A Glamour Beginning

Often times, I read books because friends suggestion them.  I have one particular reading buddy who I love to discuss books with.  He and I both are Amy Lane fans, but occasionally, I come across a book that draws me in because if the title or author, even sometimes the cover art.  I don't want to say which of those three drew me to this book, but for those who happen to know me personally, I bet you can guess.  When I saw The Guy from Galmour by Skylar M Cates, I knew this was a M/M romance I had to read. And, I am so glad that I did.  The Guy from Glamour is part of Cates's "The Guy Series," which I'm eagerly starting the second book in the series today.

Description:

Anthony Carrino loves his big, gregarious Italian-American family, even if his sisters are interfering, and his dad, the local sheriff, knows everything going on in town. He’s happy as a middle school guidance counselor. Despite helping kids and their parents fix their problems, Anthony can’t manage to get his own love life right. If only everyone would stop calling him the “nice” guy.  

Dean Pierce doesn’t do relationships. A tough-minded military man, he is dedicated to his job as a Night Stalker, flying Chinook helicopters and not speaking much to anybody. He certainly doesn’t want to deal with a mess of emotions. But when tragedy strikes, Dean finds his hands full with his troubled niece, her irresistible guidance counselor, and a meddlesome family, which includes a rather large puppy.

The story of Dean and Anthony warmed my heart.  There were a few places where the book was predictable, I've read enough Amy Lane to now always expect the worse to happen, but Cates has a gentler way of dealing with the angst.  Sometimes she draws it out and it tugs at your heart strings, and sometimes your breath is taken away, but your confidence is quickly restored.  The Guy from Glamour has  a variety of twists and turns, but you can't help from falling in love with the loquacious Anthony or the stolid and silent Dean, mostly because we get  to read Dean's thoughts and know that he's just not used to expressing himself.

The book is also about a small town romance.  I've lived in small towns all my life, and whereas, I haven't yet found the love of my life, I do enjoy reading about those who do.  I enjoy books that make me feel good, and this book made me feel great.  I listened to it as an audiobook, as I often do on my drive to and from school, and the narration by Matt Baca was phenomenal.  I had no trouble keeping up with who was who, which some readers are not as good at conveying.  Also, usually I am content with listening only when I'm in the car, but I found myself continuing to listen once I got home and even listening some before I went to sleep at night.

The Guy from Glamour was a hit in my book.  I loved it, and I can't wait to read more from Skylar M Cates, who by the way, sounds like my kind of woman.  In her author's bio, she is described as a woman who "...loves a good romance.  She is quite happy to drink some coffee, curl up with a good book, and not move all day."  Now that's my kind of day!

Long Johns

Last week when Alabama broke numerous records for all time lows, silvereagle commented "Cold here also. 20 right now. Glad I am inside. Wear those longjohns. Wonder where they got that name? Was John really long? What if his name had been Dick? Lol". So I thought I might find the answer. How did long johns get their name?

Long johns were first introduced into England in the seventeenth century but only become popular as sleepwear in the 18th century. The manufacturing foundations of long johns may lie in Derbyshire, England, at John Smedley's Lea Mills, located in Matlock. The company has a 225-year heritage and is said to have created the garment, reputedly named after a famous boxer who fought in long underwear.

The setting: a smoke-filled room with a boxing ring in Boston, Massachusetts around 1879.
The bell announced round three. Two antagonists rose from opposing corners, carefully calculating their next moves. Big John Sullivan, also called “The Boston Strong Boy,” made the first move: a blazing uppercut blow from the left. His deceived opponent fell hard, eyelids wavering.
Big John swaggered over his fallen victim, bragging, “I can lick anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

Modesty may not have been Big John’s forté, as John became known not only for his fighting style but for the mark he left upon the world of fashion. Unlike other fighters of his time, Big John wore one-piece thermals in the ring, otherwise known as the Union suit.

As his notoriety grew, John’s wardrobe took on the identity of the man, himself. Thus creating “long johns” as the character’s article of choice to wear.

In 2004, Michael Quinion, a British etymologist and writer, first postulated that the "john" in the item of apparel may be a reference to Sullivan, who wore the above mentioned union suit in the ring. This explanation, however, is uncertain and the word's origin is ultimately unknown.

