Why are writers the only workers who are expected to work for free or for next-to- nothing by people who would never expect to cheat other workers of payment?

Would editors and publishers walk into a shop and think they could walk out with merchandise without paying? Would they take an item to the cash register and say, “The ticket says $150, but I think it’s only worth $20, so that’s what I’m paying–and you should consider yourself fortunate that I am in your store.”

Would they eat a meal in a restaurant and then walk out on the bill?

Of course not. Because doing any of these things would result in arrest. Yet every day, all across the country, editors and publishers are doing just this: assigning stories for which they have no intention of paying or for which they intend to pay below the minimum wage.  And unlike what would happen if they were to walk out on a restaurant check or a shop bill, this behavior is considered perfectly acceptable and “part of the business.” 

A few weeks ago as part of a storyline in his Doonesbury comic strip, Garry Trudeau commented repeatedly about Huffington Post and how they don’t pay writers because writers should feel that the exposure is payment enough.

But while HuffPo got the Trudeau treatment–which I and many other writers I know applauded–that publication is far from the only offender. In fact, there are so many offenders, there are few places to actually publish a column decrying this loathesome practice.

Since 2008, I have been one of many writers listed in lawsuits against two different publications–The Baltimore Sun for which I was a book critic for 17 years and the Journal-Register newspaper syndicate for which I was a columnist for nearly 18 years. The combined income from these two weekly freelance jobs was a third of my income.

Both entities filed for bankruptcy, although both are still publishing four years later. When these newspapers filed for bankruptcy, I was owed significant amounts of money because they always paid late. I was not alone.

Journal-Register paid me with a check that bounced. The Sun never paid me at all.

Now, like many other writers stiffed by these publications, I am waiting for payment that will likely never come.

Years ago I had to take Ms. magazine–Ms., the feminist magazine–to small claims court for non-payment. Again, I wasn’t the only writer who had to do this. 

I should note here that I am an award-winning journalist who has been published in all the top newspapers in the country and many of the top magazines. I’m not an intern, I’m not a newbie writer. I’ve been a columnist for several national magazines and for several daily newspapers. I’m a professional. I write for a living.

So pay me.

Why is my work worth less than say, the woman who cleans the offices of the publications for which I work or the people who work in the cafeteria or the maintenance guys who maintain the lights and heat and ari-conditioning in the buildings? These same publishers would never dream of cheating those workers of their pay. Nor would they suggest that they work for $1 an hour. That would be so One Percent and so Politically Incorrect.

Yet one publication for which I have done freelance work since college still pays what they paid in 1980, but the publisher? He has three houses.

Another major publication–Publisher’s Weekly–has also been paying reviewers (who don’t even get a byline) the same amount for 20 years. And expects the reviewer to send back the galley–at their own expense. Payment: about 50 cents an hour. More or less, depending on how fast you read. (And is that how you want your book reviewed?)

The Advocate, once the top LGBT publication in the country and for which I worked as a columnist and as a features writer for over a decade, being nominated for several Maggie Awards for the work I did there, is now an online publication that expects writers to write for free. 

What do these editors/publishers tell writers like me? Think about the exposure! 

Guess what? I already have exposure. I have 800,000 Google entries with my name in them and I don’t have a common name. I have published nearly 30 books–fiction, non-ficton and poetry. I have awards.

I don’t want exposure, I want payment. I need payment.

Writers are not supposed to complain about this, because anyone can write–or at least that’s what the Internet tells us. Anyone may be able to write, but not everyone can write like a seasoned, award-winning writer who has been paid to write for many of the best publications in the country.

So on May Day, as people all over the planet are marching in the streets for justice for workers, let me put in my editorial two cents: Stop treating writers like we should be thrilled to write for free. Writing is work. It deserves payment. Stop expecting something for nothing. It’s unethical and it’s wrong.

From 1992 to 2004, Lynn was the secretary for clergy for the Archdiocese. He had full responsibility, under former Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, for all personnel issues for all the priests–more than 800–in the Archdiocese. That included complaints and investigations related to child sexual abuse.

Lynn has pleaded not guilty and his four attorneys have asserted that Lynn repeatedly reported sex abuse cases to Bevilacqua and that it was the late Cardinal who refused to address the problem.

The trial has witnessed a parade of former victims, police officers and various members of the Church hierarchy. It has also included the reading and admission into evidence of a myriad of previously sealed Church documents. A sordid and brutal tale of overnight “retreats” that were little more than sex parties for priests with parish minors as entertainment has emerged, often in tearful and heart-breaking testimony.

On April 23, one of the most appalling revelations yet was made by a Philadelphia priest. The priest testified that he had had a years-long sexual relationship with a teenager in his parish. The priest also testified that as a seminarian in 1974, he had been tied up and nearly gang-raped by fellow seminarians. Another priest–a friend to the victim–stopped the attack, but that priest later raped the victim himself on more than one occasion.

In 1992, the priest admitted to the sexual predation on the high school student. He was sent to an archdiocesan treatment center where it was determined that he was not a pedophile but was reacting to what the treatment center termed “traumatic sexual development.”

He was allowed to return to ministry and continued to be in close contact with children for more than a decade, unmonitored. His name has not been released since he is being considered a sexual assault victim himself.

Philadelphia has grown weary of the sex abuse scandal. The trial’s increasingly horrifying revelations haven’t merited headline attention and this latest shocker didn’t even make the local TV news–only KYW news radio’s Tony Hanson has been reporting on it daily. Have we become so inured to the breadth of this scandal in the Church that now we just ignore it?

The grand jury investigations uncovered a pattern of what former District Attorney Lynn Abraham called, “rape, sodomy and assault” on minor boys and girls within schools and parishes between 1948 and the first grand jury report in 2005. The 2005 report–that grand jury had convened over three years–cited 67 priests in a pattern of sexual assaults that included rape, sodomy, impregnation and even forced abortions. One girl was actually assaulted in her hospital bed where she lay in traction by the priest who was supposed to be ministering to the sick. It also seems that there were few altar boys who were not victimized as part of their ritualistic duties.

The 2011 report that led to the current trial was equally harrowing. The Archdiocese has put 23 priests on administrative leave since that report.

In the 57 year period through 2005, not one criminal complaint was filed by the Archdiocese to either police or prosecutors. Part of the testimony on April 23 stated that criminal charges would have been filed in the attempted gang rape, the rape of the priest and the sexual assault on the high school student had any of those crimes been reported. But they weren’t.

New testimony later in the week by a man alleging he was raped by two priests and his fifth-grade teacher at his parish in the Northeast when he was an altar boy in1999 will be key: Lynn’s attorneys intend to impugn the accuser’s credibility. However, that may lead to jurors being informed that another defendant in this case, Rev. Edward Avery, has already pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the then-altar boy. Avery pleaded guilty just prior to the case going to trial. He entered prison on April 2 and is now serving a two-and-a-half to five-year sentence for sexual assault and conspiracy.

But five other people have also told prosecutors that Avery sexually assaulted them as children. Which means Lynn would have yet more cases to defend against, since it was Lynn who should have had these priests removed from their parishes and also charged criminally. Since 2002, when Church rules changed, it has been required of Church officials to report sexual abuse complaints to the police.

With 1.5 million members, Philadelphia has one of the largest Archdioceses in the country. Yet just last week the Archdiocese announced that several churches in Manayunk, Germantown and Roxborough would be closing and/or merging due costs. Would those churches remain open if so many victims hadn’t been paid settlements for their trauma?

