Band of Thebes

Andrew Solomon Wins Green Carnation Prize for Far from the Tree

A National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist for his depression book The Noonday Demon [Kindle], Andrew Solomon's follow-up about variant children, Far From the Tree, has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and now the Green Carnation Prize for the best book by an lgbt author.

I was hoping the judges might declare a tie between that amazing book and Neil McKenna's wonderful, less trumpeted Fanny and Stella, a biography of two London men who dressed as women in 1870.

Said Solomon: "I am profoundly honored and utterly thrilled to have won this prize.  When I was born, it was a crime, a sin, and a mental illness to be gay; now it is an identity, and a much celebrated one at that, as the very existence of this prize clearly demonstrates.  My book is about how we can use that shift, of which gay people today are the fortunate beneficiaries, as a model for helping others with stigmatized differences to find dignity in them.  I believe with all my heart in a prize that celebrates the particular contributions of gay literature, and that recognizes that human diversity, like species diversity, is necessary to sustain the world as we know and love it.  I am delighted to play any part in putting forward that idea, and I thank the judges with all my heart."

Raising My Rainbow

This year's Oddly Normal -- a great book in which a surprised parent copes with and fully supports a queer son -- comes with an introduction by Neil Patrick Harris, a blurb from Andy Cohen, and a starred PW review which calls Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son [Kindle] "an optimistic and delightful memoir of her family's process of understanding, supporting, and celebrating their gender-creative son, C.J., who prefers Barbies to trucks and princesses to pirates. The story of the phenomenal growth that this mother exhibits as she tries to do what she thinks is best—steering C.J. toward gender-neutral toys, navigating ever-changing rules about what is okay for him to wear in public—is humorous and light, even when the issues involved are heavy. Duron employs a range of resources as she tries to understand her son and how best to parent him, including speaking to her gay brother and his transgendered friend, finding LGBTQ resources on the Internet, and discovering peers when she begins publishing a blog about C.J. In Duron's story, parents will find support for a love them, not change them style of parenting, optimism about the outcomes for their gender-creative children, sympathy for the difficulties of parenting, and an affirmation of the appropriateness and necessity for fierce advocacy. Duron's call for compassion should be heeded by educators, caregivers, and neighbors—an open heart, a desire to listen and learn, and a willingness to accommodate go a long way in doing well by someone who differs from your expectations."

HBO & Oprah Developing Richard Kramer's "These Things Happen"

Deadline reports that now you really must read this wonderful gay novel: "HBO has put in development These Things Happen [Kindle], a half-hour comedy based on the first novel by TV writer-producer Richard Kramer (Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life). The pay cable network has optioned the book, published last fall, for the comedy project, which will be produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Prods. under the company’s deal at HBO. Kramer will write the script and executive produce. These Things Happen is set in present day Manhattan and focuses on two couples – one gay, one straight. They share a 15-year-old son, who lives on the upper East Side with his mother and doctor stepfather. Trying to get to know his impressive, distant father better, he moves in for a semester with him and his long-time partner who forms an instant friendship with the boy."

Born August 24: M

One of my very favorite people dislikes publicity to the exact degree that I admire her: immensely. A careful, thoughtful editor by temperament and trade, she taught me how to eat, speak, read, write, garden, museum-go, and travel internationally... seven of my all-time greatest pastimes. Though I couldn't hope to match her knowledge, natural skill, and intuitive elegance in those activities, it has been an abiding pleasure to fall short in her shadow. Especially now she deserves your respect and gratitude for years of bravery and persistence in the slow task of helping to educate a straight community on lgbt equality, the best kind of local change that ripples nationally. 

A voracious, versatile, and adventurous reader, she recommends Hilary Spurling's two-volume biography The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master and Andrea Barrett's National Book Award-winning collection, Ship Fever [Kindle], especially the story "Rare Birds."

Atlantic Cover Story: Gay Couples Much Awesomer than Married Straights

Missed this last month: the Atlantic ran a 9,800-word cover story by Liza Mundy summarizing decades of sociological studies comparing same-sex unions and hetero marriages. Among the many findings, all of which are direct quotes lifted from the article:

• Same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages.

