Well, I got through my week with Brandon Gonzalez, the kid I mentor. (See picture below of me along with Brandon and my friend, Michael Rourke, a television honcho who has now created a trifecta of court shows - Judge Hatchett, Judge Lopez, and the upcoming first gay jurist in the genre, Judge David Young.) Yesterday, Friday, Brandon turned 13. It was the last day of his visit. I gave him an early birthday party on Wednesday and had a few people over. He ended up getting lots of loot and cash - which I have to be careful about since I don’t want him to see me as an ATM machine or his visits here to Ptown as a kind of mercenary mission. We’ve known each other for six years now so I don’t think he harbors those kinds of attitudes about me anymore, but I always have to be vigilant not to spoil him. When I was first getting to know him, he could push all my buttons - he is a bit of a street kid with a very complicated family history and his mode of survival is one of emotional manipulation, I can’t blame him for that - but he no longer is able to target my buttons with such acuity. Others aren’t so highly attuned to his methods, however, so I do have a kind of bemused resentment toward him when I watch him launch one of his charm offenses with a group of my friends when we’re on the beach or in town or at someone else’s house.

Two summers ago, photographer and artist, Jack Pierson, took a lovely series of portraits of Brandon, then ten years old, on the wharf we shared at Poor Richard’s Landing here in town. Jack has promised since then to give Brandon and me copies of a couple of the portraits. Brandon, when he discovered after Googling him, that Jack was famous and that one of his “word sculptures” had fetched $140,000 at auction, kept saying he was going to sell his on Ebay when he got back to Brooklyn. I told him it was a gift and he couldn’t do that, that it would be rude. Jack has said that his art is about “the disaster inherent in the search for glamour.” I kept thinking about that description as we all watched the Carnival parade floats and their costumed denizens here in Ptown on Thursday. After the parade - which we watched with Jack and Michael and some of my other friends from the porch of the great old captain’s house in the East End that Manhattan interiors maven John Derian bought this summer in Ptown (if you’re here be sure to check out John’s wonderful boutique version of his Manhattan store in the back of the house off Commercial Street) - Jack offered to give Brandon a ride back in his boat to the West End of town where I now live. He even let him steer the thing and Brandon arrived all hopped up from his maiden nautical advernture. “Driving a boat was the best 13th birthday present I could have ever got!” he exclaimed. “I ain’t never done nothing like that before. I didn’t even ax him if I could. He just let me. And he gave me these pictures. I ain’t gonna sell mine on Ebay. You didn’t tell me, dude, they were big pictures like this,” he said, showing me the two giant portraits Jack had given him on the ride back to my cottage. Brandon had chosen the more pensive pose and told me I could have the one of him grinning and looking more like a little boy. “He don’t take little pictures. I thought they were gonna be little like out of a Kodak. I ain’t selling this. Look how good I look.”

As you can tell from that exchange, the one thing I have no patience for is the atrocious state of the kid’s grammar; it has worsened since I’ve known him. There has been such a digression in that regard. I know he became bored and frustrated by my constantly correcting him this past week. But no amount of correction seemed to work. His sentences were filled with “ain’t” and double negatives and wrong verb tenses and “ax” and “axed” instead of “ask” and “asked.” As someone who makes his living from the use of language, I was maddened by it. All I can hope is my schoolmarmish voice remains in his head and we can slowly wean him from such woeful use of English. The exhaustion I felt at the end of his visit - the constant correcting of his language and cleaning up after him and feeling of low-grade stress as I worried about his safety and telling him to flush every time I walked into the bathroom after one of his visits and having to see what he left behind in the toilet - was made worse by the fact that Archie, my dog, came down with a virulent strain of Kennel Cough after boarding him at the Dickensian kennel we have here in Ptown when I went down to Manhattan last week to pick up Brandon and bring him back. The morning I took him to the vet after I realized he was sick with it - the Wednesday of the birthday party when I was baking my first cake and getting my place ready for our guests and running errands for supplies and decorations, etc. - and was told I would have to bring him back at the exact hour that the party was scheduled to start … well, all the pressure and exhaustion of the week came crashing down around my bald head. On the walk home - with Archie hacking and wheezing at the end of his leash- I had a good five-minute cry.