A less colorful explanation comes from Stanfield's of Canada.  An adjustable two-piece design is credited to Canadian Frank Stanfield, a native of Truro, Nova Scotia, who patented his design on 7 December 1915. In 1898, Stanfield and his brother John had developed a product called Stanfield's Unshrinkable Underwear for Stanfield's, their garment manufacturing company.  Frank Stanfield may have given it the nickname long johns after his brother.

The most interesting part of my research (to me at least) into the name long johns was that I actually knew who John L. Sullivan was.  I used to live less than five miles from the site of Sullivan's most famous fight.  You see, at the corner of Richburg Road and Sullivan-Kilrain Road in rural Mississippi there's a monument that honors the last bare-knuckle boxing fight, famously known as the Sullivan-Kilrain fight.  When I took the back roads to school, which I often did to avoid the worst of traffic, I regularly passed by this monument.  The fight is 125-years-old and happened on July 8, 1889. The prize fight was between Jake Kilrain and John L. Sullivan.

On the 125th anniversary, WJTV News in Jackson, Mississippi, did a story about the Sullivan-Kilrain fight.  Harold Hartfield, who's grandfather witnessed the fight said "A lot of the people that was here for the fight actually came on special trains out of New Orleans to witness the fight."  They came from New Orleans on a train track that runs alongside Highway 11 because the governor of Louisiana forbid the fight in his state.  However, a large number of influential politicians and businessmen (including, if memory serves me correctly, the mayor of New Orleans) wanted the fight to happen, so they decided to find a new place outside Louisiana's borders. Bare-knuckled fighting was banned in most southern states, so they had to meet in rural Mississippi at this secret location near the train tracks out of New Orleans.

This being July in South Mississippi, the temperature got up to 106 degrees and the fight went 75 rounds and lasted two hours and 16 minutes.  There is no doubt that the heat and humidity were oppressive, especially since the fight took place in late morning as the day began to heat up.

During these fights, a round ended when someone hit the ground and did not depend on a time limit.  At the end of the 75 rounds, the assistants for Kilrain took him back to his corner and the doctor said he should not go back in the ring. The doctor feared that Sullivan would kill him if it went on longer.  So Kilrain threw in the sponge, which is the same as throwing in the towel.

But since this was a bare-fisted prize fight and was illegal, there was a price to pay to the law.  Both fighters left Mississippi for the Northeast but were brought back for trial in the Circuit Court of Marion County, Mississippi.  They were both found guilty.  Sullivan paid a $500 fine.  Kilrain served a two month jail sentence. He served on the farm of Charles Rich where the fight had taken place.

Passers-by

Passers-by

By Carl Sandburg

Passers-by,

Out of your many faces

Flash memories to me

Now at the day end

Away from the sidewalks

Where your shoe soles traveled

And your voices rose and blent

To form the city’s afternoon roar

Hindering an old silence.

Passers-by,

I remember lean ones among you,

Throats in the clutch of a hope,

Lips written over with strivings,

Mouths that kiss only for love,

Records of great wishes slept with,

      Held long

And prayed and toiled for:

      Yes,

Written on

Your mouths

And your throats

I read them

When you passed by.

Carl Sandburg (January, 1878 – July, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish immigrants. At the age of thirteen he left school and began driving a milk wagon. He subsequently became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biography, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina. He once said, “All politicians should have three hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.” He also believed that, “Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.”

Carl Sandburg published Chicago Poems in 1916, as an ode to a city. It’s a clear eyed and unapologetic love letter: where you tell your true-love you love them not in spite of their imperfections but because of them. This was Sandburg’s first volume of poetry, written in the years just after 1912 when he moved to Chicago.  "Passers-by" is one of the poems from this collection.

In some ways, Sandburg’s writing was before its time–more like the social realism you associate with the later 1920s and 1930s–think Grant Wood’s American Gothic, think Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. This was a time when industry, agriculture, and the worker were the heroes of popular art.

Cluster F***

Yesterday, I woke up with a terrible headache.  I'm beginning to think that I don't have migraines but that I have cluster headaches.  Cluster headaches are less common than migraine headache or tension headache, both of which I know I have, but some of the headaches are different and do not fit the regular symptoms of a migraine or tension headache.  The pain of cluster headache is its defining and most dramatic feature. This pain comes on without warning (no forewarning symptoms such as the aura in classic migraine, which I do have before a migraine begins) and begins as a burning sensation deep in one eye.

