The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.
As of 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS globally, and 39 million have died from the disease. The epidemic of denial won, and now everyone knows there is money in the making of drugs for AIDS.
ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that AIDS could affect all of us: that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or AIDS. We were trying to tell them about the future - a future they didn't yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act.
My first letter of acceptance, to UMass - Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman.
My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.
I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
When I'm identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. 'Did you go to school for it?' someone asks. 'Yes,' I say. 'Where?' they ask, because I don't usually offer it. 'I went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' I say.
Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.
I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.
I had been in a professional boys' choir, and as a boy soprano, you're aware that your voice has an expiration date.
When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.
I loved being a soprano. It was one of my very favorite things in life, and thus far, and losing that voice was a profound emotional moment for me in my life. I never became that interested in my adult male singing voice.
My fascination with women's clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.
I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.
If you compromise, and then you succeed, that's another kind of feeling. But if you compromise and fail, it's two failures at least.
Andrea Schulz became my editor in 2009.
It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'
A woman's desire is either terrifying, or it's ignored.
The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne.
Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.