All of that said, yesterday after I took Brandon on the ferry to Boston and put him on the Acela train back to New York, I felt a twinge of sadness and emptiness when I walked down the platform at the station without him by my side. It happens every year when he comes up here. I can’t wait for him to leave and yet when he leaves there are several days of having to get used to his not being here. I feel a bit lost in the quiet and solitude, though I do agree with Jodi Foster who, in an interview published this month in More, said, when asked what she missed about her life pre-motherhood: “I miss being alone.” Mentoring is a far five-minute cry from motherhood, yet I knew exactly what she meant. On that solitary walk yesterday down the Amtrak platform, however, I remembered one of the first afternoons I spent with Brandon. We had gone to a matinee of The Lion King and during the overly crowded intermission, as we went to the bathroom, I told him to meet me at a specific spot in the downstairs lobby. I couldn’t find him for a few minutes when I emerged from the stall and finally found him in a corner. He was frightened and his face was a fist of tears. Still only seven at the time, he thought I had walked off and left him and he was all alone in a very strange environment for it was his first time experiencing a Broadway musical. I grabbed him and put my arms around him and led him up the big winding staircase to the orchestra section and, as I maneuvered us both back through the crowd, said to him, the words escaping from my mouth before I knew what I was saying, “I will never abandon you.” Those were the five words that I, orphaned at age seven myself, had spent my whole life searching for. I had always assumed that they would be spoken to me once I found them. I had no idea that when I finally heard them that they would be coming out of my mouth and spoken to someone else. It was in that instant that I knew Brandon’s presence in my life was a gift. A kind of healing had begun. And no amount of exhaustion or bewilderment at his behavior or language skills would ever alter that in my now less lonely life.

I’m here sitting at my cottage in Ptown - or Land’s End, as Michael Cunningham’s book about his love of the place is called. My dog, Archie, and Brandon, the kid I’ve mentored for the last five years who always comes for a week-long visit with me every summer, are, thankfully, asleep on my sofa so I have a few minutes to myself right now. I went down to Manhattan on the day the tornado hit Brooklyn to pick up Brandon and bring him back up here. It’s always a week I have to buck up for because by the fourth or fifth day of his visit after having to be both motherly and fatherly toward him, I have to admit I want to strangle him when my patience, not fatherly or motherly at all, begins to wear thin. On the way up here I was already so frazzled by keeping him in check as we traveled that I lost my cellphone either on the Amtrak train or in the station in Boston when we stopped to eat a sandwich on the way to the ferry to Ptown. And last night when there was no hot water after his shower and this morning after I went to the bathroom and discovered he’d used all the toilet tissue and there was no more in the cottage, my patience, alas, was already beginning to fray even before the first 48 hours were over. I say all that just to let you know though I know mentoring a street kid from the wilds of Brooklyn can be construed as an altruistic endeavor, one still can have emotions that aren’t altruistic when in the midst of the reality of the mentoring is taking place. But I told Brandon when I first met him through an organization called The Family Center that I would be in his life at least until he’s 18. I’ve grown to love him and there is an emotional intimacy - call it family-like- when we’re together. We do know each other very well after five years - he’ll be 13 this week and I’m throwing him a birthday party. But he sure can drive me crazy at times. My hat goes off to mothers and fathers who do this 24/7. Although, I do think it’s a bit more stressful for someone like me who mentors a kid and is entrusted with his safety for a week. One is extra vigilant to make sure nothing happens to harm the child. There is a low-grade stress that by the end of the week ain’t so low-grade. Brandon would strangle me himself if he knew I used the word “ain’t” in that sentence since I get to slap his shoulder every time he uses it in my presence. (He just woke up and I read him all that and got his permission to keep it in my post so I’m not talking behind his already sunburned back.)