If the grand jury found dozens of priests culpable in the 2005 report, and more were uncovered in the 2011 report after the “problem” was allegedly clean up, how do we know still more perpetrators simply weren’t found out by those investigations? Avery was in ministry until he was arrested and charged last year. He wasn’t named in the 2005 report and five other alleged victims have come forward saying he assaulted them as well. Plus, the incident he admitted to took place in 1999 when Avery was 56. Are we to assume that he just woke up one morning in his middle 50s with an uncontrollable desire for altar boys? Or was this a pattern throughout his priesthood?

Rape and sexual assault are among the most recidivist of crimes. The testimony on April 23 points to an actual culture of rape, sexual assault and sexual brutality within the Archdiocese throughout the 1970s to the present. If Avery was part of that, and Lynn covered it up in the 12 years that he was in charge of complaints, how many other priests still in active ministry like Avery was are still preying on children and teens? How can we Catholics know if all the rapist priests have been removed from active ministry? How do we know if our own parish priest is actually one of those involved in preying on minors?

Another question raised by the most recent testimony is whether other seminarians have been sexually assaulted at St. Charles Boromeo Seminary. Is gang rape an initiation to the priesthood in Philadelphia?

There has been no comment from the Seminary as it is under a gag order since the trial began March 26, but this latest revelation certainly raises the question of what happens there and whether or not priests are or have been groomed to be rapists by older sexual predator priests. That certainly seems to have been the case with the priest who testified April 23 who went from victim to perpetrator.

When will the Archdiocese reveal just how much money it has paid out to victims over the years? With schools closing and merging due to alleged lack of funding, shouldn’t someone be accountable for the money spent on covering up all the rapes of children that have occurred in our churches and schools?

Will the documents that have become part of the trial evidence against Lynn, and against Rev. James Brennan, 48, who has also been charged with sexual assault against a child, reveal other priests in active ministry who are or were accused of sexually assaulting minors? The priest who testified on April 23 has not been defrocked as Avery was prior to entering prison. Why not? Because he was a victim as well as a perpetrator? What became of the priest who raped him? Where are those seminarians who allegedly tied him up to gang rape him?

The questions raised by this trial are manifold as they are sordid. The Church has had a lot to say of late about contraception and same sex marriage, but little about the scandal that continues to reveal layer upon layer of brutality perpetrated against the most vulnerable members of the Church. Even during this trial, victims are being impugned by the defense.

The Church hierarchy has victimized every member of the Church with its failure to protect or avenge these victims. It’s time for the Archdiocese to reveal the predators within its ranks and turn them over to prosecutors. Until that happens, the sex abuse scandal will continue to be a wound that can never truly heal.

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I was in my 20s when I received my first Pulitzer nomination for investigative reporting for an expose on corruption in Philadelphia. I was euphoric. I was fortunate enough to be nominated again after that first time, but while I won numerous other journalism awards, I never won that tantalizing and coveted Pulitzer Prize. Thus, April often was indeed the cruelest month.

The feeling of nervous anticipation is awesome, but once the announcements are made, you know who the winner is and you can raise a glass–or an eyebrow–and move on.

Not this year. For all those novelists who were lucky (and talented) enough to be nominees for the fiction award, the finality of a winner isn’t there. Because there isn’t one. It’s unsettling.

It was a real WTF moment for the literary world. Most of us Pulitzer watchers thought the prize would go to David Foster Wallace for his novel, “The Pale King,” which was published posthumously last year. Wallace, who suffered from crippling life-long depression, hanged himself in 2008. He was 45.

The Pulitzer committee announced that there had been three finalists–Wallace, Karen Russell for Swamplandia! and Denis Johnson for “Train Dreams.” (Johnson was also a finalist in 2008 for “Tree of Smoke.”)

In declining to give the award, the Pulitzer Board noted that none of the three finalists had garnered a majority vote.

Seriously?

I’ve been a judge for various literary awards over the years, including the Lambda Awards, which I have judged every year but one. The role of a judge is succinct: You pick a group of finalists and from those, a winner. A person is chosen to judge because s/he is a writer, editor or in some other way associated with writing. They know writing. They read extensively in the field in which they are judging.

So judge.

I think it’s shocking that the judges did not take their responsibility seriously enough. A literary jury is like any other jury–you sit in the room until you have a final vote. You don’t abdicate your responsibility.

This has happened before, however. The fiction award has been given since 1918; over those 94 years, no award was given 11 times. The most recent instance was in 1977 when Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” was chosen by the committee but the Pulitzer Board, which has the power to override the choice, chose to do so and the award was not given. In 1941, Ernest Hemingway’s anti-war, anti-fascist novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” was chosen but considered “offensive” by the president of Columbia University, which gives the prize, and so no prize was awarded that year, either.

Posthumous awards have been given before–to James Agee in 1958 for his stunning novel based on his father’s death when he was six, “A Death in the Family” (read it if you haven’t) and to John Kennedy Toole for his comic novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces.” Like Wallace, Toole had suffered from severe depression and committed suicide in 1969. His mother, Thelma, worked arduously to get his final novel published, which it was in 1980, winning the Pulitzer in 1981.

So precedence existed for giving Wallace the award. And unlike Toole, Wallace had a large body of work, had won a MacArthur “genius” grant at 32, had been teaching writing for 20 years at the time of his death and was considered an author who had developed his own sub-genre of post-modernist literature. Would it really have been such a stretch to give him the award?

Or what of Johnson? If he was a finalist for the second time in three years –and thus with two separate committees–then isn’t it possible that this was his year, if Wallace wasn’t the choice?

Russell is the youngest of the finalists, at 31 she’s half Johnson’s age and “Swamplandia!” is her first novel. But the book was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and was on the New York Times top ten list for 2011. Toole was 31 when he killed himself and Wallace was already thoroughly established as a writer at that age. She could have won.

I can imagine the discussion by the jury over these three choices–Wallace was dead, Johnson had been a finalist before, this was Russell’s first novel, but highly acclaimed. Which should we choose?

What I can’t understand is the lack of a final decision.

Some people don’t like awards. In 1926, Sinclair Lewis was chosen for the Pulitzer for his now-classic novel “Arrowsmith,” but declined the award. Still, at least he was given the option.

Like everyone who has won–or lost–an award, I have mixed feelings about them. It’s good to be a nominee/finalist, great to be a winner, not so wonderful to lose, unsettling to be judged. Yet I like the principle of giving people recognition for the hard work that propels talent to the next place. In the many years I have taught writing, I have seen a lot of serious talent, but not as much of the cold discipline required to take talent to fruition.

What concerns me about awards, however, was codified in this Pulitzer debacle: I’m sure about why awards are a good thing, less sure of how the determinations of who gets them is made. The story of John Kennedy Toole, for example, makes one wonder if it was his tragic death that got his book published and the award given, or his nascent talent. Yet what I do know is that having awards like the Pulitzer keeps writing and books in the public eye, which is essential in these days when everyone who has a blog site or enough money to self-publish thinks they are a serious writer.

What bothers me most about the decision not to decide by the Pulitzer committee is that I personally think Wallace should have won. In scanning over the 83 novels that have won the Pulitzer since its inception, I was struck by how many I had read–68. More than a dozen are books I have taught over the years. A few, like the Agee novel, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” or Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” are among my favorite books. I re-read “The Collected Stories of John Cheever” regularly and never cease to be struck by his depth and nuance.

A few years ago, when I was going through some books that had belonged to my now-deceased mother, I found her copy of “Gone with the Wind.” Her bookplate with her maiden name in her neat script was pasted on the inside cover with the year–1951–that she purchased it, while a freshman at Wellesley. On the back cover was the tagline–”Pulitzer Prize winner.”

