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“You ever been shot at?” the man with the gun asks me.

“Not so far,” I tell him with a small laugh.

He nods. “Do you want to be?”

It takes me a few moments before I realize the man holding the assault rifle is not joking.

He pushes a fresh 20-round magazine into the bottom of the Colt AR-15 and chambers a round. “Go up there,” he says, nodding in the direction of a tall hillside at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

I squint up at the dry grass and dirt and then grin. “Absolutely.”

Jerry Baker is that peculiar Southern California mix of hyperkinetic energy and laid-back attitude all at the same time...

I remember being the boy who pushed his radio into the corner of his childhood bedroom so he could have a chance of hearing Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” play on the nearby college radio station, and for that year, that was the one place I could hear it, on that station. In that corner of my room.

Yes. I was, I knew, the small-town boy in the song.

I was 12 the first time I looked up the word "homosexuality" in a library card catalog, and I couldn’t have told you what I was hoping for other than a larger world than the one I knew. I found two entries in my small-town Maine library, and I stared at them like they were the tiny doors to the rest of my life...

When we meet someone new, my husband likes to introduce me as, “My wife, Pam, Professional Witch.” He does this from a place of pride certainly, but also because he’s a rascal who gets a kick out of surprising people. He’s a priest’s kid — or “P.K.” as I’ve learned they’re called — and so the idea that he ended up married to someone like me still gives him a frisson of rebelliousness. (His father and I adore each other, for the record, and have both politely avoided discussing that whole “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” bit in the Bible.)

Besides, he is technically correct: though I’ve been a writer and curator who has focused on magic and witches for most of my life...

During the 2016 general election campaign, a meme circulated on Twitter in which a giant fist used chains to manipulate unwitting Americans who had television sets for heads. It was not subtle. The text beneath read: “The people will believe what the media tells them they believe – George Orwell.” In fact, Orwell never wrote those words, nor do they sound like something he would have written. For one thing, “the media” did not enter common usage until after his death in 1950, and this stickler for correct prose would never have used the singular. For another, he had too much faith in ordinary people to portray them as gullible puppets. A report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee later discerned that the phony quotation had been disseminated by the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s most prolific troll farm...

The second weekend in May, I attended the Toronto Comic Arts Festival for the third time. For those who are unfamiliar, TCAF is one of the largest alternative comics festivals in the world. Each year over 20,000 people attend to buy and sell graphic novels, mini-comics, and zines. TCAF is also, in my opinion, one of the most incidentally queer events I’ve ever gone to.

There were several panels focusing on Queer representation in comics, and many more where queer creators were involved, including myself. The question arose a few times: What is it about comics that attracts so many queer people?

The evidence was all around me. Even in the few years I had attended since 2015 I had seen a palpable rise in the number of queer creators present and spotlighted in what is essentially a crucible for the indie comics scene as a whole...

In 1974 a judge attempted to undo the long history of racial segregation in Boston public schools by enacting a mandatory busing system. The retaliation was loud and televised nationwide, so that all of America got to hear the now infamous, ignorant ranting of white Bostonians in their donkey’s bray of dialect. Full of racist fire and brimstone, this was at once a new and very old jeremiad. It was as if all of our history’s ugliness was suppurating from its natal wound.

I grew up in the suburbs just north of Boston, where things were not quite this bad, which is kind of like saying the necrotic tissue surrounding a tumor is not quite as bad as the tumor itself. I speak of Boston as synecdoche, standing in for that colonial experiment known as New England. Here lies the splintered cradle of our deepest American myths — of progress and freedoms always misunderstood...

All my books begin with a question, and so The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation began with a question inspired by Ecstatic Nation: Why neither I nor many other people knew much about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the first-ever impeachment of an American president; especially since it occurred at such a crucial time in the nation's history, shortly after the Civil War, when the country was reeling from more than 750,000 deaths and the horrific assassination of Abraham Lincoln, when four million people had been freed from slavery but had nowhere to go and no obvious source of income.  

The country seemed broken. The new president was a Southerner and white supremacist, so whatever would happen to the nation, everyone wanted to know...

Eighteen years ago, when I started writing The Obsoletes — my new novel set in the early ’90s about two teenage basketball-playing brothers who happen to be robots — the book had no robots. It also had zero brothers. It was just a story about a 15-year-old kid who loved basketball and was too nervous to talk to a girl he liked. 

I was just out of college, living in Prospect Heights, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two friends. I had a draining day job as an architect’s assistant, but evenings and weekends I hung out at the Brooklyn Public Library to find inspiration for my fiction. Back then I considered myself a strictly “literary” writer. I fashioned my narrative after Harold Brodkey’s “First Love and Other Sorrows.” My finished book was just over 100 pages...

Someone once told me that before a child acquires language for the first time, their world is connected. Prior to that, there is no difference between a mother’s face and her hair, the grass and the dirt, or their own wiggling fingers and the air they wave them through. But once they learn the word for, say, apple, each and every apple is then cut out of the fabric of the universe and can never be put it back into the murk. 

I feel this way about about three words in particular: Chuck E. Cheese's. 

Like many children of immigrants, I grew up watching a lot of television. After elementary school, where my cousin Derek and I spent half a day not understanding a single word the teacher said, we’d rush home together to turn on the TV...

As a child, my grandparents and great-aunts would periodically bend down and look me in the eye, pull me close, and ask, “Do you know where your parents keep your passport and the emergency money for tickets?” 

I did, of course. “How will I know when it’s time to run?” I asked every time we had this conversation, squirming to get away from the smell of herring and onions that was always on their breath.

“You’ll know.”

How? The question still haunts me. They fled Russia for America because of pogroms and anti-Semitism, and I grew up on their fear and hatred of that country. It’s no accident that when I sat down to write A Bend in the Stars, set in 1914 Russia, my characters struggled with the same question: How do we know when it’s time to run? ...