The pain peaks in just a few minutes. People describe the feeling as having an ice pick driven through your eye. They use words such as "excruciating," "explosive," and "deep." This stabbing eye pain carries with it a rapid electrical-shocklike element, which may last for a few seconds, and a deeper element that continues for a half-hour or longer. The pain almost always begins in my eye and always on one side of your face. Interestingly, for most people the pain stays on the same side of the face from cluster to cluster, while in a small minority, including myself. the pain switches to the opposite side during the next cluster.

There are two types of cluster headaches, episodic and chronic.  Episodic cluster headaches occur regularly between one week and one year, followed by a headache free period of one month or more. Chronic cluster headaches occur regularly for longer than one year, followed by a headache free period that lasts for less than one month.  Because of the frequency to which I have headaches, it could actually be either.  I do go months without headaches that are like an ice pick driven through my eye, which could merely mean that I suffer from episodic cluster headaches but with the misfortune of also having tension, sinus, and migraine headaches in the intervals.

As the name suggests, the cluster headache exhibits a clustering of painful attacks over a period of many weeks. The pain of a cluster headache peaks in about five minutes and may last for an hour. Someone with a cluster headache may get several headaches a day for weeks at a time - perhaps months - usually interrupted by a pain-free period of variable length.

One of the reasons that I think I have been suffering from cluster headaches is because of one of the main triggers.  Alcohol is one well known trigger of cluster headache, often bringing on the pain within an hour of drinking. In the past four to six months, every time I have drank alcohol, I have suffered from intense debilitating headaches that last for several days.  These headaches usually come and go through the day.  I haven't had any alcohol with the exception of three different occasions in the last four months.  It appears that a good white wine does not trigger them, but any other alcohol (including cheap white wine) does trigger these headaches.  I guess my head is a tad bit of a wine snob.

Even if these headaches are cluster headaches, the treatment is only minimally different from migraine treatment.  Doctors still recommend taking a class of drugs known as triptans, which I already have a prescription for the only one of the triptans I can take, Maxalt.  The others often are not recommended for people with high blood pressure, and they have the nasty side effect of simulating a heart attack, that is tightness in the chest and a radiating pain down the arm.  Maxalt has never caused the simulated heart attack but others have when I have tried them and believe it or not, it is much more uncomfortable than the migraine.  Other treatments that have been proved effective, not for curing but for relieving the pain is breathing pure oxygen for short periods of time and opioid pain relievers.

I know this is a bit of an unorthodox post and doesn't exactly fit into what I usually blog about, but when I research something, I'm like a dog with a bone or my cat Lucy when she has one of her toys, I just don't want to let it go.  After researching cluster headaches, I thought I'd share what I had found out, just in case any of my readers have suffered from similar headaches and would enjoy the information or might have some advice.

Through A Glass, Darkly

Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

1 Corinthians 13:8-12

Last week, I only covers these verses briefly because I wanted to look at them more closely this week.  In these five verses we see that love is an eternal gift. Paul discusses the temporary nature of the spiritual gifts and the eternal nature of love. In 13:8, Paul talks about the temporary nature of gifts when he writes, “Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.”  When Paul says, charity (sometimes interpreted as love) never faileth, he means love/charity/agape never ends. The synonym for this expression is “love abides” in 13:13. These phrases serve to bookend this final section where Paul argues that the spiritual gifts will be done away with one day.

The reason that spiritual gifts like prophecy and tongues will come to an end is revealed in 13:9-10. Paul writes, “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” Paul explains that we are limited in our understanding, but this will not always be the case. A time of perfection is coming. The “perfect” refers to the returning of Christ. When we recall that 1 Corinthians 1:7 "So that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" Paul pointed out the ongoing role of the gifts until the return of Christ, there can be only one possible interpretation of “perfection”—it is the life in the world to come, after Jesus reappears on earth.

Paul explains himself further in 13:11-12: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Paul explains that our understanding of God is indirect in this life. He uses two analogies: childhood and a mirror. In using the analogy of childhood, Paul is not suggesting that those who speak in tongues are childish and immature. Rather, he is adopting an eternal perspective and simply saying that there will come a time when the gifts of the Spirit will no longer be necessary.  In essence, I have always been taught that speaking in tongues was something that would go away after the apostles did.  The church would no longer be in it's infancy.

