Sitting in a circle on the grass on my second day of freshman orientation at Boston College, the inevitable gay issue came up. Not about me, just in a general sense, a rap session topic. "Let's talk about tolerance," said my orientation leader (a member of an aggressively peppy tribe-khaki'd and polo'd kids who loved being party animal emissaries for this scrub-cheeked, undercover party school). Boston College had just been rated number two in the US World News & Report list "Alternative Lifestyles Not an Alternative", second only to southern horror show Duke. BC was not a gay-friendly school, this magazine said, confirming what growing up ten minutes from [...]

Today in the poetry section, a new poem by Richard Lawson.

I have a friend who just moved to Valparaiso, Chile-a beautifully-situated stutter of city teeming with feral dogs and nefarious purse snatchers. It's sad for me that this friend, a Best Friend if ever there was one, will be spending the last glimmering twitches of this decade in a place so thief-ridden and faraway, because we spent the first early ticks of it together, freezing and sick in the Boston Common. It was actually the night that we first became real friends, not just two kids working on a play together, not just two people who occasionally passed each other in the same lazy social orbit. We bonded that night, [...]