• Researchers found that the quality of gay and lesbian relationships was higher on many measures than that of the straight control group (the married heterosexual siblings), with more compatibility and intimacy, and less conflict.

• Gay and lesbian couples were fairer in their dealings with one another than straight couples, both in intent and in practice. 

• Other studies have since confirmed findings that same-sex couples are more egalitarian.

• A growing body of scholarship on household division of labor shows that in many ways, same-sex couples do it better.

• In all couples, the person with the higher income had more authority and decision-making power. This was least true for lesbians; truer for heterosexuals; and most true for gay men. Somehow, putting two men together seemed to intensify the sense that “money talks.”

• [on conflict] In same-sex couples, the partner with the bone to pick was rated “less belligerent and less domineering” than the straight-couple counterpart, while the person on the receiving end was less aggressive and showed less fear or tension. The same-sex “initiator” also displayed less sadness and “whining,” and more affection, joy, and humor. 

• [on an experiment of parents and kids playing with toys] The same-sex couples are far more likely to be in there together, and the opposite-sex couples show the conventional pattern—the mom more involved, the dad playing with Tinkertoys by himself.” When the opposite-sex couples did parent simultaneously, they were more likely to undermine each other by talking at cross-purposes or suggesting different toys. The lesbian mothers tended to be egalitarian and warm in their dealings with one another, and showed greater pleasure in parenting than the other groups did. Same-sex dads were also more egalitarian in their division of labor than straight couples, though not as warm or interactive as lesbian moms. (Patterson says she and her colleagues may need to refine their analysis to take into account male ways of expressing warmth.)

• We know that heterosexual wives are more likely than husbands to initiate divorce... Intriguingly, in Norway and Sweden, where registered partnerships for same-sex couples have been in place for about two decades, research has found that lesbians are twice as likely as gay men to split up. 

Liza Mundy is the author of three books, most recently The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Our Culture.

Fairyland: Growing Up with a Gay Dad in 70s San Francisco

Alysia Abbott's mother liked it that her husband was bi and sometimes picked out guys for him. She also had extra flings, but she died when Alysia was two; suddenly Steve, enjoying the golden age of gay sex in San Francisco, had to raise a daughter on his own. He got aids and died before she turned 22 in 1992. Their twenty years together are the subject of her brand new memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father [Kindle].

Earlier this week Alysia got the whole hour on Fresh Air. 

Edmund White: “A vivid, sensitively written account of a complex but always loving relationship. This is not only a painfully honest autobiography but also a tribute to old-fashioned bohemian values in a world that is increasingly conformist and materialistic. I couldn't put it down!” 

Alison Bechdel: “Generous, precise, and deeply moving, Fairyland is a love story that not only brings a new generational perspective to a history we’re in danger of forgetting, but irrevocably shifts the way we think about family itself.”

Dani Shapiro: “At once a father-daughter love story, a testament to survival, a meditation on profound loss, and a searing chronicle of a complex coming of age, Fairyland is a beautiful, haunting book that instructs, even as it breaks our hearts.” 

Honor Moore: “In Alysia Abbott’s gorgeous account of her 1980s San Francisco childhood, a whimsical gay poet becomes an intelligent father, his motherless daughter a forceful and articulate young woman, and a rich, dizzy fairyland is shuttered by a plague. As a chronicle of the moment when the San Francisco of Armistad Maupin became the city of Harvey Milk, when gay and experimental poetry flourished in California, Fairyland is vivid and indelible. As the portrait of a conspiracy of love between a father and a daughter, it is heartrending, a brilliant addition to the literature of American memoir.”

Essays by Gay Italian-American Men: Our Naked Lives

Big month in the Michael Carosone - Joseph LoGiudice household: They've adopted a two-year old Shih Tzu and co-edited a new essay collection called Our Naked Lives: Essays From Gay Italian American Men.Blurbed by Michael Musto, David Bergman, and Michelangelo Signorile, the book features these authors and possibly more:

Michael Carosone, John D'Emilio, Charles Derry, George Di Stefano, Joseph A. Federico, Joseph A. LoGiudice, Michael Luongo,David Masello, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Joe Oppedisano, Frank Anthony Polito, Felice Picano, Michael Schiavi, Frank Spinelli, and Tony Tripoli.