The phrase "through a glass, darkly" is an often reused phrase that has spawned the title a of many works.  The ‘glass’  that Paul describes here is actually a mirror. The analogy of the mirror implies that our visibility of Christ is indirect. In other words, Paul is comparing the nature of looking in a mirror to the relationship we will enjoy with Jesus when we see Him “face to face.”  The mirrors of the ancients were of polished metal, in many cases they were of brass and they required constant polishing, so that a sponge with pounded pumice-stone was generally attached to it. And it was  the apostle Paul who wrote this famous passage from the Bible in a letter to a church in Corinth, which was famous for the manufacture of these kinds of mirrors. The images reflected in these brass mirrors were indistinct in comparison to our modern mirrors. They were seen darkly.

Which, literally translated from the original Greek language in which he wrote, means, “in a riddle or enigma…that the revelation appears indistinctly, imperfectly.”  Paul is telling us that this is the  state of our knowledge of divine things–imperfect and incomplete. “Now I know in part,” Paul mourns.  There were limitations upon the knowledge even of Paul; only a part was seen. But wonderfully, it will not always be so. One glorious moment in the future every single human being on earth will suddenly face Jesus.

This reminds me of the refrain from one of my favorite hymns,"When We All Get To Heaven:"

When we all get to Heaven,

What a day of rejoicing that will be!

When we all see Jesus,

We’ll sing and shout the victory!

It is in that day that we will no longer "see thought the glass, darkly" but we will rejoice in the knowledge of the universe and be assured of God's love.  As 1 Corinthians 13:13 says, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."  The English Standard Version translate this last verse to say, "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."  It is a truly wonderful thought that out of faith, hope, and love, love is the greatest.  If only more people would keep that in mind, then we could truly "We’ll sing and shout the victory!"

Moment of Zen: Touching

Each of these pictures were pictures I thought about using on my post about “Touch” from Thursday.

Cold

Several cities in Alabama broke temperature records yesterday for the coldest temperatures on January 8th since those records began being taken.  When I left for work yesterday, it was a bone chilling 14 degrees.  I know people who love up north think that's nothing, but I live in Alabama, and we rarely get this cold.  The warmest it got all day yesterday was 33 degrees.  Today, the high is expected in the 40s, but the weathermen have been off quite a number of times this week.

Even worse than the cold yesterday was the fact that when I go to my classroom, I had no heat.  Inside it was 53 degrees, so we had class in a different room that had heat until it could be repaired.  It turned out that the four heaters in my building blew the main circuit breaker.  Honestly, it never really got warm in my room.  My building is the only building equipped with electric instead of gas heat, and the bad part of that is that the electric heat is a heat pump.  I don't know if you've ever had the "joys" of having a heat pump, but they are bit very good at keeping places warm.  They will heat for a short while (which is the emergency heat kicking in) but mostly it tries to draw what heat is available outside to indoors.  When it's 14 degrees and most of the day is below freezing, there's not much heat to draw in, so it blows cold air.

Honestly, I don't mind the cold as long as I can be warm inside.  I'd much rather cold weather than the oppressive heat of the summer, but still, down here we aren't used to it being this cold.

Touch

There is simply no denying that life can be hard, even cruel. I've learned this more than once in my life.  Few, if any, of us go through life consistently getting all the affirmation and pleasures that would offset the hardships that inevitably come our way. Fortunately for us, our bodies are equipped to provide the ability to cope with even the most difficult circumstances. We generate our own natural pain and stress relievers through our positive physical contact with other people. 

Extensive research by the University of Miami's Touch Research Institute has revealed that human touch has wide-ranging physical and emotional benefits for people of all age groups. In the Institute's experiments, touch lessened pain, improved pulmonary function, increased growth in infants, lowered blood glucose and improved immune function. Human touch is important for all ages, but by the time children reach their teen years, they receive only half as much touching as they did in the early part of their lives. Adults touch each other even less.

From the time we are infants we learn to find pleasure in skin-to-skin contact with others. It appears that we are dependent on copious amounts of this kind of comforting and pleasurable contact for both physical and emotional development. When we transition from childhood to adolescence, we simply move our source of physical contact from our family to our friends. However, the special pleasure of human, skin to skin, contact never loses its importance.

