When my mother worked at the hometown Walmart when I was a boy in the 1970s, one rule was chiseled in granite: “Do not call me at work, ever — unless the house is on fire or somebody’s dying!” Mom practiced what she preached, so it was a shock thirty years ago this month when…
Coming to Left Bank Books: Poet and Activist Steven Reigns
Former St. Louisan Steven Reigns (he graduated from Parkway South in 1994), now an LA-based poet and activist, is not afraid of spending time with life’s unavoidable finale – death. He founded the Gay Rub Project in 2011, a collection of rubbings of LGBTQ+ historical markers and monuments, including many gravestones. The Gay Rub Project…
St. Louis LGBTQ History: MCC, Our World Too, Magnolia’s, and John D’Emilio
By Rodney Wilson I live in the past as much as I live in the present, and often I’m more comfortable in an imaginary conversation with the dead than when engaging with the living. In visiting the physical spaces that once sheltered people, dreams, movements, and institutions, I exchange the imagined, or the only read…