Recent Articles
-
The National Museum of African American History and Culture tells stories that shape all our lives
The Baltimore area is blessed with a multitude of African-American history museums and heritage sites. We've got Great Blacks in Wax, the Lewis Museum, Benjamin Banneker Historical Park, the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, and the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Meyers Maritime Park, just to name a few....
-
Field Tripping: Nostalgia Tripping
This week's field trips were all about nostalgia, the perfect way to start marking what is (I hope) the slow transition from summer to fall. It's a zillion degrees outside, but the ladyfriend swears she can smell a change in the weather, and in a sense of hope and solidarity, I say I can, too....
-
Field Tripping: A Good Girl's altered states
Drugs are a quick way to altered consciousness, which is why lots of us use them. Rates of drug use are remarkably consistent across demographics, with white people leading use rates and people of color leading rates of incarceration on drug charges. Those racial politics mean real differences...
-
Field Tripping: Detroiting
So, my big summer trip was supposed to take me and my touring bicycle up and down the Canadian Rockies with my dad, but, well, since he was hit and killed by an errant driver in December, I had to make new plans. I thought I'd take a bike camping tour on my own, in his honor, but every time I thought...
-
The history of Baltimore's lesbian bar scene
In the August 1979 issue of Baltimore's long-running Gay Community Center newspaper, Greg Lehne wrote about casual sex in the gay men's community in his column, "Gay Perspectives." How do you let a man know you are interested in getting to know him, not just getting it on? Lehne advised looking...
-
Field Tripping: Lewis Museum Redux-ing
One of the great things that happens when someone close to you dies is that you find out that a whole bunch of people love you and wish they could make it better, even though everybody knows that's impossible, because the only thing that makes it better is time, and nobody's figured out how to...
-
Field Tripping: Funeraling
I took a big field trip this past week, all the way back to Idaho for my dad's memorial service. He died so unexpectedly at Christmas, hit by a left-turning driver, that none of us were ready to plan that whole funeral thing. My stepmother, an incredibly private person with a husband who was bigger...
-
Field Tripping: Memorial Dazing
Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer, or so I've been told by all the folks who've been chomping at the bit to wear white again after that whole Labor Day thing. If my social media universe is any indication, everybody was grilling in the backyard, getting stuck in traffic on...