While down in New York for a couple of days before picking up Brandon, I had a meeting with the great marketing team at Picador, the trade paperback publisher of Mississippi Sissy (watch for it in March 2008). They were Darin Keesler, the Marketing Director, and Lisa Mondello, the Senior Publicist, and Tanya Farrell, the Director of Publicity, as well as Picador’s publisher, the - how to describe someone as singular as she? - daringly smart (as in deeply chic and keenly intelligent) Frances Coady. I also was photographed for the upcoming OUT 100 December issue by French photographer Francois Rousseau. I was shot with Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion and co-author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email. I had talked about Will a lot the first of the summer with my old buddy, Larry Kramer, who was visiting Ptown, since Will is also the sturdy soul who is going to edit Larry’s eagerly awaited 3000 page opus which encompasses all of gay American history - “his own Scheherazade” according to Will. The night before the photo shoot and Picador meeting, I had a catch-up dinner with my dear friend - emphasis on the dear - Tim Tompkins, who runs the Times Square Business District. Tim is also a sailor - he’s been chartering sails on his new sailboat this summer in the Hudson - and a newly certified yoga instructor. He’s an inspiration. He’s even got a new boyfriend, an architect from Nigeria. An architect from Nigeria? Now that sounds deeply chic and keenly intelligent.

Also an inspiration to me are two writers of books I read the last few weeks in manuscript form. The first was an upcoming book from St. Martins that was sent to me to blurb. It’s called Memoir of a Beautiful Boy by Robert Leleux, a recent grad of Sarah Lawrence. I’ll just paraphrase my blurb for you since I loved it: Memoir of a Beautiful Boy is in a word just that: beautiful. It is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Robert Leleux, whose talent is as big as his home state of Texas, is more than a survivor, he is, with this glory of a book, triumphant. The other manuscript was an early draft of a novel, Everybody’s Everything, by Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni. (She’s the daughter of historian Lady Antonia Fraser and the step-daughter of Nobel Prize winning playwright Sir Harold Pinter.) The novel takes place in the highest echelons of the fashion world of Paris, where Natasha lives. I gave her one of her first jobs when I hired her as my assistant when I was Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. She was but a girl back then but now she is an amazing woman with twin girls who went on to be the Paris editor of W and then the Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Her biography of legendary Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel was a critical and commercial success. And now she has written this wordly, emotionally complex novel. If I were an editor I’d scoop it up in a hot second.

And finally, before I went down to Manhattan last week, I was riding my bike down Commercial Street here in Ptown and rode by a big, gangly handsome young guy with a cute little kid in tow. For some reason I knew he was Tony Perkins son. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of him - maybe somewhere I did and it stuck with me but I have no memory of it. It was as if Tony swept through on a sea breeze and whispered to me, “That’s my boy. Stop your bike. Say something to him.” I did stop the bike. I turned around and said, “Excuse me, is your last name Perkins?” He looked shocked. “Yes,” he said. “Are you Osgood or Elvis?” I asked, naming Tony’s two sons he talked about all the time to me when I was in Equus with him almost 30 years ago when they were as small as the child that was in tow. “I”m Os,” he said. I told him I was in Equus with his father and that Tony talked about his brother and him all the time. “You’re dad really loved you,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know that. You were loved.” The shock in his eyes at being stopped on the street by a total stranger disappeared and a misty-eyed gratefulness replaced it. I rode on and suddenly remembered reading that his mother, Berry Berenson, who was killed in the Boston-to-LA flight that was crashed into the World Trade Center, had a home close by over in Truro. He must still summer there. Maybe it was she who had wafted through my consciousness on Commercial. As I was locking up my bike, I caught a glimpse of him putting an arm around his own son. The Land’s End light encircled them - a kind of spectral glow, fatherly and motherly at the same time - and seemed to lead them along.

