Inaugural Blog
You could call this my Mission Statement.
When I started my first website several years ago, it was primarily to disseminate news about my recently published book, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson (McFarland, 2014). That book is still represented here, and still in print, but the mission of this new site is somewhat larger.
The web site will now serve as a source of information for multiple books about LGBT life, history, and culture in which I have had a hand: The Up Stairs Lounge Arson (McFarland 2014), and my new book, Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice (Exposit Books, forthcoming in November of 2017). I am also including information on several books for which I have contributed material: Fashionably Late (Eldridge Books, 2016), My Gay New Orleans, (LL Publications, 2016), and Queering the South (Information Age Publishing, forthcoming in 2017).
Most of my work has been—and will continue to be—about LGBT life in the South, particularly in Louisiana, the state with which I am most familiar.
I will also be blogging periodically. Sometimes the posts will be about news events that relate to the lives of LGBT people in America. Sometimes the posts will be drafts or partial drafts of next book or essay. Sometimes I will simply be musing about the various milestones and passages that I encounter as I move through life.
My goals are to record the LGBT experience, not just because of what it shows us about the past or the present, but also to help guide the next generation toward a better future. I was a teacher for over thirty years (most of them in a residential high school for gifted students), and I see my work here as being a continuation of my work as a teacher.