I wonder if I would ever have read Booth Tarkington had he not been a Pultizer winner. Or Conrad Richter. Or even Herman Wouk. Because the prize does matter–it leads readers to books that s/he might never pick up otherwise. I love Junot Diaz, and have favorite stories of his that I teach regularly, but how many people read his books prior to his Pulitzer win? Conversely, I was forced to read Saul Bellow in college and hated every word, baffled by his Pulitzer. And I question how it is that the most prolific American writer of the 20^th century, Joyce Carol Oates, could have been a finalist so many times and yet have never won.

But it is these mysteries of the awards processes–the finalists, the winners, the also-rans–which make those days leading up to that April day so unnerving, yet compelling. And a year like this one so fraught with outrage and a cloying sense of injustice.

I wish there had been a winner this year. I’m not sure how many novels were short-listed before they were winnowed down to that select and impressive three. But that there was no winner leaves every writer in America at a loss. We should be able to point to the solidifying of Wallace’s legacy, or the promise of Russell’s or the appreciation of Johnson’s. But instead, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there’s no there there.

Those of us who judge the work of others, be it as critics or in some award venue like the Pulitzers or the Lammys, have a weighty responsibility. I reviewed many of the Pulitzer finalists and winners of the last 20 years in my role as book critic at the Baltimore Sun. Many of those books have quotes from my reviews on them. I stand behind the criticism I have written over the years because I am writing about the book, not the writer, the quality, not the quantity, the ephemeral nature of what elevates one book above its peers in any given year. When we judge books publicly, we need to stand by those choices. The Pulitzer committee did not do that.

That the Pulitzer committee did not finish the task they were given is a slap in the face to the three finalists as well as to the other nominees. But mostly it’s a slap in the face to American letters. There is no year without good books; 2011 was not some anomaly. But it is to be hoped that the furor over this lapse on the part of the Pulitzers will serve to draw attention to the finalists, their books and the other superb novels that came out last year–some of which won awards and more of which did not.

It’s never easy to not win the Pulitzer because some other writer has. But to not win to no one–that’s insupportably wrong and the Pulitzer committee deserves all the outrage writers across America can muster.

Current polls, like the one two weeks ago from Quinnipiac put the incumbent Democratic senator 12 points ahead of any of the likely opposition (six Republicans and one Democrat are running against him). Casey’s approval rating holds steady at 47 percent, but he can’t seem to break 50. The question is, does it matter?

Pennsylvania reads as a swing state in national elections because with the exception of Democratic Philadelphia and to a lesser degree, Pittsburgh, the state is conservative Republican throughout its largely rural mid-section, hence the satiric moniker “Pennsyltucky.”

The last gubernatorial election saw all the Democratic contenders trounced by Gov. Tom Corbett’s bid, even though Corbett ran a pretty lazy campaign. But whether that was voters tired of the Rendell Administration, voters genuinely seeking a Republican after eight years of a Democrat or voters unimpressed with a lackluster Democratic lineup, it’s impossible to say.

Casey is running the same kind of lazy campaign Corbett ran, and is likely to have the same result–an overwhelming victory in November.

I wish I could be pleased that Casey looks more and more like a shoe-in for another term, but I’m not. I would prefer to be in Massachusetts where an incredibly exciting senatorial campaign is being waged between incumbent Scott Brown, the Republican who won the seat held for decades by Ted Kennedy, and Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor, former Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, creator of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a former advisor to President Obama.

Alas, this is not Massachusetts and the Senate race here is neither national news nor, apparently, even local news. The interest level in this race hovers somewhere between none and zero.

Why?

In September I wrote a column asking whether Casey deserved re-election and listed the many reasons why he didn’t. Quinnipiac and several other pollsters asked similar questions and got an appalling lack of consistency in answers that culminated in that not-quite-50-percent approval rating.

With six other men vying for the position of senator, why do Pennsylvanians still know so little about the not-Caseys when the primary is April 24^th?

Many of the candidates running against Casey–a career politician from a political lineage–are businessmen. Considering the state of both the national and state economies, that might be a good alternative. Might be. The Democrat running against Casey, Joseph Vodvarka, is a spring maker. But does manufacturing Slinkys qualify you to be senator? I’d love to see a true Democrat run against Casey, but if Vodvarka has the right stuff, we haven’t heard about it.

Nor have we heard much about the field of opposition candidates. The list of Republicans includes former state representative Sam Rohrer and Marc Scaringi, an attorney and former legislative aide to Rick Santorum. Both men are serious conservatives to the right of Sen. Pat Toomey.

Other contenders include John Kensinger, pharmacist, Steve Welch, businessman, David Christian, businessman and veteran’s advocate and Tom Smith, farmer and former businessman. Smith’s are the only political ads running in the Philadelphia market. In those ads, in which he appears to be very engaged with people, he refers to himself as a fiscal conservative and a true conservative.

There is one thing everyone running–Casey and all the challengers–have in common: none is from Philadelphia. In his six years as senator, Casey hasn’t been a great friend to this city, despite his love of the Phillies. Toomey made it clear when he was running for Senate that he thought Philadelphia was a drain on the system. Harrisburg has always been happy to set this city off on an ice floe and without a strong voice for the city in the Senate–as Arlen Specter was throughout his years in the Senate–will Philadelphia get what’s needed?

Also at issue is the stunning lack of third party candidates on the ballot, because both mainstream parties do everything in their corrupt power to keep third parties off the ballot.

Six years ago there were several challengers to Casey, who was the Democratic machine candidate despite being against many basic tenets of the traditional Democratic platform . So six years ago, among those challenging Casey and his centrist politics was a Green Party candidate. But in the current race, third party candidates are MIA, even though progressive voters like myself are desperate for alternatives.

Why are we progressives so desperate? Because Casey’s tenure in the Senate has been both lackluster and deeply centrist, providing none of the forceful leadership that the fifth most populous state with the fifth largest city in the country deserves–and needs.

An early supporter of Barack Obama, Casey used that decision to propel himself forward once Obama was elected. But as the President’s approval ratings dipped, Casey distanced himself from Obama. Does that mean Casey is a proponent of Obama’s failed policies and civil liberties violations or that he’s an opponent? Or just that he’s a political opportunist?

It’s distressing that Pennsylvanians are so close to primary day and we have little information about our choices at the polls in this race. Is there a centrist among the Republicans and if so, who? Is the other Democrat running a Blue Dog like Casey, or is he more left-leaning? What do these other candidates bring to the equation of what’s best for the state, given the economy and other issues plaguing both Philadelphia and the state as a whole?

I want answers before I step into the voting booth April 24^th. The new law passed last month restricting voting to people with valid state-sponsored ID is bound to influence the November election because inevitably many people–likely Democrats–simply won’t have the ID required to vote. Which makes the primary choices all the more vital.

Here are concerns Philadelphians should have: The anti-Philadelphia tenor of the race; that none of the candidates is pro-choice, especially Casey; that none of the candidates has provided a clear plan for either job creation or debt resolution–two of the major issues for voters; that none of the candidates is addressing the fracking controversy which does impact Philadelphia, even though the drilling is being done primarily in central Pennsylvania, because it impacts our water supply.

Also, none of the candidates has addressed the closing of the refinery in Philadelphia–a major source of jobs and also an important part of energy demand. Lack of refineries is a huge problem with regard to utilizing our available energy resources. We have more oil than most people think, but we also have no refineries, which means no gas, which has contributed to the higher prices at the pump. Why are we closing a refinery when they are so desperately needed? Why isn’t this a topic for the candidates, given the fact that gas was almost $2 less a gallon a year ago?

