Two of my poems (and my Southern Legitimacy Statement) are now up at The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Also: I read this Rodney Jones poem ("Cathedral") in The Atlantic this morning. Oh, wow. (It begins: "Over time it occurs to me / I am building a shed that will burn." Damn, that's a great opening.)

And third: I wasn't expecting to be moved by Andrew Sullivan's essay on his Big Fat Straight Wedding. But, and, I was. It was this section that did it:

No other institution has an equivalent power to include people in their own familial narrative or civic history as deeply or as powerfully as civil marriage does. And the next generation see themselves as people first and gay second.

Born in a different era, I reached that conclusion through more pain and fear and self-loathing than my 20-something fellow homosexuals do today. But it was always clear to me nonetheless. It just never fully came home to me until I too got married.

It happened first when we told our families and friends of our intentions. Suddenly, they had a vocabulary to describe and understand our relationship. I was no longer my partner’s “friend” or “boyfriend”; I was his fiancé. Suddenly, everyone involved themselves in our love. They asked how I had proposed; they inquired when the wedding would be; my straight friends made jokes about marriage that simply included me as one of them. At that first post-engagement Christmas with my in-laws, I felt something shift. They had always been welcoming and supportive. But now I was family. I felt an end—a sudden, fateful end—to an emotional displacement I had experienced since childhood.