Many of the writers recount struggles to balance their homosexuality with their complicated, tradition-bound Italian-American heritage. Happily, in most cases the rejecting families eventually come round to acceptance and affirmation.

Joseph says, "The book centers broadly on the intersection of sexuality and ethnicity and how they clash with one another. Specific themes surround familial issues, conflicts with Roman Catholicism, father-son disputes, gender stereotypes, and the separation of gay and Italian American identities."

Their first book event is at the B&N at Broadway & 82nd St on Tuesday, June 25 at 7:00.

These Things Happen, a Bestseller in Los Angeles

McEwan, Diaz, Eggers, Munro, Kramer, Mantel, and Smith. Over the weekend, on a visit to the venerable L.A. indie Book Soup, I was delighted to see Richard Kramer's gay novel These Things Happen [Kindle] at #6 on their bestsellers list. If you haven't yet met Wesley (age fifteen) and George (Wesley's dad's partner), make reading their story another of your resolutions.

Out Today: Alice Munro, Andrew Solomon, Colm Tóibín

Other writers start repeating themselves with their second book, but Alice Munro, at 81, still finds fresh things to say in her thirteenth collection of stories, Dear Life. A career standout is "Gravel," which also happens to be her first story about a lesbian, after much earlier gay stories "Turkey Season" and "The Jack Randa Hotel." For once, readers of The New Yorker have a lot to look forward to; only six of the book's fourteen stories appeared in the magazine. Others debuted in Harpers, Granta, Tin House, and Narrative, and two are in print for the first time.

One of a very few openly gay National Book Award winners for nonfiction, Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression rocked critics and readers in 2001. Now comes Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity [Kindle], his nearly thousand-page exploration of how families do or don't cope with kids born different from their parents: gay, autistic, genius, deaf, criminal, etc. Already a media sensation, the book "makes for fascinating and disturbing reading," says Sara Nelson.

Colm Tóibín's new religious novella The Testament of Mary [Kindle] inspired the NYT to rave, "Tóibín is at his lyrical best in The Testament of Mary, a beautiful and daring work…it takes its power from the surprises of its language, its almost shocking characterization, its austere refusal of consolation." The New Statesman called it "a flawless work, touching, moving and terrifying."

My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey

Classics scholar Charles Beye was openly gay in his teens in the 1940s, twice married to women, fathered four children, has been partnered with a man for the past 20 years, and waited until he was 82 to release this memoir My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey [Kindle]. Published today by FSG, it earned a boffo review from NPR's Maureen Corrigan:

“It’s Beye’s charming raconteur voice, however, and his refusal to bend anecdotes into the expected ‘lessons’ that really make this memoir such a knockout. Beye won me over in his introduction when he admitted that, looking back at the long span of his life—he’s now over 80—the big question he still asks himself is, ‘What was that all about?’ . . . Beye’s story is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon. While he seems to have been blessedly free of the standard sexual guilt growing up, he was also acutely aware of the cost of being different . . . Beye’s memoir ends on a joyous note. He and his husband of the title have been married for some four years; together for 20. Bowing to his background in ancient Greek, Beye subtitled his memoir ‘A Gay Man’s Odyssey,’ but he might just as well have availed himself of the affirmative LGBTQ slogan It Gets Better.” 

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.

Boy Scouts Unanimously Reaffirm Anti-Gay Bigotry

After a two-year secret review of their policy excluding gay people, the Boy Scouts of America yesterday announced the organization reaffirms that ban. A mouthpiece claimed the unidentified eleven-person panel represented "a diversity of perspectives and opinions," and yet the antigay vote was unanimous. The LAT quotes Jay Mechling, a professor at UC Davis and author of On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth, calling it "a business decision based on religious pressure." Of 2.7 million scouts, an estimated 400,000 are Mormons.