We will have to live with our choices for the next six years. It would be great if we could support a candidate with a progressive stance who is willing to work hard for the state. But thus far, no such candidate is on the ballot. Which is why, perhaps, despite the importance of Pennsylvania come November, no one is shining too bright a light on our Senate race. It’s just too discomfiting to watch a Senate race that isn’t.

read my political blog at www.victoriabrownworth.com

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Adrienne Rich died March 27, six weeks shy of her 83^rd birthday and when I heard of her dying, a tsunami rush of memories came at me. For me, Rich was the first great female poet. It’s not that I didn’t worship Emily Dickinson or Christina Rossetti prior to discovering Rich when I was a college freshman. But for me, Rich presented a level of brilliance and smart, exacting, thrilling poetics mixed with polemics that propelled me forward as a poet. I had already published my first book of poetry just before my 19^th birthday, having been taken in hand by an older poet, a professor at school. But I had fallen in thrall with male poets, deeply and seemingly irrevocably. I immersed myself in Rimbaud, Verlaine and the more obscure Symbolists. I couldn’t get enough of Rilke. I carried tattered foreign paperbacks of these poets of poison. I lived poetry in those days and performed frequently in Philadelphia and New York with a coterie of older male poets who had taken me under their wing as a kind of female mascot.

But then came Adrienne Rich and my life as a poet changed, my life as a student of letters changed. I was caught not just in the web of her words, but in the weft of her ability to express her politics so keenly, so succinctly, with such force and breadth. I didn’t forget my tortured Europeans, but the break-up was swift and clean.

I was hers.

And she was mine–she led me to the world of female poetry, she lead me to the understanding that I could be a feminist poet, a feminist writer, a feminist in all things. Rich opened the world to me as a woman writer in a way I had only glimpsed fleetingly in the work of Dickinson and Rossetti, the Bronte sisters and the Georges Eliot and Sand, because she lived her poetry.

Several quotes of hers are taped to the mirror in my bathroom. In one, she writes, “The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.” In the other, she asserts, “If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”

She maintained that perspective throughout her writing life. In 2005, she said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “For me, socialism represents moral value–the dignity and human rights of all citizens. That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible.”

Rich was a cartographer of her times. Born May 16, 1929, she grew up in Baltimore, where she was home-schooled until she was ten. She attended Radcliffe College, where she studied poetry and writing, graduating in 1951. Her first collection of poetry, “A Change of World,” was chosen soon after for the Yale Younger Poets Award, having been picked by W.H. Auden.

That auspicious beginning propelled her forward to a Guggenheim Fellowship, a year in Italy where she wrote continually, and then back to the U.S. where she married Alfred Conrad, the father of her three sons–David, Paul and Jacob. Conrad was an economics professor at Harvard whom she met at college. The marriage was fraught from the start, as Rich wrote. But it was motherhood that propelled her into her feminism and, as she wrote, “radicalized me.”

The family moved from Cambridge to New York where Rich was to become deeply involved in the civil rights, feminist and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Her involvement became so entrenched, that it sundered her relationship with Conrad. They separated in June 1970 after he accused her of “losing her mind” because her politics had become pre-eminent in their lives. (She was giving Black Panther parties and feminist salons at their New York apartment.)

In October 1970, Conrad shot himself to death. Their youngest son was only eleven.

Rich went on to raise her sons and maintain an increasingly strong poetic and political voice. She published six books of poetry between the time of her husband’s suicide and the beginning of her relationship with writer Michelle Cliff, with whom she became involved in 1976. Cliff was 17 years her junior.

The 1970s were a period of intense work and political action for Rich. She had embraced many of the lesbian-feminist writers of the period, most notably Audre Lorde, with whom she had a complicated and sometimes fractious friendship. Rich had always lived a life of privilege–her father was a world-renowned pathologist and her mother was a concert pianist–and some lesbian-feminists questioned her “credentials” in that period of extreme activism and the intensity of the Second Wave of American feminism where class privilege was discussed in earnest for the first time since the 1930s. While there were many women who left their husbands for other women in those years, suspicion still hung over those women and Rich was, coming out in her 40s, for a time, among them. But she declared in an interview with the London newspaper, The Guardian, in 2002, that after her husband’s death, “The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.”

Rich’s anger and frustration with the complexities of her life–as a woman, a former wife, the mother of sons, a lesbian, an undeclared Jew (her father was Jewish but she and her sisters were raised Protestant)–was revealed in her poetry during the years between 1970 and 1980.

What was most complicated for Rich, perhaps, was trying to maintain her position as the most important female poet of her generation among what was still a definingly male institution–the Academy of Letters–when she was also increasingly engaged in lesbian-feminist politics and exploring those politics in her writing.

As she wrote in 1976 in her ground-breaking feminist treatise, “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution,” “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.”

In 1976, such statements were still perceived as very avante garde, if not extremist. The book received mixed reviews. The personal nature of her poetry and essays was suddenly suspect. Yet the most defining male poets of her same generation wrote exceptionally personal work. Certainly when one considers the work of the man who granted her first award, W.H.Auden, one can hardly imagine how Rich’s work was somehow more personal than his. But Rich was re-inventing poetry from the vantage point of the female gaze. She was doing what Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston had done as black writers–she was re-creating the writers’ world from the perspective of the permanent underclass that was women. Her concerns were the concerns of women–mothers, wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, lovers, mistresses. In her poetry and essays she was exemplifying what it meant to be female in every aspect of life. As a member of the transitional generation of women–the women of my mother’s generation, who were going to college to find a career and a life of their own and not just an Mrs. degree–she was taking the lives of women as seriously as the lives of men. It was shocking for the Academy and earned her more than one epithet of “shrill” over the years.

Yet her artistry won out.

Perhaps the most defining collection of poems from that period of change for Rich was “Diving into the Wreck,” for which she won the National Book Award in 1974. Proving that she lived her politics, Rich declined to accept the award individually. Instead, she accepted it “on behalf of all women” with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker.

The poems in the collection still resonate for me–that was the book where I first discovered Rich’s work, albeit several years after it was published.

In the title poem, Rich writes, “the words are purposes/the words are maps.”

Those words have echoed for me from my college classroom for over three decades.

Rich evolved throughout the past 25 years as a deeply emotional poet whose feminism never wavered, whose politics remained solidly lived. In 1997, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, which she declined. Of her action, she wrote, “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration…[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”

Over her literary career Rich won a myriad of awards, including the Bollinger Prize, the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, the William Whitehead Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant). She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Harvard. Rich taught at some of the most prestigious colleges, including Swarthmore, Columbia, Brandeis and Bryn Mawr.

For more than 20 years, Rich was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. I recall seeing her one year, barely able to walk or sign books. Her son attributed her death to complications of the disease. She had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s, but traveled little in recent years.

When I consider the life of Rich–as a literary icon, as an activist icon–I think how fortunate we have been, those of us who were her students, her readers, her compatriots in battle, to have had her words, myriad and deep, illuminating and explicative.

As word of her death reached me, the poem of hers that came immediately to mind was “Power,” which she wrote about Marie Curie, the scientist and discoverer of radium. At the end of the poem, Rich writes,
“She died a famous woman denying/her wounds/denying/
her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

Rich was one of the most lauded poets of our time, yet was never Poet Laureate–perhaps a political decision, perhaps just an inexplicable oversight. But her oeuvre, her work, her life all combined to break ground for a generation of women and women poets. Her work opened us up to realities and possibilities. She made us believe that women could perhaps cease to be second-class, she made us believe that striving for that day was not just the work of activists, but of writers, of poets, of thinkers.

As she described that venture in “Diving into the Wreck,” she also continued to describe the journey toward full personhood for women, queers, people of color, the poor, the incarcerated.

She wrote, “Whatever is unnamed, un-depicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language–this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”

Rich also told us, “The moment of change is the only poem.” She made her life her poem. We should all read one–or write one–in her memory.

