According to the Republican right, their great hero Ronald Reagan personally caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union with his insistence to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!" Twenty plus years later, I issue another plea to the woman who, by all indicators,...

I'm a gay man who supports the right of consenting adults to enter into whatever relationship they'd like, including marriage. I have several married friends who took advantage of the pre-Prop 8 window. I love these men and respect their relationships. I volunteered in the campaign against Prop 8 and...

In the '30s came radio and newsreels, and with them access to a degree of fame never known before. Still, the vast majority of time, you had to do something to get a microphone or camera in your face. It wasn't until the '50s and '60s that John and Jane...

Having HIV for 25 years is like traveling on a very long highway. It is not only studded with tollbooths charging exorbitant fees, but the gas stations are spaced so far apart that you barely make it from one to the next. At the end of the trip, you look...

These are excerpts from an email written to the environmental liaison of my City Councilman, who I met as she supervised a clean-up crew in Silverlake. Although specific to Hollywood, some of the ideas might be applicable in other cities.

..I have noticed that trash cans at bus stops on...

So the first day I decided to start picking up trash in my neighborhood, I stuffed my pockets with Ralph's grocery bags, (thank God for cargo pants) took my new E-Z Reacher in hand and headed out with the dog. My "route" covered the street where I lived and the...

When I got out of prison, I was very lucky to have just enough money to get a small studio apartment in Hollywood. Once I got my dog back (my brother had taken care of him during my time "away") I was grateful to have Griffith Park about ½ mile...

I admire Barack Obama very much. He's smart as hell and his attempt to change the tone of politics has been admirable. But it has failed.

These right-wingnuts who have hijacked the Republican party aren't interested in bipartisanship. They're interested in one thing and one thing only: Power. They don't...

Twice in my life, in separate decades, I lived off the proceeds of dispensing the elements of temporary physical euphoria. Consenting adults came to me and I gave them a drug for which they handed me money. When I was a bartender, the drug was in legal, liquid form. I...

I think my saddest moment in prison came near the end of my term, when I threw out a question to the group gathered around my bunk. I asked them if they'd been hit growing up. Unsurprisingly, they all said yes, but the sad part was what they were hasty...

(The author was an inmate at the California Institute for Men at Chino in 2004. This is the second in a series about the prison system.)

When LA Police Chief Bill Bratton recently announced his resignation, he trumpeted the fact that LA hadn't seen such a low crime rate since...

Around the turn of this century, I became one of those gay men whose recreational meth use turned occupational, as I turned to dealing to support my habit. After a novel's worth of drama (including successfully forging my own death certificate), I ended up being sentenced to 16 months in...