L to R: Human #1, MAXIMILLION, Human #2, GRANDMA, Human #3, HAMLET, Human #4 It was a good life for a dog. We had returned to our mesa,...

Shoga Films creator Robert Philipson reflects on his successful first film festival submission "Ma Rainey's Lesbian Licks"

Robert Philipson attempts to save him and his daughter from eternal damnation

Born in 1950, I knew about Richard Nixon from the dawn of consciousness -- and he was synonymous with Evil. I inherited my contempt of...

Alice Philipson - Berkeley based solo practitioner, 1987 In the 1980s, queer lawyers were still reluctant to come out publicly. They...

Watts Rebellion, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 1965 Having grown up swathed in unrecognized white privilege (i.e. The Fifties), I...

Raising her family in a newly-created suburban neighborhood on a Pasadena mesa during the 1950s, my mother always knew she was a square...

Christmas is upon us, and I glide through the capitalist frenzy and social anxiety with frictionless insouciance. I buy no Christmas...

Lady Hamlet and her humans, 1961 It wasn’t easy for a dog used to the freedom of the San Gabriel Mountains to accommodate herself to the...

The young ulpanist in the rose greenhouse.   Aliyah. In its Biblical context, “aliyah” is a Hebrew word meaning “to rise up” and...

Four Jews The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and...

The closest equivalent we have to the N-word as an ethnic slur is “kike,” which, while certainly meant to be wounding and offensive,...

Folsom Street Fair 2019 --- not bad for 69  Way back in 1981, I was living in Washington, DC, with my first lover. I was only three years...

In 1954, Jean Guyard, a Frenchman working as a civil servant in the tax department of the French Republic, married my cousin Marion...

I'm a poet And my feet know it. They’re longfellas. This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts...

Doris and Alice enjoy a Footsie Wootsie at the San Joanquin County Fair  In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family...

Me and Ebrahim Hussein  In the spring of 1994, I published a commentary in Research in African Literatures , "the premiere journal of...

Some of the staff of Hage Geingob High School. Guess which one is the Coloured.  First of all, note the British spelling. Second of all,...

The raffish director strikes a casual pose in front of the Queens Film Festival banner Grey Gardens , if you must know. And if you don't...

As a mid-century Jewish American child, I was enrolled in the Zionist project without my knowledge or acquiescence. I was born in 1950,...

When I was coming out in the Stone Age of the 1980s, drag was not well understood (at least by me) or widely accepted, even in the gay...

One blanket statement we can endorse about American Jewish boys and men is that we are neurotically attached to our mothers. Since our...

One of the Victorian legacies of the middle-class homes of the 1950s which bespoke of aspirations to gentility was the piano in the...

On the right! Look at the guy on the right! That’s me at age 69. The physical specimen with his arm around me is Adam, my personal...

And when I say "clueless," I'm talking specifically about African American culture. I grew up in Pasadena during the 50s and 60s. There...

Of course he wasn't "my poet." He was my friend who was also a poet. I'd had other friends who wrote poetry and who had even published...

At the age of 30, my mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, met and fell in love with the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker...

Around 1990, I had recently returned to America from a year of dissertation research on East Africa's most famous playwright whose plays...

During December of 1977, I found myself intensely nostalgic for the remembered rituals and celebrations of the American Christmases I had...

We were talking about Christmas, about the Christmas tree, and we never called it a Chanukah bush.  I must have heard that somewhere...

In 2013 I was in New York to screen one of my films at the Harlem International Film Festival. While there I learned that one of...