On March 25, David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and now Senior Advisor to the president, was doing a tour of the Sunday morning political shows. Plouffe is usually unflappable; he has a party line, he sticks to it and he smiles readily and frequently. On Sunday, however, he seemed caught off guard by the repetitive questioning of George Stephanopoulos, chief political correspondent for ABC news and anchor of “This Week.”

Stephanopoulos was in Plouffe’s shoes 20 years ago: he was communications director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and later became Senior Advisor. He knows how to rattle members of an administration’s hierarchy. And rattle he did. At issue was a plank for the Democratic platform put forward by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, half of the Democrats in the Senate and the chairman of the Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (widely considered to be a likely presidential candidate in 2016). Pelosi and her retinue want to include marriage equality in the Democratic platform.

Same-sex marriage is legal in nearly ten states and the District of Columbia, several other states are poised to legalize it, and civil unions are legal in many other states, including New Jersey and Delaware. According to former Speaker of the House Pelosi and Mayor Villaraigosa, it’s time for the Democratic platform to reflect both the national change regarding marriage equality (close to two-thirds of Americans support legalizing same-sex marriage) and the civil rights/civil liberties aspect of the movement for marriage equality.

The only fly in the ointment, apparently, is the President himself, who has repeatedly stated, rather flippantly, in fact, that he is “still evolving” on the issue.

Thus, when Stephanopoulos was grilling Plouffe, the discomfiture was evident. Stephanopoulos presented the plank as civil rights, which it is, and Plouffe had trouble evading an answer.

You’d think he’d be used to evasion tactics by now, given the President’s record on civil liberties, which is, according to the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), not so good.

Back-pedaling and backtracking are not just for Republicans any more.

I admit, my involvement with the Democratic Party has always been casual. I started my voting career as a Communist, then moved to Socialist and then, reluctantly, moved to Democrat in an effort to get viable candidates into office on both the local and national level.

But the 2000, 2004 and 2008 elections soured me on the Democratic Party and in the past four years I have actively worked toward third party involvement whenever and wherever possible. It seems likely that the 2008 election was the last in which I would vote for a Democratic presidential candidate.

As a child of the 60s and 70s, I came of age when Democrats were actually committed to civil rights and civil liberties–not proponents of the death penalty and extraordinary rendition and covert wars and indefinite detention but on the War on Poverty and Head Start and the Civil Rights Act.

I voted for Obama predicated on my then-belief that he was a better choice than his Republican opponent. I spent a long time in the voting booth in 2008–I had worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supported her because she was the more progressive candidate. I also believed strongly that it was past time the U.S. joined the rest of the Western and even Eastern world and elected a woman president.

But the Democratic National Committee changed the rules for the nomination and while Hillary won the popular vote, Obama was granted the nomination based on Super Delegates changing their votes. Obama was the charismatic candidate and no one was looking too hard at his centrist record.

Then he became president and for four years we have had a centrist/Republican-lite president instead of an actual Democrat.

Which is why Plouffe’s discomfiture on Sunday seemed a little disingenuous. If Plouffe can’t stand up for Obama’s conservative views, then perhaps someone else with more authority to put forward Obama’s ever-changing message should be installed as Senior Advisor.

Remember two months ago when Obama vetoed the pipeline project? The veto was conditional, of course. But was meant as a sop to the Democratic base. How many members of that base noticed when Obama changed his mind last week and allowed a large portion of the pipeline to proceed?

Last Thursday Glenn Greenwald, possibly the best investigative political reporter in the country and a strong Progressive, spoke at the University of Pennsylvania. Greenwald was a harsh critic of the Bush Administration and has been an equally harsh critic of the Obama Administration particularly regarding Obama’s covert wars, involvement with Wall Street and hiring of lobbyists and major donors to his campaign. Greenwald has also been critical of the lack of transparency in the administration.

Greenwald’s concerns should be the concerns of all registered Democrats and those amorphous Independents who assert that the Bush Administration nearly destroyed the country by eviscerating the Constitution and sending the country into two unwinnable wars.

But what I have noticed just from sheer anecdotal evidence of friends, acquaintances and colleagues, not to mention Democratic politicians, is that people who screamed and tore out their hair over the civil liberties abuses and encroachments during the Bush Administration have not just turned a blind eye toward the same under the Obama Administration, but have, like Plouffe, attempted to explain and argue for and justify those abuses now.

Because somehow it’s different when a Democrat does it.

I knew when I voted for Obama instead of voting for the Green Party candidate, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (who would have been the first woman and first African-American president, had she won), that I was voting party politics. But living in a swing state, I had concerns about Pennsylvania going to the Republicans. So I voted party rather than heart.

But now I have seen Obama in action–or mostly, inaction–for four years and there is no way I could vote for him again. Why? Because I did not vote for George W. Bush and Obama has supported all of Bush’s worst and most egregious civil liberties and Constitutional violations. I don’t support the war in Afghanistan, I don’t support Obama’s covert wars and the drone killings of civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere which have exponentially exceeded those of the Bush Administration. I do not support Guantanamo–which was one of the biggest scandals of the Bush Administration. I do not support extraordinary rendition or torture, which continue under this administration. I do not support the Patriot Act.

Obama has also deported more illegal immigrants than any other president in U.S. history. Why are progressives ignoring that reality? Obama has done nothing to further immigration reform. And in that regard he is actually behind Bush, who was a strong proponent of such reform.

Where I really have concerns with this Administration, however, is with its continued expansion of the powers of the presidency. While most Americans cheered when President Obama assassinated Osama bin Laden, I questioned when and how the President granted himself the power to go into another country and kill someone–no matter who it was. But Obama expanded that power to include the assassination of American citizens he deems worthy of killing, like Anwar al-Alwaki. Yet nowhere are those powers written into law.

Obama also signed indefinite detention into law. And among the first people being detained indefinitely under Obama’s new rules of the presidency is Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking documents about the wars to the media. None of the media who have published the documents–the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC news, etcetera–have been prosecuted, however. Obama has also used a little-known aspect of the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute whistle-blowers. Six times more than in recorded American history.

And then there is that issue Plouffe avoided on Sunday. Imagine a white president saying he was still evolving on civil rights for African Americans? There would be marches in the streets, if not riots. Obama’s own party is ahead of him on this one.

It’s time for those Americans who call themselves progressives to hold this president accountable. Deconstructing the Constitution and Bill of Rights is not okay if our guy does it. Refusing a civil rights platform because the other side will find it problematic is nothing short of reprehensible. And puts this president firmly on the wrong side of history. Again.

I like the immediacy of newspapers. I like the complexity and the simplicity. I like the solidity. I like seeing the newspaper on the porch. I like looking for the small story, as well as reading the big ones.

Those of us whom came of age as reporters in print journalism really have a hard time imagining a world without the morning paper or the Sunday paper or…some paper.

Which is why what is happening with Philadelphia’s daily newspapers has been so unnerving. We could be on the verge of losing our dailies.

Sure, we all read the weeklies, like this paper. We like to know what’s happening in our neighborhoods; we like the arts and in-depth pieces in the City Paper and Philly Week. We like the edge and bravado of the independents.

That doesn’t mean we don’t want dailies. Of course we want dailies. We need dailies. Who ever heard of a city without a daily newspaper?

Except that’s where this city–this fifth-largest city in America–is heading.

I first interviewed Ed Rendell when he was still District Attorney. I interviewed him numerous times when he was Mayor. When he was governor, I would run into him at Target on City Line Avenue or at the Sunoco at Ridge and Midvale in East Falls. A few times we saw each other at parties.

Ed’s the kind of guy who never forgets a face. So he always remembered me, even if it had been a while since I’d called him for a quote.

