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Posts published in “Essays”

Surgical Strikes: Eight Decades Worth

The patients in Dr. Wenwu Jin's fifth-floor office on Clay Street in San Francisco's Chinatown are almost all elderly Chinese men and women. I'm one of the few exceptions: a white guy who doesn't speak…

Bank Book

The first edition of Christina Stead's 795-page novel, ‘House of All Nations,’ published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1938, did not sell out. It was reissued in ’66, in anticipation of a Christina Stead…

The Bullshit Invitation

Hey, my friends, feel free to spend some time at my place in Mexico, sure, anytime I'm not there. This is what's known as a bullshit invitation as it's not easy to get to and…

My Life As A Rabbi [2003]

Asked to a recent wedding in Virginia (it was a family affair on a grand scale), the proud parents asked if I would do some sort of officiation. It would be my second inning in…

Assignment: Ukiah – California Stupid, And How I Got It

Down South people think all Californians are either gay or work in Hollywood; we forgive them as they forgive us for believing all southerners are racist, uneducated redneck brutes. Caricatures of our fellow citizens are…

The Great Homo Hunt Of 1998

Official Mendocino County is awfully slow to adjust to contemporary realities, as the startling ordeal of a gay Ukiah man named Marc Tosca illustrates. In December of 1990, Tosca and his late partner, Harry Kirkpatrick,…

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