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Trump’s Manzanar

So, what are we now – Myanmar?

One of my sisters lives there, working for the U.S. State Department and spending all day every day on the Rohingya refugee crisis. These minority Muslims have been ethnically cleansed from the Buddhist country. More than 600,000 live in camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

I’m glad that America abroad is still standing up to human rights abuses, because America at home is busy creating them – setting up detention camps for the children of those trying to cross the southern border illegally for the sole purpose of deterring future crossings. …

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The literature of rejection

I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.

But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)

As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …

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