The announcement also kills a new resolution from May's annual meeting to consider allowing individual local chapters to accept gay leaders. The issue received widespread media scrutiny in April after Jennifer Tyrrell [left] was ousted as a den mother in Ohio for being a lesbian. A petition to overturn the ban soon gained more than 300,000 signatures, spurred by support from Iowa Eagle Scout and incessant publicity hound Zach Wahls, 20, author of My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family.

Offering a shred of hope, two BSA board bigshots, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Ernst & Young CEO James Turley, have said it's time to change the policy and welcome gay people. They are in the minority now but Stephenson becomes president of the BSA board in 2014.

The Girl Scouts, Boys & Girls Clubs, and Big Brothers Big Sisters all have vowed to not exclude gay and lesbian people. 

Sort-of Top 12 States of LGBT Couples Raising Kids: All Red

 

Based on data from the 2010 Census, and analyzed by the The Williams Institute, this infographic is a little deceptive because it shows the percentage of each state's total number of same-sex couples, NOT where the highest percentage of all child-raisers are queer parents. The original key says in these top states approx 25% - 33% of same-sex couples are raising kids. This means, in theory, South Dakota could have made the top rank with a mere ten same-sex couples raising children if the census counted only forty households headed by a same-sex couple in the state. For more about LGBT people raising children check out the Family Equality Council, founded in 1979.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Six years after the firestorm of praise for her groundbreaking book about her closeted father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel triumphs again with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama [Kindle]. The new book lacks the propelling plot of the first memoir, but it's more daring and its issues are more interesting. The overall subject is the development of the self, created primarily from three strands: being queer, struggling as an artist, and unraveling the mother-daughter bond. Frequent text quotes are woven in from four authors who become characters in the narrative as well: Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Donald Winnicott, and Alice Miller. (Bechdel's working title was The Drama of the Gifted Mother.) She portrays her prickly, disappointed mom with a fraught sympathy and a groping understanding. The book spends possibly a little too much time at her therapy sessions but the jargon is minimal and the insights are great. And those scenes are enlivened by surprises like this exchange:

Carol: "So when you see this gay cartoonist's work in The New Yorker."

Alison: "Oh, God. It's the worst feeling in the world."

I was suffering at this time from nearly unbearable spasms of professional envy.

Alison: "I feel, annihilated."

Of other cartoonists, of other gay and lesbian writers, of anyone who was at all like me or doing anything remotely similar to what I was doing.

Alison: "I'm not making enough money. The newspapers my strip runs in keep folding or merging."

Alison: "People don't need cartoons about lesbians anymore! You can watch them on tv!"

Alison: "I'm spending more than half my time on this crazy book about my dad and I don't even know if it'll ever get published."

Alison: "So, yeah. When all of the sudden The New Yorker starts running these blase, post-gay cartoons, I feel like, Fuck! What have I been doing with my life?" "Am I going to have to get a job?"

Carol: "Hmm. Your own achievements get erased by other people's."

Alison: "Isn't that how it works?"

Carol: "All this makes me think that in your family there wasn't enough room under one roof for several geniuses. You've reversed your own aggression. You feel guilty for wanting to annihilate others, so you turn it on yourself."

Alison: "Whoa!"

Serious as her subject is, Bechdel hasn't lost her goofball sense of whimsy. The complex drawings perfectly convey her skewered perspective, as when she and her girlfriend are stargazing, lying in a field, and the frame shows the mountains upside down. Even if you never read graphic books, you'll want to own this original, boundary-busting, and altogether marvelous memoir.

Two Gay Dads and their Fifth-Grade Son Around the World for a Year

Speaking of great fathers, meet Terry and Carl, two gay dads who are letting their fifth-grade son Corbin skip school again today. Actually, all year. Because they're taking him around the world, a different country every month. They're almost halfway, currently in Australia. Naturally, the three-man trip has spawned four blogs: 1, 2, 3, 4. Plus recipes.

(Hat tip: Jacqueline.)