It’s endearing, that part of Ed.

Except when it isn’t.

Just like the William Randolph Hearst character in “Citizen Kane,” Ed woke up one morning recently thinking it might be fun to run a newspaper. Our newspapers.

It’s no secret that the Philadelphia daily conglomerate has been a mess for several years now. I’ve watched as friends and colleagues who have been at either the Inquirer or Daily News have been laid off or have taken the early retirement package as the papers have been shunted from one new sort-of owner to the next since they were set adrift by Knight-Ridder. Watching your city’s journalistic crown jewels go into receivership just isn’t right.

I was worried the papers might go crazy right wing for a while, but that only happened on the Op-Ed page when people like Rick Santorum and unindicted criminals from the Bush Administration, like John Yoo, were hired as columnists. No one can say that Ed Rendell would drag the newspapers to the far right. He wouldn’t.

What he would do is just as worrisome, however.

As I said, Ed never forgets a face. He also never forgets an insult. Or something written or said about him or something he was associated with that he disagreed with. Ed’s big on telling you he hated what you said about him. Or implied. (He won’t like this, for example.) Ed leads with his chin in politics–it’s part of what has made him so successful–and he leads with his chin in life.

Ed is never going to be a silent partner in the running of our city’s newspapers. Ain’t gonna happen. It doesn’t matter whether he says he just wants to save the papers. We all want to save the papers. But Ed has enlisted his friends Ed Snider–most powerful sports magnate in the city’s history–and George Norcross, the Boss Tweed of South Jersey politics, to be his cronies in the deal.

Yikes.

Ed was a great mayor–one of our best. But not without flaws. The same things that made him great also made you not want to peer too closely at how he was achieving that greatness. Sausage-making and all that.

As a governor, Ed was not so great. Part of that was Harrisburg–the state capital has always wanted to set Philadelphia off on an ice floe with its largely poor and black demographic. We’re just too needy for those folks.

But the other part of Ed’s issues with Harrisburg was that Ed led with his chin. He thought he could run the state the way he ran the city. Except in Harrisburg, people were peering more closely.

That’s how Ed will run our city’s newspapers: leading with his chin.

In an interview on NPR a week or so ago, Ed invoked Walter Annenberg when he was explaining how he would buy out the whole package–the Inquirer, the Daily News and Philly.com.

Most Philadelphians remember Annenberg as a philanthropist whose name graces lots of important stuff in this city from the journalism school at Penn to the modern art collections at the Art Museum.

What they don’t remember is Annenberg as the man with a stranglehold on the city’s newspapers, who used them to grind his enemies into the dust and elevate his own particular political agendas. The Annenberg years were not the finest for the Inquirer and Daily News. In tone they fell somewhere between a HUAC hearing and a pogrom.

Here’s why we can’t have someone like Ed Rendell and his cohort running our papers: Because they have an agenda. A political agenda. And even if it happens to be your same political agenda on a given day, it won’t always be. And what separates print journalism from the vast, undisciplined maw of the Internet is at least an effort at independence, transparency and facts. With the most powerful politician in Philadelphia history running the news, it won’t be much different from your kid’s blog in terms of credibility. How, for example, do reporters investigate when the ownership says no?

I don’t want to see our dailies die an ignominious or any other kind of death. But if the only answer is for a career politician with many an axe to grind to become the owner, along with another career politician and corporate magnate, then maybe we should just go down to Broad and Callowhill and torch the Grand Old Lady ourselves, before the new gang does a tear down none of us can live with.

In the photograph of O’Connor, she stands on her front steps in a dress with a very full skirt. She stands with the aid of her crutches. At her feet is a peacock, its head bent and tail unfanned, but magnificent nonetheless.

I have always been fascinated by this photograph because it embodies all the contradictions of O’Connor the person and O’Connor the writer. She was seriously ill for years, dying from lupus at 39. Yet notwithstanding that devastating illness, she wrote two major novels, two collections of short stories and many essays. She lived in the rural South and raised exotic fowl, like the peacocks, which for her were both comfort and metaphor.

In that photograph she looks happy and vibrant. Yet it was taken not long before she died from complications of her disease. She was quite frail then, needing the crutches even to stand. Still, that photograph embodies the writer in her element–strong in defiance of all that would mitigate against her creativity, her passion, her life-blood.

When I used to write in that room, I felt impelled by those women–their strength, the things that motivated them, the contradictions. There’s a photo of the aging Alice Neel, one of her paintings behind her. In her 20s and 30s she was so poor, some of her paintings are done on slats taken from the insides of the drawers of a dresser. Other small ones are done on shirt cardboard.

Back before I was ill myself, back when I was a writer who traveled to the story, rather than needing stories to come to me, I spent a decade covering writers who were dying.

It wasn’t a plan–I was a young reporter and I got assigned a beat that no one thought would be big in the 80s: AIDS.

In the most virulent years of the epidemic, I made friendships and acquaintanceships, only to have them evaporate into the grim mist of death. I would sit, the very picture of youthful health, and talk to gay men not all that much older than I–sometimes younger–who were dying.

Most of these men were trying to eke out a last flush of exegesis and illumination of their lives before they died. Some could, some couldn’t. For years I was surrounded by the urgency of these impending deaths, powerless to save the lives I had come to cherish. When people wonder why we were all so angry in those years, that is why. The accident was right in front of you, but you were powerless to staunch the hemorrhage.

I spoke with poet Essex Hemphill on the phone one day as he lay in intensive care less than a mile from where I lived at the time. He was in isolation due to the extremity of his illness–you couldn’t visit because you might make him more ill or you might get what he had. Essex had to stop speaking periodically because the pain from the rectal abscesses he had literally took his breath away and the fever made him unfocused.

He died in 1995. At 38.

My good friend Darrell Yates Rist, who had gone cross-country to finish his book, “Heartlands,” about the lives of gay men in America, became another silenced voice. Critics didn’t get the book–some found it sappy, others beside the point while we were in the throes of the AIDS crisis that would later take Darrell’s life. But the book was about living–how we live queer in America–not how we die. That was the story Darrell had wanted to tell. He told it lyrically and well. Passages from that book still haunt me. Are we so callous to the implications of living, the responsibility of charting our own existence, rather than our epitaph?

Darrell and I used to meet in a little arts café in Greenwich Village in the years before he was sick. I was no longer living in New York, but commuting there from Philadelphia. Strains of various operas would play in the background as we sat looking out onto the street as we talked about writing and love and the future we both thought would be so different from what it turned out to be.

One morning I awoke from a dream, tears streaming down my face. In the dream, Darrell had AIDS. He was dying. Horribly, as I has seen other people die–the Kaposi’s lesions filling their throats, the PCP asphyxiating them. Without thinking, I called him–still in bed, only half awake, the hiccupping click of sobs still coming from my throat.

There was silence on the other end when I asked if he was okay, told him about the dream, wanted to hear it was only nightmare.

He’d been diagnosed two days earlier. He was still reeling from the knowledge.

The last time I saw him, he had come to visit me in Philadelphia. I was too ill myself to leave the house at the time. It was a warm day–I cannot remember now if it was early or late summer–but the back door was open and the garden which I could no longer tend had run amok, yet was still discernible as a garden. We stood in my kitchen, looking out onto the yard. I had always thought of him as much taller than I, because he was larger than life. As we stood together, I realized he wasn’t.

He was gaunt and his skin had an orange tinge to it that looked like a bad spray tan. He was a hairy man with olive skin–handsome and virile before his illness, his complexion inherited from his mother’s Hispanic lineage. But now I could see he was slipping away from himself, yet still trying to hang in, hang on. He’d made the trip to Philadelphia from New York because he thought it would be his last.

It was.