There is only one problem.  Over the span of our life there are limited times when we have regular and consistent access to enough of that kind of contact. Even if we are in a relationship with an active sex life, we do not necessarily have access to the physical pleasure when we need it to lessen the pains of life.

I miss that touch that can only come from another human being.  Sexual touching is great, but any kind of physical contact is welcome.  A friendly hand on your arm or shoulder.  A pat on the back.  A hug from a friend.  Then there are the more intimate touches.  Someone running their hands through your hair.  A hand brushing your cheek. Slow dancing with someone.  Once you get past those touches, then it moves usually from intimate to sensual.  A kiss on the lips.  A nuzzle in your ear. After that usually comes sexual touch.

I miss all those touches, from the simple to the sexual, but so often, I just crave the simple touch of another human being on my body.  Of course touch is not the only sense that we crave, but it is an important one.  Besides having physical needs for food, cleanliness and shelter, we also have touch needs.  Touch deprived children tend to be the more aggressive and violent ones. They lack the experience to discern whether or not touch is good or bad. 

Ever had cold feet at night? People had a remarkable solution to this problem in the Middle Ages. Many nobles in medieval Europe had large beds that allowed a noble, his wife, their children, some servants, and his knights to sleep together in the dead of winter. If this sleeping arrangement sounds a little too cozy, this is probably because modern people like you and I have come to regard the practice of sleeping together with one’s entire household as shameful and uncivilized. Indeed, over the centuries, various forms of interpersonal touch have become less and less common, crushed under an onslaught of changing cultural values and new technology. We increasingly view touch as unhygienic and even invasive, as in the case of sexual harassment, for example. And isolating ourselves behind phones and laptop screens has only exacerbated the trend.

We live in such a busy, crowded world, yet it’s so easy for many of us to go days, even weeks or months without touching or being touched by others.  While we might not notice the effects of not being touched right away, it can negatively affect our mood, our confidence  and our health. We are only beginning to understand the holistic way our bodies work and the relationship between our emotional well being and our physical health.

We are social beings, and although we all fall in different places on the introversion – extroversion scale, we all need to have that sense of connection to other members of humanity. While some of that connection can come from having conversations with others, touch also plays an important role in human communication.

Simply touching another person can make us feel more secure and less anxious. It can make us feel grounded and safe and not so alone. It’s not just children who could use a warm, reassuring hug to make things a little better, so if you’re feeling like a bundle of nerves, go ahead and ask for a hug.

Studies have shown that those that get regular touch often have lower blood pressure than those that don’t. Even having a pet can have beneficial effects! Touch can also slow the heart rate and help speed recovery times from illness and surgery.  It’s harder to get into a pessimistic funk when you feel the confidence of being connected to others. Touch can make people feel more optimistic and positive and less cynical and suspicious. A positive, trusting attitude towards others can reduce tension in our daily lives and improve our relationships.

Scientists are just discovering how truly important it is to exercise all our physical senses for proper brain and emotional development. All the various kinds of touch from butterfly kisses to deep tissue massage send our brains the physical inputs it needs to make sense of the world. So, along with touching other people and pets, make time to explore different textures and touch sensations such as letting cool sand run through your fingers or taking a warm relaxing bath.

Labels

Yesterday, I talked about masks.  Today lets discuss labels.  Labels play a large role in society. Some choose not to identify with a label, while others find a sense of security in a label and use it to define who they are to others. Off the top of your head, how many labels can you think of for the LGBTQ community? Do certain groups not tolerate one another well? In history, the lesbian community and the gay male community have often been at odds. Some facets of the transgender community are hostile toward one another based on personal decisions regarding medical transition or one's choice not to do so.

"Gay." "Lesbian." "Bisexual." "Transgender." "Pansexual." "Genderqueer." "Neutrois." "Non-Identified." "Queer." "Femme." "Butch." The list goes on.

One of the most puzzling to me is "Cis" or "Cisgender."  The situation is more complicated for "cisgender," coined in the 1990s to mean the opposite of "transgender." The "trans" in "transgender" comes from a Latin word meaning "on the other side of," and the "cis" in "cisgender" comes from a Latin word meaning "on this side of." "Cisgender" refers to people who feel there is a match between their assigned sex and the gender they feel themselves to be. You are cisgender if your birth certificate says you're male and you identify yourself as a man or if your birth certificate says you're female and you identify as a woman. Presumably you are also cisgender if you were born intersex (that is, with some combination of male and female reproductive parts) and identify as an intersex or androgynous person.

