Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, an oppressed minority decided they'd taken all the shit they were going to and rose up against their persecutors. The scene of this uprising was the Stonewall Inn, a Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village in New York that catered to a primarily gay clientele. The spark that ignited this was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn. The end result was 3 days of sometimes violent demonstrations against police persecution by patrons and neighborhood folk. In the words of one anonymous participant, "Tuesday night was the last night for bullshit... Predominantly, the theme (w)as, 'this shit has got to stop!'" The Stonewall Riots are often identified as the beginning of the gay rights movement in America. PBS recently aired an excellent documentary about this watershed event called Stonewall Uprising which can be viewed online (at the present) on the PBS website. It should not be missed. Watching it places current strug...

Went on the Ft Worth AIDS Outreach Walk today. It was a beautiful, breezy spring day, perfect for a nice stroll in support of something important. We gathered in the Cultural District at the Community Art Center. The crowd was diverse - young, old, male, female, gay, straight, button-down, flamboyant. A celebratory, festive mood predominated. The actual walk kicked off at 2:30. We strolled down Lancaster, turned right on University Drive and south to the Botanical Garden. As we walked, my better half and I struck up a conversation with someone we heard mention lived in our neighborhood; in talking we realized the three of us had met a couple of months ago at a movie theater with her aunt and uncle--old friends of ours. The walk was not long -- about an hour. We circled through the Botanical Gardens and wandered back north to the Community Art Center. United for the moment, we then departed. A day in Fort Worth.

News flash: youngest son has just been accepted at George Mason University . Along with most of his buddies, he's a computer geek, and is planning on studying Computer Science. George Mason, located in Fairfax, Virginia (suburban Washington, DC) has an excellent Computer Science department which just opened a new 180,000 sq.ft. facility and is home to a number of active research programs which bring over $16 million a year. U.S. News & World Report ranked George Mason University #1 in its new category of Up-and-coming National Universities, 2009. They also have highly regarded history, economics and public policy departments. In addition, Virginia out-of-state tuition cost is remarkably reasonable. It was also ranked as 11th most diverse university in the nation, by the Princeton Review in 2009. As we began our college search, youngest son announced he was thinking he might want to major in history. Interestingly enough, given his interest in history, GMU is home to the Cent...