Due Vincitori Italiani: I Am Love & Loose Cannons

Later this summer you'll have two opportunities to watch three generations of extremely good looking Italian merchant dynasties cope with suppressed desires, unexpected passions, strong mothers, all-seeing servants, and grown children finally coming out to their conservative families. In both movies the gay third generation marks a seismic change in freedom from the stifled affections of their elders, but the films have opposite personalities, immediately evident in their trailers.

The Tilda Swinton starrer I Am Love is richer in every sense. Very likely it's the most sumptuous, most elegant film you'll see this year. Predictably, Swinton is splendid as a Russian wife beautifully trapped in a Milanese clan. The debut director charmed the audience at New Directors New Films apologizing for sounding pretentious as he said this was his Buddenbrooks. Even the gorgeous, confining mansion becomes a character. Over the top but a must see for cineastes, from June 18.

After Steam: The Turkish Bath, His Secret Life, Facing Windows, and Saturn in Opposition, Ferzan Ozpetek has made his funniest and most blatantly enjoyable film yet. Loose Cannons is an ensemble dramedy that sometimes aspires toward Almodovar and sometimes toward Mamma Mia. More than summer fun, if not quite profound, it features six queer characters, including the lead played by Riccardo Scamarcio of Eden Is West. Tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival, Ozpetek and three of his actresses discussed the joys of filming in Lucca. Indiewire offers a brief interview.

Benjamin Taylor's Novel Named Among Year's Best by L.A. Times

Well earned congratulations to Benjamin Taylor. The editors of the Los Angeles Times revealed their favorite titles of 2008, among them his remarkable second novel, The Book of Getting Even, about a young gay Southerner's attachments - erotic, fevered, platonic - to a sterling family of Eastern European intellectuals. The New Yorker said, "Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised."

Overall, the LAT list has the most interesting choices of any roundup so far, despite vexing omissions like Olive Kitteridge and The Story of a Marriage. It's particularly gratifying to see Miriam Toews' The Flying Troutmans included, especially after the NYTBR's wrongheaded review. Their nonfiction list has Honor Moore's memoir about her father's decades-long secret gay life while leading the Episcopal church of New York, The Bishop's Daughter.

Hanna Rosin's Atlantic Article on Trans Children

Somewhere in a deep-South town with no stoplights but lots of Confederate flags, in a double-wide trailer next to an evangelical family with anti-gay bumperstickers on their white van, live the Simms family: Tina, her husband Bill, their daughter Madison, their son Travis, and Tina's child from a previous relationship, an eight-year old biological boy Brandon who has always known he is a girl. Always. As a toddler, he draped towels or scarves on his head to approximate long hair. As soon as he could, he dressed in his mom's clothes, drew himself as a girl, loved Barbie and mermaids, hated his penis which he tucked under himself, and said of being born a boy, "God made a mistake." 

His behavior might be familiar to anyone who saw Ma Vie en Rose, but it knocked his mother Tina for a loop. She started taking him to therapists when he was four. Eventually Tina's mother taped a Barbara Walters 20/20 segment on trans children, and, discovering Brandon was not the only child in the world with gender assignment issues, Tina bought a computer. She joined a listserv for parents of trans kids, and later, she got the whole family to a national conference for parents of young trans people. A seven year-old holding a balloon puppy approaches Brandon:

“Are you transgender?”

“What’s that?” Brandon asked.

“A boy who wants to be a girl.”

“Yeah. Can I see your balloon?”

At the conference Tina meets a host of experts, becomes friends with a lesbian mom from Seattle, and learns about a drug option for Brandon. Puberty blockers stop some of the changes that would have to be reversed with expensive surgery later in his life. Other parents discuss their children's success with the drugs. Huge decisions loom.

Did I mention Tina and Bill are both army vets? And that Bill doesn't see things the way Tina is trying to? He says, "A boy's a boy and a girl's a girl." Also: "You're ruining his f---ing life!" The evangelical neighbors do unto others by refusing to carpool with them anymore. Brandon loses his best friend, a girl.The whole family faces trade-offs between honesty and acceptance.

Hanna Rosin has written a great, comprehensive article on an overlooked subject. Make time to read it. And give the Atlantic more props, following last year's stellar piece "The Kingdom in the Closet" on gay life in Saudi Arabia. 