For a while, "cisgender" only appeared in academic journals. But now it's all over the Internet, and not just on blogs and sites of, by, and for transgender people. It's made it into online reference works like the Oxford Dictionaries. And since "cisgender" is one of the 56 options for gender identification on Facebook (along with "cis female," "cis male," "cis woman, "cis man," "cisgender woman," "cisgender man," and just plain "cis"), it has already achieved a kind of pop officialdom.

There are a number of derivatives of the terms in use, including cis male for "male assigned male at birth", cis female for "female assigned female at birth", analogically cis man and cis woman, as well as cissexism and cissexual assumption. In addition, one study published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society used the term cisnormativity, akin to sexual diversity studies' heteronormativity. A related adjective is gender-normative; Eli R. Green, an interdisciplinary scholar in Gender and Sexuality Studies, has written that "'cisgendered' is used [instead of the more popular 'gender normative'] to refer to people who do not identify with a gender diverse experience, without enforcing existence of a normative gender expression".

The thing is, and this is just my opinion, can there be a normal.  We want to give labels to everything, but if you are male and female do we really have a need to say cis male or cis female?  Wouldn't that just merely he male and female?  Sometimes people make life too complicated, or they try to make things even more complicated with all of these labels.

I use labels in my life for ease of identification to others like me, but I don't discriminate against anyone for choosing to use or not use them. The bottom line is this: regardless of anyone's labels or lack thereof, we're all in this together.

We Wear the Masks

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) 

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

       We wear the mask!

Born on June 27, 1872, Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first African-American poets to gain national recognition. His parents Joshua and Matilda Murphy Dunbar were freed slaves from Kentucky. His parents separated shortly after his birth, but Dunbar would draw on their stories of plantation life throughout his writing career.

By 1895, Dunbar’s poems began appearing in major national newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times. With the help of friends, he published the second collection, Majors and Minors (1895). The poems written in standard English were called “majors," and those in dialect were termed “minors.” Although the “major” poems outnumber those written in dialect, it was the dialect poems that brought Dunbar the most attention. The noted novelist and critic William Dean Howells gave a favorable review to the poems in Harper’s Weekly.

The above poem appeared in Dunbar's first professionally published volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life, in 1896 by Dodd, Mead, and Company. It also appeared in the volume Majors and Minors from the previous year. 

To get by in America of the late 19th Century, blacks frequently concealed their pain, frustration, and anger from whites, as well as from one another. For blacks to reveal publicly their true feelings about whites' maltreatment of them would have been to risk dangerous retaliation. After all, prejudice was official policy in Dunbar's lifetime–governmentally and otherwise–and whites vastly outnumbered blacks. Sometimes, blacks even withheld their true feelings from one another, for defeat and desperation were difficult to articulate–and could impose deep anxiety upon loved ones. So it was that many blacks wore a mask that suggested happiness and contentment but concealed acute distress and pain. 

Since Dunbar avoids specifically mentioning blacks and their suffering, the poem could stand as a lament on behalf of all people forced to wear a "mask"–the girl who hides her pregnancy from her parents, the boy who defensively humors an abusive parent, the soldier under fire who writes home that all is well when all is not well. One may fairly argue that the poem is about every human being. Who, after all, has not worn a mask on occasion to conceal hurt, frustration, disappointment?  

As gay men, we often wear a mask, especially if we are in the closet.  We can't be our true selves, we conceal our love of other men, we conceal the pain from friends and family when they make homophobic comments, we face the anger and frustration in near silence because we fear for our jobs and out livelihood.  In many ways this is changing in some parts of the United States, but not in all parts.  Even in areas where out LGBT people are able to be more out and proud, there still exists homophobia and discrimination.

I remember on the movie The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer's character wanted to be very vocal about the AIDS epidemic, but even those in the movement with him were afraid of being too vocal.  Even today, we have people within the LGBT community that preach constant civility, even when we are very angry and hurt.  I admit, I do think politeness is the way to go, but within the LGBT community, we should be open and honest, and we should have more opportunities to be who we are.  We all wear masks, but one day, and one day soon, I hope that there will no longer be a need for those masks.  We will have the protections we need and deserve to be fully equal citizens, no matter where we live in this country or in the world.