If you want to read a couple of great posts about Provincetown go to Andrewsullivan.com and read two of his on his blog. One is titled Always and the other is Poem for a Friday. I can’t do any better than those two postings in relating what it’s like to be here once two months have passed and one is finally relaxing into the ebbing and flowing of Cape Cod village life. Every summer I think it will be my last one here in Ptown and I always end up coming back. Part of the allure is, of course, the debauchery found here along with the artistic dedication, a coupling that has somehow always flourished from generation to generation in the florid sunshine of the place, a coupling that finds a home in the heady flush of conversations one is able to conjur with a strikingly interesting stranger or a life-long friend as well as the stretches of contemplative silence one can attain on a bit of deserted beach or an achingly lonely patch of dune. That dedication to debauchery and art has always been part of the enduring appeal - it’s there for the scratching just beneath the town’s omni-sexual surface, as I’m sure Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams and Jack Reed and Louise Bryant and Stanley Kunitz and Franz Kline and Tallulah Bankhead and Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner and Hans Hoffman and Norman Mailer and Mabel Dodge and Marlon Brando and Mary Heaton Vorse (a Greenwich Village novelist and labor organizer who was the town’s bohemian pioneer in the summer of 1907) all did as they dug their fingernails, already dirty with artistry, into it, dirtying them even more, making them even more artistic. Yet it’s the simplicity of village life and the play of light which daily amazes me and, in some sense I can’t quite quantify, restores my battered soul. I am a loner by nature but I do find a kind of solace in the sweet-natured yet cantankerous comaraderie I feel with my summer-long compatriots here as we sit around and watch the, yes, ebbing and flowing of the weekly visitors who spice up the lanquor of our lives.

The town is now filled with drag shows - both old-fashioned and good-naturedly-neo- as well as comedians and not-one-but-two reviews with naked-male-nymphs-singing as their curb appeal. The days have long passed when O’Neill would stage his one-acts on the makeshift theatre at the end of a wharf or Williams welcomed his own rush of words in his cabin at Captain Jack’s Wharf - though Captain Jack’s still colorfully stakes its claim jutting out into the bay with its array of cottages and cabins and loft-like spaces. Every time I walk by Capt. Jack’s with my dog Archie - who loves to hang there with his friends Julius The Schnauzer and Henry The Pug - I think of the twenty-something Tennessee pining for some summer boyfriend with as much ardor as he pined for success and recognition and a bit of peace for his own battered southern soul. On Wednesday, I went to the Provincetown Theater to see a staging of a play he wrote in 1940 in longhand in his journal there at Capt. Jack’s Wharf. It is titled The Parade, or Approaching the End of Summer. He left the play unfinished, tore out the journal pages, and gave them to his roommate, Joe Hazan. The play - full of arduous pining - is about his tortured love affair that summer of 1940 with a young dancer in town. In 1962, a researcher discovered the pages and gave them to Williams to complete. Last October a young troupe here, Shakespeare on the Cape, staged its world premiere as part of Ptown’s first Tennessee Williams Festival. I’d seen the troupe’s production of Much Ado About Nothing and was immediately a fan of its youthful members, most of whom met as students at the University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theatre BFA Actor Training Program. The company has revived its production of Parade this summer as part of the Provincetown Theater’s season. Though certainly not a great play, it is nonetheless heartbreaking in its glimpse not of Williams talent but of his achingly lonely, uncertain self before success and fame curdled that loneliness and uncertainty to the point that his great, unequaled talent curdled, sadly, a bit as well. There were lovely performances by Elliot Eustis as the dancer and Ben Griessmeyer as the Williams stand-in and especially Grant Heuke as the rich Jewish Hegel-reading platonic girlfriend of the lead Williams character. I walked out of the play in an odd mood - always delighted to see young actors of real talent tackle a difficult text yet realizing in that difficult text which contained the inchoate voice that would a few years later rock the theatre world with its power (indeed, Williams wrote much of Streetcar and Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke and Night of the Iguana during his four summers in Ptown) was a plea for understanding and acceptance on a very personal level that was finally left unanswered. Tennessee, take it from another southern sissy, a Mississippi one, you should have kept summering in Ptown where understanding and acceptance are part of the Cape Cod air if only you breathe it in deeply enough. I took deep breaths all the way home that night and gave Archie a midnight walk by Capt. Jack’s. The moon was three nights past its fullness yet its light was able to dance - its beauty as untouchable as Tennessee’s own dancer that summer sixty-seven years ago now - atop the bay.

i’m not sure if I still have any readers on this site anymore since I’ve been away from my postings for so long. Sorry about that. But I promised myself I wouldn’t post again until I had a chunk of my new novel written. Last week, I sent off 101 pages of THE SENSUAL MUSIC OF NEGLECT to my agent to see if they are worthy to show to publishers. I hope so. I think I’ve come up with something quite different and moving and funny. But we’ll see. I’ll keep you … ah … posted.

