Essentially I was smoked.

[Read more →]

(Photo: As a matter of fact, we have been posing on this corner for 21 years.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

So I’m GLYNYing again. This past spring, I chronicled the sudden and miraculous Internet reunion of my 1980s cohort of Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY, pronounced “GLIH-nee”). The nation’s first-ever gay youth peer support group, GLYNY was founded in New York City in 1969 as a splinter cell of the historic Gay Liberation Front.

[Read more →]

(Photo: And every connotation that goes with it. Credit: Mildred’s House of Signage.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

So I’m in New York job hunting. And as usual when I’m here, I am the unofficial ringleader of the ongoing GLYNY AGAIN reunion. No surprise, then, to find me and the gang hanging out on my first evening in town at Astoria, Queens’ sloshily seminal Bohemian Beer Garden. Picture it: one outdoor acre; 100 picnic tables; unlimited hooch; and half a dozen gay New Yorkers. Somebody’s secrets were coming out that night or no one was going home happy.

[Read more →]

(Photo: A smile marking a turning point in my life, and I am forever changed.)

(This entry was originally posted to the Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York reunion message board the evening of Monday, April 16, 2007).

Well here I am, my last night in New York, leaving tomorrow to finally head back to my life in Chicago. I’ve already spoken my peace about Saturday night and seeing you all again. But my momentary anxiety got the better of me and I never did tell you at that table at Sammy’s what I thought of you all. Last night, on the spur of the moment, Barbara and Jennifer and Scott got to hear. I want the rest of you to know, too.

[Read more →]

(Photo: Can you find me in this picture? It took me almost 20 years.)

Last week, I was at a loss for words. Try as I might to blog, nothing came. Nothing could. I was preoccupied with an unfolding miracle–one that continues to reveal its happy countenance, its joyous contours. Just where does one begin to describe the feeling of finding long-lost family?

[Read more →]

In the late 1980s, I joined a group of people who came together to survive. A large, proud group of gay and lesbian adolescents who met every Saturday in Greenwich Village, New York, and talked things out. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing for almost 30 years, Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY, pronounced “GLIN-ee”) provided a safe forum for hundreds if not thousands of gay youth to meet, talk out problems of home and school, try to make some sense of life, and see that being gay and being happy did not need to be mutually exclusive.

[Read more →]