Gay Men and Their Widowed Parents' "New Old Age"

   
Two new books A Place Called Canterbury and Assisted Loving tell the story of gay men coping with aging widowed parents, and at that point the stories diverge in opposite directions.

Dudley Clendinen, whom all readers revere as the co-author of the essential gay history tome Out for Good, elegantly faces down life's hard choices as his mother enters an assisted living apartment tower in Tampa and slowly weakens after a stroke. For a time he moved there himself, so his observations are as immediate as they are poignant. In the dining room, jackets and ties are obligatory, wheelchairs are outlawed. Nagging annoyances mask far more daunting fears, yet the overall mood is a sort of jovial "dottiness." Astute critics love the book's many layered, wise, and clear-eyed examination of what Clendinen calls "the new old age," an extra decade at the end of life, unprecedented on such a large scale across society. The Baltimore Sun's reviewer said

It is a book that stands apart from so much of what is being written about aging in this country because of its confounding juxtaposition of screwball comedy and inexorably fading life; of the capacity for love in the human heart and the harsh rejection of anyone who is skittering down life's last slope too fast for the group.

And Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, wrote

Mr. Clendinen made a smart decision in structuring his book as something other than a story of decline. His mother’s health did fail at Canterbury, and he conveys his own worry and grief at seeing this happen. But he finds graceful, subtle ways to slip between the past and present, so that his mother remains a wonderfully imposing figure even at her weakest moments. And he populates the book with brightly drawn characters who give the place its reigning mood, “a slow, good-humored dottiness and dignity.”

Bob Morris's many fans from his eight years writing the New York Times column The Age of Dissonance, will immediately recognize his comic foibles even if the situation is wholly new: He attempts to pimp and Queer Eye his eighty year old father, Joe, who wants to start dating after the death of his wife following a ten-year debilitating illness. But Joe is a touch slovenly, a tad Republican, and a lot picky: He rejects one elderly woman with "She's no Dinah Shore!" because she doesn't smile enough. Another woman is dubbed "the Jewish Shirley MacLaine," because she announces she used to be a Socialist; Joe responds by signaling their waiter for the check. Bob, forty-four, gay, and single, never actually double dates with his father as the subtitle claims. You might say he "parallel dates." Helping Joe find love again makes him confront his own commitment fears and relationship phobias as he looks for a man for himself. Ultimately, their story delivers double happy endings.

As far as I'm aware, Assisted Loving has the seriously most awesomest book promotion website ever (created by Martin Zager); pump up your volume and slide your cursor over "Contacts," "Kvetch & Blab" and "Get the Book" to feel the love. One last thing: The tanned lothario on book's jacket is purely the fantasy invention of a misguided art director. The real Joe, miles more dignified, can be seen in the sweet clip below.

The Bishop's Daughter by Honor Moore

You probably remember Honor Moore's personal history essay in the March 3 New Yorker in which she revealed her father, formerly the Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of New York, had sex with men throughout his life. Her essay generated an unusual number of letters to the magazine and, rare for them, they dedicated the entire letters column to it and directed readers to even more letters online. Most prominent was a group letter by some of the nine Moore children who decried Honor's telling the truth about what they feel should be a private matter for eternity. That frightened me. If the straights succeed at preventing us from writing honestly about the dead, we are in grave trouble. That would be another big step toward erasing our history.  Luckily, the Reverend Martha N. Macgill also wrote a letter, which seems to me much wiser:

The legacy of grief, anger, and suffering that sexual secrets cause in the institutional Church are legion and legendary. This story illustrates the necessity for our church to struggle honestly with the issue of healthy sexual behavior—gay or straight. The courage of the Right Reverend Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire, and the reverberations from his consecration as a bishop in our church show that we people of God still have a good deal of work to do in this area. More important, secrets—particularly sexual secrets—in the life of an individual and his or her family are deeply harmful to wholeness and to health.

Read her whole letter here. Or read the siblings' complaint here. If the subject interests you, get the full story in Honor Moore's memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, which Norton published yesterday.