I had made us lunch that day. Quiche and salad. Some pasta thing. A dessert of fresh berries with chocolate and a sponge cake. We drank iced tea and talked. He sat in a rocking chair in my living room and I lay on the sofa.

We had more talks after that, on the phone. He was angry, but not bitter. To the last he was an activist, intent on making noise to the end. He was enraged that no one got AIDS, still, despite all the dying. He hated that the gay men he knew didn’t understand that cancer was becoming a lesbian epidemic. He thought I was brave. I thought he was beyond brave–amazing. It’s been so long since he died and yet I think of him often, wishing he’d gotten the critical acclaim he deserved before his death, gotten to write down all the things he was thinking before it was too late.

He died at Christmas, 1993. He was 45.

Assotto Saint–born Yves Lubin–was a poet, performance artist, diva. He died a few months after Darrell, in 1994. He was 37.

I lost a lot of friends and colleagues that year. Assotto was one of the most beautiful men I’d ever known. He was fierce before we adopted that term for ourselves. I thought he was strong and had a brilliance to him. We talked a lot in his last year. He was filled with rage over not just his own illness, but that so many gay black men were dying, unheard. He begged me not to let the voices die, to memorialize them.

I wrote an essay for Lambda Book Report that year, “Lost Voices, Lost Lives: Death of a Generation,” in which I delineated how a generation of black voices had been lost to AIDS. It reminded me of the generation of young British writers lost to World War I–the Rupert Brookes and Wilfred Owenses dead in their 20s. Except this was not a war. Or was it?

When Assotto died, his mother called me. I can still hear the Haitian lilt in her voice. His voice was in her voice. She wanted me to know her son valued me. I wanted her to know how beautiful he was, how much he moved me, that we shared ferocity and rage, and that I would not let his voice be silenced if I could help it.

*

In November 2011, I nearly died. One lung had ceased to function, the other wasn’t doing so well. My heart, damaged by a congenital cardiomyopathy just discovered a few years ago and unfixable, was beating wildly in an attempt to counterbalance the lack of oxygen.

On the way to the hospital I knew I was dying–you do feel it–and I was terrified, begging my wife, who was driving us in the middle of the night, not to let me die.

Please.

It isn’t the thought of being dead that scares you. It’s that you’re not ready. You have so much more to do, because we are all lazy, we writers, even my friend Greg Herren who writes more than anyone I’ve ever known, or my old friend Tee Corinne, herself dead from cancer too soon, who was always doing some new project. We are lazy because we always think there’s more time.

Except so often, there is not. Three months after nearly dying, after waking up every night in the ICU drenched in sweat from fever and my imperilled lungs and the drug cocktail that made me feel sick in a different way, I have been writing as much as I can. But it is not enough–it’s not enough for the ideas in my head and it is not enough for me and it is not enough for whatever time is ticking away from me.

Pain wears me down, exhausting me. And my body works against me, over and over, all the time. Breathing treatments take time–an hour here, an hour there. Medications make me sleepy or dizzy or just unfocused. Insomnia plagues me, because pain is worse at night and so I always feel tired, unrested. I lie in the dark trying to sleep, while lists of things I want to do form and re-form in my head. A friend who died a few months ago haunts my dreams and reminds me that death is never very far away: inevitable death is the prompt that should keep us looking back over our shoulder at life.

I sit on my bed, cross-legged, hunched over the computer for hours at a time, but I’m an inveterate and omnivorous reader and time can fly as I read and read and write not nearly enough.

I have daily correspondences–the wonder of the Internet–with two writer friends. We talk every day about writing and I know that’s good for me, because I am a recluse. Like O’Connor, I rarely leave the house. I go out to teach and to doctors and hospitals. But there are days at a time when I cannot even go outside, let alone “somewhere.”

*

A week ago I was sitting in a doctor’s office reading an essay in “The New Yorker.” It was written by Donald Hall, former U.S. poet laureate. As I told my writing students the next day in class, the piece wasn’t really about anything, and then proceeded to discuss it for an hour. Because, of course, it was about life and death and the continuity of the seasons. And about writing.

Hall was sitting in a chair in his New Hampshire home, looking out onto the snowy vista, contemplative, in mid-January. He’s in his middle eighties now, so contemplation is the order of the day–all days. He was thinking about this view out the window and the life in that house, the farmhouse his family had lived in for several generations. His father died young, at 52. His wife, poet Jane Kenyon, whose work I loved, died young, at 47, from cancer. His mother died old–over 90, she was.

Hall doesn’t talk about his own impending death–though impending it must be. He does touch briefly on his infirmities. He goes to a museum in a wheelchair pushed by a companion.

It was a compelling piece, this piece about nothing. Except writing about the life of the writer and the life of the mind and what the writer sees when he or she looks “Out the Window” (the title of the piece) is never nothing.

In 1995, in my book, “Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life,” I wrote a piece titled “The View from My Bedroom Window.” At the time I wrote it, I had spent over a year in bed, nearly paralyzed by an unending MS exacerbation, unable to get to the bathroom, which is a mere 15 feet from my bedroom, without a wheelchair. My bedroom–shared with my then-partner–had become a hoarder hell. I lived in that room stacked with books and papers, six bookcases lining the walls, a computer table on one side, a commode discreetly at the end of the bed, a TV across the room. A beside table held the detritus of illness–bottles of pills, a box of tissues, a statue of the Virgin Mary draped with a rosary, a lamp, a telephone.

But the view from the window–the view of the church beyond my garden, which is the length of a city block, the view of the birds landing in the trees outside my window, the view of the sun setting behind the trees that criss-cross their limbs beyond what I see–that view has sustained me. Not just through that year which turned into three, but this year, and last year, and I hope, next year and more.

It’s very hard, this dying thing. It’s very hard to be ill and know there is no getting better. It’s very hard to know that your grandmother lived to be 96 and your great-aunt was playing Scrabble and walking two miles every day until her 101^st year and that you will never be them, you will never even be close. My aunt lived to be twice the age I am now. It’s daunting, infuriating, hopeless.

It’s very hard knowing the writers you knew and loved in the 1980s and 1990s are dead and that was 20 or 25 years ago now and that you are middle-aged but feel terribly old and that the youthful you, the energetic, peripatetic, world-traveling, story-grabbing, running in high heels for a train or a plane you is, and has been for nearly two decades since that particularly crushing diagnosis, dead.

But there is a living you. It’s not the living you that you had hoped to be. It is, to a degree, Donald Hall sitting contemplatively looking out his window at the vista he has known his entire life. Except of course, he has 30 years on you and you know, in your messed up heart and in every difficult breath you take, that another 30 years are not there for you and never can be. There’s no deal with the devil that will change that.

*

In her declarative essay, “Illness as Metaphor,” theorist Susan Sontag wrote about what we think illness is, as a society. She also wrote in other essays about AIDS and pain and how we see things.

I find illness is a metaphor for people who aren’t ill. Flaubert, Proust, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Hemingway–those greats all deconstructed illness and accident as metaphor. But they were all perfectly healthy when they did so.

Write from the place of illness and you get something altogether different, as O’Connor’s “Wiseblood” proves. You get a somewhat twisted and gothic version of life.

Hall’s lyric reminiscences, for example, are not clouded by a fight to stay breathing. One can tell from this essay that he has not given up, but neither is he fighting the inevitable. But then he is in his mid-80s, not mid-40s like his wife, or mid-50s like his father–or me.