I’ve been up in Provincetown since June 1st - except for a brief trip back to NYC and Washington D.C. to do a couple of readings of MISSISSIPPI SISSY as well as furnish the “entertainment” to a big Democratic National Committee fundraiser at the Waldorf at which we raised over a million dollars for the upcoming campaign. In NYC I did a reading at the Gay and Lesbian Center that went really well. Down in D.C. I did one at the FDIC as its featured speaker for Gay and Lesbian month.

It’s my sixth summer here in Ptown. Last night was typical of my time here. I went to see Hairspray at the local movie theatre and as I walked out I ran right into my old buddy, John Waters, who wrote and directed the original version. John is a Ptown summer denizen like me. He asked what I thought of the film. “Well, I can’t lie to you, John. I thought it was a mess. I started to hate it during Michelle Pfeiffer’s first production number and it went down hill from there. I adored the Broadway production. But this mess of a movie just made me realize how much I loved your original version.” John smiled and shrugged. “I think they did a fresh job. I liked it,” he said. “But I didn’t make this movie so you can’t hurt my feelings about it. A lot of people feel the way you feel about it, but a lot of others love it. Are you coming to my party later?” he asked, moving on to more important matters. I told him I was but first had to catch a ten o’clock performance of the Nellie Olsens, an edgy sketch comedy troupe that consists of three old NYC friends of mine. They were hilarious. Then I rode my bike to John’s party and as I walked in I was confronted with a social tableau that could only be witnessed in Ptown, which is why John and I all those like us who revel in the slightly taboo and a kind of grin-inducing incongruity summer here. Before me, as I entered his party, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Cunningham and editor-in-chief of New York magazine Adam Moss were being introduced to gay porn icon Jeff Stryker. When I coupled that image with one I had earlier in the evening of my old friend Andrew Sullivan and his partner Aaron (to be married here in a month) stopping to share a few laughs with Miss Richfield, one of Ptown’s reigning drag divas, as they strolled along Commercial Street with columnist Dan Savage and his partner and their young son who are here for Family Week which started yesterday … well, it all just reminds me why I keep coming back to this most quaint of fishing villages at the very tip of Cape Cod, an end-of-the-world kind of place - geographically, not philosophically - where all are welcome.

It’s good to be back - in Ptown as well as this blog.

I’m sorry I haven’t posted much in the last few days but all my writing energy is going into trying to get these first 50 or so pages of my novel in shape to give to my agent. Right now I’ve changed the working title to “The Sensual Music of Neglect.” It’s taken from the first stanza of one of my favorite poems, William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.”

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, command all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, or dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

On another note, I found out this morning that I”ve been nominated for a Quill Award. The Quills are considered the Oscars of the publishing business. I’ve been nominated in the Audio Book category for my recording of Mississippi Sissy. I’m up against Sissy Spacek for her recording of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Amy Sedaris for writing and recording I Like You. Fannie Flagg for writing and recording Can’t Wait to Get Out of Here. And Will Patton for recording Charles Frasier’s 13 Moons. The ceremony is in October at Lincoln Center and is broadcast over NBC. Sissy and Amy and Fannie - now that’s a category I always I knew I’d be in one day.

Also, I was get my political fix yesterday by browsing through my favorite political blogs and clicked on to dailykos.com and was surprised to read a long rave review of Mississippi Sissy there. Dailykos.com is one of the most heavily trafficed political sites so I was thrilled to see the book written about there. You’ll probably have to search for it on there now but it’s worth the read.

I’ve been meaning to apologize for the corny aspects of the poem I dashed off below in a matter of minutes (excuses, excuses) since I am striving to wrench any corniness from the first couple of chapters of the novel on which I’m working right now. I called Peter Staley, one of my most unsentimental friends, and asked him to read the poem and tell me if he thought it were too corny. He called back and said, “Yeah, it’s corny. You knew that. That’s why you called me. But it does tweak your interest as well. So keep it on the blog.” Since I haven’t been “tweaked” myself in a while, I followed his advice. But just wanted to let you know that I rolled my own eyes while writing it so read it with the same spirit.

