Mark McNease

I’ve had a Facebook group for LGBTQ older people for many years now (LGBTSr), as part of my website of the same name. One of the members told me he was leaving the group because he is afraid “they” will begin tracking us, and not because they want to sell us products and laxatives.

I told him I was sorry to see him go, and that I would resist until my last breath. While fear is becoming pervasive among many of us who know it is a rational response to the hostilities we have known throughout our lives and that are daily returning with a vengeance, disguised as concern for parental rights and the defending of gender conformity, fear is something I refuse. Fear serves those who benefit from instilling it.

I think about the aged among my peers. Simply being able to marry has meant we are not denied access to our loved ones. We are not erased when they die. We are not refused services (although the incidence of LGBTQ people going back into the closet when we need nursing home care is unspeakably heartbreaking). It is the simplest of dignities and the frailest of protections in a world that would prefer to offer us none.

While Clarence Thomas is a cruel wretch, he is at least honest about what they plan to do. The lying reassurances from Alito and Kavanaugh (much like the lies some of them told in their confirmation hearings) remind me most of the way we calm animals before we euthanize them, assuring them that all will be okay as the needle goes in. Remove the blinders if you still have them on. Of course they intend to overturn marriage equality. Of course they intend to strip our rights, whether it’s the right to be intimate with the person we choose to be, or the right to have our children kept free from religious coercion.

Part of their magic trick is to pummel the country with imaginary reason, while our society is dragged in their preferred direction one ruling at a time. They did not save us from a coup when they refused to do Trump’s dirty work. They are simply carrying it out themselves.

There is nothing alarmist in saying what I see. Unfortunately millions and millions are sleep walking into a country many of us will not recognize in a few years, led by the feckless Joe Biden and a geriatric Democratic leadership that refuses to say it’s raining as their clothes soak through.

And that is that.

For the first five days of summer you can download two free Marshall James Thrillers for your Kindle reading pleasure. Settle in under your beach umbrella, and start those pages turning! Available from June 21 through 25.

MURDER AT THE PAISLEY PARROTTime waits for no one, including Marshall James. Now 58 and living in New York City, Marshall has outlived the expiration date he was given with a cancer diagnosis three years ago. He beat the odds but he knows he may not beat the clock. So he’s decided to tell a story or three about some murders he was involved in back in the day.

The year was 1983. The bar was the Paisley Parrot in Hollywood, a gay, mob-run dive where people came to drink and few of them remembered the night before. Marshall loves his job as a bartender there. But one night, among the regulars, a killer arrives.

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BEAUTIFUL CORPSE

“It was 1984. Prince ruled the airwaves. The Los Angeles Olympics had come and gone, taking with it a spotlight that had shone harshly on the city’s night crawlers and left them thankful for the shadows. AIDS was spreading its dark, black, wings over us all, and I was a happy guy. At least I thought I was, until things took a sudden turn for the deadly.” – Marshall James

It’s been over a year since Marshall James first became intimately familiar with murder. He’s six months sober now and happily living with the love of his life, LAPD Detective Mac McElroy. Despite the coming storm of AIDS and its devastating toll on the world Marshall knows, his dark days seem to be behind him. Then one night he says the wrong thing, storms out in anger, and walks straight into a nightmare.

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