*

Not wanting to die can consume you. It consumed David Wojnarowicz–writer, artist, filmmaker, activist–when he was dying of AIDS. It became hard to be around him, his anger and bitterness was so great. I think about David a lot now–how fierce his talent was, how brave his brutal monologues were, how none of us should have dared to be annoyed with how he was because we weren’t where he was–imprisoned by the knowledge that death was coming, death was right there, death was tapping, tapping on the window, staring him down and that there was never going to be another chance to choose the road not taken because time was up, all the metaphors had run out. This was real. Soon he would be dead and there would be no more words.

Many days not wanting to die consumes me, also. It consumes me as I struggle for literal breath, as I try to make arms and legs work that are confused about their purpose, because my brain is being stripped of the protective myelin that makes everything function. Not wanting to die consumes me as my heart races irregularly like a fallen athlete’s, even though I am not running or dancing or riding my bike as I used to do every day, but just sitting, reading or writing or staring out the window like the 80something Donald Hall. It consumes me for reasons similar to Wojnarowicz’s–I am enraged by the impending loss and the invisibility of my suffering.

When I say “my” suffering, I mean my kind of suffering–the suffering of people without money and influence and a means to stop what is happening. When I was faced repeatedly with the deaths and dying of my gay male friends from AIDS, I was furious most of the time. We lived then with a sense of urgency, as if everything we said and did was like our lives depended on it–because it did.

Life is different in one’s 50s than in one’s 20s and 30s. We know more, we know about inevitabilities. But we also know about the breadth of injustice. We know that fighting is imperative, even if we don’t feel like it.

I don’t feel like it, but few days go by when I am not writing about the interconnectedness of being poor, a minority and sick in a nation that values wealth and health and turns its back on everything else.

As I lay in ICU in November, I was on the telephone with my insurance company, arguing that they had to pay for my oxygen–which is, after all, air–while they explained that health care reform had a clause that meant they no longer had to. Throughout January, I fought to get my lung infusions paid for–they cost $400 every six days–and am still fighting. I can’t get a new, motorized wheelchair because it’s no longer covered. I reached the lifetime limit for physical therapy in 1996, but I am still alive and my legs still don’t work like my old legs.

The Kafkaesque nature of dealing with illness and all its ramifications is a daily revisiting of the surreal. Who can write under these circumstances? And yet we must.

Even when we do, however, what is the venue for the outrage that wells up and spills over because we know we deserve more and better and should be able to tell our stories and have them heard? Where can we write out our rage and pain, give voice to the rage and pain of others suffering as we are, but unable to articulate that suffering? AIDS is not over, the lesbian cancer epidemic is not over. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was just here in Philadelphia this week at an LGBT health conference. One of the lesbian speakers noted that we have no data about lesbians and cancer–we just know that they get it more than other women do. We don’t know why, but no doubt being queer and female in a sexist and homophibic society is a factor.

*

With writing comes responsibility. Darrell wanted to tell the story of the gay men who weren’t all white and upper-middle class and privileged enough to say so blithely that “it gets better,” because for them it never did.

More than a decade ago, I compiled the first book on the lesbian cancer epidemic. But how long had we been dying at that point? Even as I write this, a tumor sits in my right breast. It’s not too big and growing slowly, which is good because it can’t be removed right now because my lungs are too fragile–I won’t survive the anesthesia. But the cells sit waiting, I sit waiting.

I understand Wojnarowicz’s anger now like I never did when he was alive. Because I was healthy when he was dying. And now…

I am far from the only lesbian with cancer or MS, a heart problem or chronic lung disease. I am not even the only lesbian battling all of that at once. The chronicle of our lesbian, gay and transgender health crises is inextricably linked to sexism and homophobia and yet: Where is the story? Why are we so invisible? Still.

It was over 25 years ago when I was dancing with Audre Lorde and feeling the absence of her one breast as she pulled me close. It was 20 years ago when Larry Kramer was telling me that we had already become complacent, but that he was still HIV positive and he was not going to be complacent. It was ten years ago that Tee Corinne told me that she thought she had liver cancer because being a lesbian in the straight world had challenged her body in ways straight people’s never were.

Yet we act, collectively, as if all of this is over. But these disease are so not over.

Why has our own community–which has embraced mainstreaming to such a degree that it ignores the reality that many of us are poor, sick, barely making it–why has that community refused to acknowledge the reality that we are being crucified by both political parties, that Obama is not even remotely our friend, that being a queer Republican is an oxymoron, that our so-called queer leadership can’t even get out a press release on time, that we have only three issues we discuss: marriage equality, military equality and the bullying of our teenagers.

What about the rest of us? What about those of us clinging to life as second-class citizens who can’t access any of the rights every straight person takes for granted?

In the throes of the AIDS crisis, we were lying in the streets. Die-ins were the norm. We were queer activists, we outed people, we refused to be silenced because silence, we screamed, equaled death.

When did we walk away from that activist construct? When did we begin to listen to upper-middle-class queer conservatives like Andrew Sullivan who first told us that AIDS was over because he was still living with the disease and now tells us to quit our whining about Obama because as a conservative, he can embrace him–torture, gutting the Constitution, failure to evolve on our civil liberties and all.

When did we stop fighting the system that oppresses us and decide we wanted to be part of it, instead? When did we decide to embrace our oppressors in the hope they would like us or invite us to a White House dinner or just not kill us?

I remember well how people were irritated by Wojnarowicz’s rage as he was dying. Yet one wonders, inevitably, if it’s that rage that Dylan Thomas writes of, against the “dying of the light,” that refusal to “go gentle into that good night” that propels us forward when we are dying, be it slowly or quickly. It’s hard not to realize that Wojnarowicz, who blazed hot to the end, has had his work revived and kept alive, even though it’s 20 years since he died. In 2010 one of his works was censored–that’s how far and not far we have come from that time in our collective community response to the diseases that kill us.

I wanted to write about many different things in this essay. I wanted to write about how hard it is to fight every day against the failure of the body and how it constricts and restricts one as a writer, even as it informs one’s writing.

I wanted to memorialize my dead writer friends–Darrell, Assotto, Essex, Steve Corbin and Marlon Riggs, Joe Beam and Donald Woods–because sometimes it seems like we’ve forgotten what happened in those years.

I wanted to write about the view outside my window, the passing of the seasons, the imperiling nature of pain, the fractiousness of outrage, the shattering knowledge that death hovers ever closer with each new diagnosis.

I wanted to write about how death stalks us in myriad ways–it directs and redirects our energies, even if we do not recognize it.

I wanted to write about what it means to be a survivor, even if that survival is tenuous at best.

I wanted to write about what it feels like to still be alive when so many people you loved and admired are long dead.

Illness is a metaphor–I agree with Sontag on that. But illness is also real, not just a literary construct or artistic conceit. It’s a battle, for those of us who are ill, and with so much illness in our community, the silence seems, to me, to be deafening. And deadly.

The straight world is not going to write about us. Whether we want to believe it or not, at best they tolerate us, at worst, they’d like to see us put down. There is a archive of our struggles between 1985 and 1995. Where is the archive of our struggles since? AIDS is not over for the poor or people of color. Cancer is not over for lesbians. All queers are not wealthy white guys for whom things got amazingly better. We lost a generation of artists and writers as well as just plain folks. We ran into the arms of assimilation and never looked back, but that means we left our identities–our true, honest, queer, not straight-acting or straight-looking identities–behind.

Illness can indeed be metaphor. Our community is sick: we lack leadership, we have subverted our collective voice, silenced ourselves. We ache for grudging acceptance instead of being in-your-face, deal-with-us demanding as we were two decades ago. We’ve narrowed our vision of queer future to what straight people have that we don’t. We should want more. We must want more.

Yes, illness is metaphor. But as I sit writing this from my bed, the pile of pillows behind me, I know how urgent it is that we not give in to metaphor. And that we get those last words–even if they are the screams of the dying–down before we succumb.