To change the subject completely, something that I didn’t find corny was an editorial I wrote for my high school newspaper when I was sixteen years old. Sixteen! One of the joys of having written my memoir and continuing to write these posts on my blog is that people from my Mississippi past have contacted me. One of those people was a schoolmate from Forest High School, Robert Bliss, who is still one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in a life of meeting smart people. He had saved one of our old school newspapers and thought I’d like to read it. Here is the editorial I wrote in 1973 regarding amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, which was a hotly debated topic during my teenage years, just as amnesty for illegal aliens is such a heated topic this week in Washington. Some things never change. But I thought you’d like to read how uncorny I was as a teenager. I’m trying to get back in touch with that uncorny teenager that could come up with something like this. It’s so unsentimental, so uncorny, I wonder if I could have plagiarized it. But I don’t think my journalism teacher, Judy Lewis - where are you Judy? I’d love to hear from you. You are acknowledged, by the way, at the beginning of Mississippi Sissy - would have published it if it were or she had any questions that I had not written it myself back then. I was always a bit precocious, especially in my liberal leanings in that still paleoconservative state of Mississippi. Anway, here is an excerpt for that long editorial that could perhaps still speak to us today.

The editorial:

The other day I heard two women talking at a local drugstore. The conversation went something like this.

Mrs. X: A few short years ago most of us supported the war.

Mrs. Y: I supported the war.

Mrs. X: While most of us today oppose the war.

Mrs. Y: I oppose the war.

Mrs. X: And according to the polls, think it’s immoral.

Mrs. Y: I think it’s immoral.

Mrs. X: So the question is what to do with those thousands of young men who thought the war was immoral years before we thought the war was immoral and deserted to Canada and Sweden - shouldn’t they be granted amnesty?

Mrs. Y: ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!!!

Mrs. X: Why not?

Mrs. Y: Premature morality.

That discussion was held a few weeks ago, before the peace announcement. But now that peace, or at least peace for the U.S., is apparent, the amnesty question has become a greater issue than ever. Let’s look at both sides.

First of all the word itself is from the Greek “amnestea,” which means “forgetfulness.” The first recorded amnesty was granted by Athens in 403 B.C. to most of those who had collaborated with Athens’ Spartan conquerers after the Pelopponnesian War. The Romans, on occasion, continued the practice, which they called “restitutio in integrum,” and many other states since then have granted amnesty to achieive reconciliation after a civil war or a period of internal strife.

But the question did not take on major popportions until World War II. Sixteen months after V-J Day, President Truman responded to public pressures and established a three-man amnesty board to determine whether those who had been convicted of refusing to fight should be punished. The board was less than lenient, partially because WWII had wide popular support. Of course, of the more than 15,000 cases considered, only about 1500 men were pardoned, most of them on religious grounds. “Intellectual, political, or sociological convictions” against the war were not accepted as excuses and clemency was not granted to those who, in the board’s words, “set themselves up as wiser and more competent than society to determine their duty to come ot the defense of their nation.”

This amnesty question, however, is a complex one with no clear-cut historical precedents that would apply in blanket form to the present problem.

The deep and violent divisions of the Vietnam War have left the United States with this unprecedented problem of what to do about the estimated 30,000 deserters and between 70,000 and 100,000 draft evaders.

Many bills providing for various forms of amnesty have been introduced in Congress and both candidates for the presidency in 1972 made it a campaign issue of deep and explosive emotional content.

Many ask the question: Would it be fair to those who fought to forgive those who refused? This is the emotional crux of the problem. But maybe that is just the problem - we look at this question of amnesty too emotionally. Maybe if we were more practical about it.

One of the most practical reasons for opposing amnesty has been: How could the U.S. ever field an army of draftees again if it established the precedent that draft evasion will be forgiven? Well, the Nixon Adminstration has gone so far as to do away that reason by doing away with the draft altogether.

Also opponents argue that while amnesty might reconcile one group, it would embitter many Americans. Healing some wounds, it would exacerbate others. Sentator Robert Taft, Jr., a Republican with impeccable credentials who went so far in December of 1971 as to introduce a bill to grant amnesty to draft resisters with the stiff provision that it be coupled with three years in compensatory military or civilian federal service - can attest to the bitterness of those who oppose amnesty. He asked one protester what should be done about draft evaders if his plan was to be rejected. The answer: “Shoot them!”

