Browse Topics
Civil Liberties
Race
The carpenters, The Supremes, the flowering vine planted at the base of a cross
April 1993My Campaign Diary
I run for president the same way. Every few weeks, I go to St. Mark’s Church (a half block from my house), mimeograph leaflets, and stick some in my attache case. Whenever it comes up in a conversation that I’m running for president, I take one out.
September 1992When The Bough Breaks
When we finally reach the street, it’s like moving into the current of a mighty river. We pass the White House, the Treasury, the Justice Department, all the cornerstones of empire that remind us this is Washington, where decisions are made that affect everyone, the way one careless moment, one broken promise — one broken condom — can affect your whole life.
May 1992Notes From The Closet
I’m also a fag. Which means that I regard my accomplishments and abilities and virtues with considerable irony. Not because I think any less of myself in the abstract, but because I know how little my accomplishments and abilities and virtues protect me from self-doubt.
April 1992Loyalties
I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.
December 1991Tanganyika
The night of the day that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, my parents had gone to the art museum in Cleveland to see a stunning painting by Titian of Mars and Venus, a fat naked Venus and a Mars clad in Renaissance armor. But instead of eating a fancy dinner or making love in a motel room, they were frantically trying to book a flight back to Newark, New Jersey, which was burning to the ground.
April 1991Heaven On Earth
A Conversation Between A Political Radical And A Spiritual Seeker
Radical: You talk about yoga, and meditation, and prayer, and the search for ultimate truth. But what is your spirituality in practice? Spiritual Seeker: You’re so angry. What kind of change will you create if you’re dominated by these feelings? Will the world you build be so different from the one we have now?
January 1991Rooms
Fatima remembers the infant eyes closing against the first handfuls of dirt. She stopped moving almost immediately, as if the sheerest blanket of earth were too heavy.
September 1990My Earth Day
We were all terribly sorry we’d made the earth pay for our pleasure these last 200 years. We had a fear-taste in our mouths. Maybe the earth is preparing revenge. In comic books, an exposure to toxicity creates superpowered heroes, but in this world we are not so lucky.
July 1990Dear Michael
Kevin Murray, retired, one-time police chief of a small midwestern city, turned on his electric typewriter and began his third letter of the day. “Dear Abbie Hoffman, It says in the newspapers you killed yourself because you weren’t getting enough attention. Makes sense. More sense than most of what you said. . . .”
June 1990
