It's the birthday of the poet Angelina Weld Grimké, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880, a member of the distinguished biracial Grimké family, some members of which were important in the abolitionist movement and active in civil rights into the twentieth century.

Her father Archibald Grimké, a Harvard Law School graduate, served as the Vice-President of the NAACP and her mother Sarah Stanley was a white woman from a Boston middle-class family. The Stanley’s opposed Sarah’s interracial marriage. Soon after her birth, Angelina’s parents divorced. Angelina lived with her mother until she was seven years old, then was sent to live with her father. She never saw her mother again.

In my younger and thinner days, I used to go out dancing all the time. In Boston, in Providence (whenever I could get a ride), in Buffalo, in Chicago, I had what might be called “every night fever.” In Boston, where last call was at two, I rarely got to bed before two or three; in Buffalo and Chicago, where last call was at four, I rarely got to bed before four or five.

I went out all the time because I love to dance and I love music, as the O’Jays sang oh so long ago, though unlike them I don’t like just any kind of music, even if it is groovin’. I also went out because I was bored and lonely and I wanted to get laid, or at least to feel wanted. Though I had more sex than I felt that I was having (does anyone ever have “enough” sex?), I rarely got to have the sex I wanted with the men I wanted to have it with. But I had the music, and I could spend a good night in a musical trance, almost forgetting that I wanted to have sex. Almost. There were also the nights when I felt so lonely that a sad song would make me sit on the edge of the dance floor and cry. At first I accidentally typed “fly.” That works too.

For most of my life I have felt very awkward and uncomfortable in my body and in my social presence. I feel better about both now, but still hardly at ease. But when I dance, which is rarely these days, I feel at one with my body. I was a great dancer (no boast, just fact—I rocked the dance floor, and still can) and, a little heavier and out of practice, I’m still damned good. When I’m dancing my movements are graceful and smooth. When I’m dancing I feel attractive, I experience my body as admirable, even masterful, just like Madonna sang in "Vogue." In the days of my constant clubbing, men who would never have slept with me would compliment me on my dancing, buy me drinks (I always chose soda or orange juice), befriend me, even. Sometimes a man would sleep with me because I danced well (as the old saying goes, if a man can dance that well, imagine how well he can fuck), though the dance floor brought me more friends than lovers.

As a young gay man growing up closeted in a Mexican household, I had to find my queer role models in books. In high school I heard that Federico García Lorca was gay, and that so was Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, and Walt Whitman. Though their works weren’t necessarily queer—I really had to read into them sometimes—knowing that the literature was the artistry of a gay man was enough. I had yet to discover John Rechy, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Arturo Islas (my gay Chicano role models, none of them taught at my high school) but I did come across during my senior year, the verse by the Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933).

A celebrated scholar of Spanish and Latin American literature, Aurora de Albornoz also published eleven books of poetry during her lifetime. She’s an innovative poet who incorporated prose poems, collage, and other modernistic techniques into her verse. Her writing is situated within the poetry about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and “la Generación de los ’50,” one of many important periods in which the national literature flourished during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). Her body of work is an important contribution to world letters because, among other achievements, it gives voice to the experience of los exiliados, or Spanish exiles—one of the prominent women poets in a group dominated by men.

I never took a creative nonfiction writing class, yet I wrote a memoir and now teach creative nonfiction (or, more specifically, memoir writing) at Queens College and for the Vermont College of Fine Arts. It’s actually my favorite writing genre to teach because the stories I come across are rarely disappointing—people are passionate about their pasts, and they have somehow come to terms with this avenue for expression. It’s not poetry with its demand for compression, it’s not fiction with its propensity for fabrication, it is memoir—flawed memory and the interpretation of truth.

At birth, before the umbilical was cut, Ralph Steadman pooped in the hand of the hospital nurse. This marked, according to Steadman, the “earliest manifestation of a Gonzotic event.” He claims to have sole understanding of Gonzo, a term taken from an astonished medical student, Giuseppe Gonzaga, who witnessed the immaculate crap and shouted, “Biologico impossible! Mama mia! Gonzo puro!” Steadman figures, “Pure shit.”

Jean Baudrillard: 1929-2007