But since the Vietnam War is like not other war in our nation’s history, perhaps no precedent should be sought in history. Many Americans had been against this war, but because they were ineligible through age, sex, or infirmity, were not forced to back up their beliefs with their lives and careers. Why persecute those, who, because they were young and eligible, did put their lives behind their convictions? Those now in exile or in jail include some of the most intelligent, the best eductated, and the most passionately concerned men of their generation. Most of them are a gain for their homes of exile and a great loss to the U.S> Why should this country so willingly, even perversely, suffer such a drain on its talent and spirit?

…..

In short, no other action except amnesty could be as effective in persuading us, the young of our country, that once again we can trust the humanity of our government. In this sense, amnesty would serve its traditional function: healing angry wounds.

But still, after all the arguments are made, both pro and con, two questions remain - one moral, the other practical. Does the individual have the right to decide which laws or which wars he will support? If he does, can any government survive?

“Human law,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, “does not bind a man in conscience, and if it conflicts with the higher law, human law should not be obeyed.” But also one might quote Socrates: “In war, and in the court of justice, and everywhere, you must do whatever your state and your country tell you to do, or you must persuade them that their commands are unjust.”

Yet there are some laws, even in a democratic society, that are so unjust that any man of conscience cannot obey them. Segregation laws are the best recent examples. Opponents of the war would say that service in Vietnam is another. But Ghandi and Thoreau and Martin Luther King, as examples, decided that unjust laws must be disobeyed but at the same time had to accept the penalties for disobeying them in a civil society. The country can appreciate the courage of those who have evaded the draft just as it can appreciate the courage of those who did not, but can it excuse the former brave young men from the consequences of their choices just as the latter accept the consequences of theirs. Maybe the draft evaders could perform some kind of service, as Taft suggested, in a poverty program or in the peacetime military.

As I close, I am reminded of a TV commercial that I saw a few days ago. It showed different portraits of different families as you heard a voice say that a certain man went to war and died for his country. That man’s son grew up, went to war, and died for his country. His son grew up, also went to war, and died for his country. Then the voice continued: “God had a Son, but He didn’t go to war. He chose another way to peace. If your son, like God’s Son, chooses another way, will you understand?” It’s funny, maybe the sponsors of that commercial should have been addressing that commercial to America itself - perhaps they were - instead of parents. It take that back - it’s not funny - it’s very sad. Bring all our sons home.

I haven’t posted in a week
because I’ve been working on my new novel’s first chapter.
So if you’ve logged in for a peak
at my life, please be patient for I guarantee you’ll soon be rapt or
titillated, at least, by the love story I’m writing.
It’s not set in Afghanistan. It’s not about kiting.

This much I can tell
you about it so far since it’s just beginning to unfold in my mind.
It’s about an ex-stripper named Emelle
who is overburdened, overweight, and overly kind.
Any more info would just be conjectural.
Though it is set in Ptown. And the love is hetero as well as textural.

Right now its title is “Cock and Load,”
yet I realize that could lend itself to a lot of Provincetown lore
on its own. So before I get too far down the narrative road
I might change it to another title that would fit: “Soul Whore.”
Which of the two do you find more resonant?
I’m not sure I like what either says or not

About the love story I’m trying to write.
Emelle heads to Ptown to spread her son’s ashes from their urn
and meets Doyle, a housepainter, whose daughter, always ready to fight,
has recently been killed in the war in Iraq. Together, they learn
how again to walk along a beach
as well as the lessons only dead children can teach.

Don’t worry, there is a drag queen
or two in the story also. The main one, in fact, is named Nan Tuckit.
So rapier wit and raunchy mean-
ness abound with words like “suck it” and “fuck it”
thrown around with a bit of zest and much, much verve,
since everyone in Ptown - even middle-aged heteros - is a bit of a perv.

Okay, the novel is now demanding attention
so it’s time to put words in the mouths of Nan and Emelle, and Doyle
and other characters too numerous to mention
in a sprightly little poem. I must also be careful. I do not dare spoil
any more of the plot residing in my imagination.
Plus, I’ve reached - thank God, huh - my rhymester limitation.