Novelist and Storyteller
There is a Chinese Zen kōan, a teaching story about a pilgrimage that I won’t share with you today. If Zen teachers were lawyers, Zen practitioners would be required to sign a release which states that whenever a teacher says they will not do something, it means the opposite, especially if they use words that …
If you were locked down over the last months with your partner or partners, intimacy has likely been a key part of quarantine survival. But for those of us that are single or in non-monogamous relationships, our ability to attend to our emotional and sexual health needs was severely diminished. Abstinence or pleasuring ourselves with …
Continue reading "Six Questions to Ask Before Having Sex in the Time of Corona"
This piece was published in the Bay Area Reporter on 3 September 2020 under the title of Six Questions to Ask Before Having Sex Again. If you were locked down over the last months with your partner or partners, intimacy has likely been a key part of quarantine survival. But for those of us that …
Continue reading "Six Questions to Ask Before Having Sex in the Time of Corona"
Who could imagine that radical behavioral changes required due to the coronavirus would make kissing dangerous and caressing forbidden? Sadly, health professionals have ignored sex and intimacy as they outline the dos and don’ts of our current lives. The implicit message is that we shouldn’t be talking about sex when people are dying. However, that …
Recently, I have been anxious, fearful and angry. How about you? While Covid-19 brought these feelings to the forefront, I realized the cause was something else, old traumas being re-triggered, the trauma of the pandemic—HIV/AIDS—that killed virtually every person affected in its early years. The deaths and illnesses affecting family members and beloved friends. The …
Continue reading "Corona Anxiety, Fear & Anger–How to Calm the Trauma"
The musical Hamilton ends with the Finale, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” Our view of history has always been shaped not by the specific events themselves, but by who records and who remembers.Queer people are certainly not the only ones that have been eliminated from history or seen its history distorted by others. Straight white …
Continue reading "The Importance of Novels in Preserving Queer History"
In 1996, I had the honor of interviewing the major players who engineered the inclusion of sexual orientation in the South African constitution. Simon Nkoli, Zackie Achmat, Edwin Cameroun and David Botha were among the leaders that I interviewed, each having their own crucial role to play. As I was pulling up the articles I …
Continue reading "Remembering Simon Nkoli: The White-washing of LGBT History in South Africa"
This was one of the last pieces that Dave Robb wrote before his death in November 2016. He was a fantastic editor. A Conversation with Alan Lessik Interview by Dave Robb. On a foggy summer morning in San Francisco, Dave Robb sat down with Alan Lessik over a plate of homemade waffles. Lessik’s debut novel, …
Babalú Ayé and Apollo the gods of disease and its cure in The Troubleseeker.
Alan Lessik 