Selected Essays

The following are essays that appeared in a variety of publications, from The New York Times, to Lapham’s Quarterly, on subjects that happened to catch my eye—from tantric sex to beekeeping.

“Anti-climax; Coitus reservatus is an ancient technique promising bliss and longevity. Does orgasm data back up these tantric ideas?” Aeon, January 27, 2020

I wrote this essay for the semi-academic British-Australian on-line magazine, Aeon, after interviewing the doyen of the American neo-tantric movement, Charles Muir, at an “Eastern secrets of love” conference, in Thailand. The research was for a book I was planning to write (I still am) about the 19th Century Oneida Community and the connections between free-love communes, orgasm control and progressive politics in America (See “Reinventing Sex” below). More…

“The Calm Before the Swarm: A Day in the Life of an Urban Beekeeper,” Serious Eats, August 10, 2018

It started with a phone call from the health department. A rootless swarm of bees had settled over the door of a 24-hour check-cashing store on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. … The five beehives we have on our roof are registered with the city, so once or twice a year, we get calls to rescue errant swarms from other people's backyards and grape arbors. But this was the first time we'd ever been asked to foray into such an inhospitable urban setting. More…

The Orgasm Cure; What if we could expand ecstasy, reduce stress and lift depression, all by delaying and extending orgasm? Aeon, June 15, 2017

This is the second essay to appear (after “Reinventing Sex” below) resulting from my as-yet unfinished book on the sex, communes, and progressive politics in America. I ran into Nicole Daedone during a time when she was rapidly expanding her “Orgasmic Meditation” franchise throughout the U.S. and Europe. Later her organization OneTaste was branded a cult by exposes appearing in Bloomberg and the BBC and lost much of its following. I was the only journalist who took seriously Daedone’s claims of being influenced by the Zen writer Alan Watts and thought she could easily appear on a continuum that included the Oneida Community, and early birth-control-feminists, such as Margaret Sanger. More…

“Reinventing Sex: The Oneida Community challenged American standards of sex and marriage,” Lapham’s Quarterly, FLESH, Volume IX, Number 4, Fall, 2016

We are wonderful musical instruments; made to give and receive great pleasure in love.

—John Humphrey Noyes

In April a year ago I drove north from New York City to visit the Oneida Community Mansion House. It’s certainly one of the most curious museums in America. A redbrick edifice weighed down with cornices, dentils, towers, porticoes, gables, and other oddments of the Victorian architectural imagination, the Mansion House is fronted by a curved drive and sloping lawn, and lacks only a polite scattering of whitewashed Appalachian chairs to complete the picture of a prosperous Victorian resort, or perhaps a genteel insane asylum. More…

“Losing a Hive,” The Common, July 10, 2014

We lost a hive this winter. We’d set our two hives facing south on the roof of our Brooklyn home for maximum sunlight, knowing that in winter that would translate into maximum exposure to wind and cold as well. … Normally, when you open a hive, even in winter, you are struck by the chaos, the thousands of glinting bodies nosing and circulating, and the sharp hive smell that combines sweetness and sourness in equal proportions. More…

“Ken Ferguson: The Palm at the End of the Mind; Thoughts of a Potter and Professor” From the artist monograph, Ken Ferguson; Talking with the Wheel, (2007, Silver Gate, Arlington, Texas)

Kenneth Ferguson was perhaps the most influential professor at the college I attended, The Kansas City Art Institute. As the head of the Ceramics Department, he trained a generation of potters and ceramics artists who went on the influence the state of the art nationally for decades. He was from a working-class background in Pittsburg and had known Andy Warhol as a student. Like Warhol, his taste seemed innate and unerring. More…

“Brothers,” Anthologized in Reading Rhetorically; A Reader for Writers, (Pearson/Longman, 2005)

I wrote this essay about my homeless stepbrother, “Little Peter,” originally to accompany a photo essay by Jim Syme appearing in the photo magazine, DoubleTake. The essay was widely anthologized and became the basis for the first chapter of my memoir, The Looking Glass Brother. More…

“Vinyl Idling,” The New York Times, March 13, 2005

ONCE a week for several weeks, I have been taking my 9-year-old son, Alden, to see Michael Carlucci at Subterranean Records, Mr. Carlucci's narrow, cluttered store on Cornelia Street.

Subterranean Records, which under one name or another has been in the same spot since the late 1970's, is underground in both a physical and a metaphorical sense. You reach it by climbing down a long, narrow flight of concrete steps, and its gated door is so far below street level, you feel justified in looking around for an entrance to the nearby Fourth Street subway station. More…

“Mapping the Cosmic Currents: An Interview with William Burroughs,” New Letters, 1986

I was assigned to interview one of my literary heroes, the writer William S. Burroughs, early in my career. I stayed up all night preparing questions, feeling like I was about to have a tooth extracted without Novocain, but in the end, Burroughs was so candid and easy to talk to that I hardly needed my notes. (This interview was later anthologized in Conversations with William S. Burroughs, edited by Allen Hibbard, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999.) More…

“David Wojnarowicz,” Out, 2002.

The following article appeared as a feature in the “gay Time Magazine,” Out, in 2002, where I had briefly stepped in as an art writer. For it I interviewed dozens of friends of the brave and pioneering painter, performance artist, and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz, weaving their voices together, documentary style, to create a prismatic view of the artist and his era. It is a companion piece to my portrait of Keith Haring for the same magazine (see below). For me, it was gratifying to have the opportunity to talk to all those artists and relive those amazing times in the East Village. More…

“Keith Haring,” Out, 2002

I was a huge fan of Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s Edie, a stunning verité portrait of the Andy Warhol superstar, Edie Sedgwick, for which they edited together hundreds of interviews. The Keith Haring article for Out was my attempt to emulate the same style. It took a lot of work to weave spoken words into a coherent narrative, honestly—much more than it would have taken to write a conventional article—but I felt it was worth it. More…

“After Armageddon; Tactics of Survival in a Post-Nuclear Planet.” Anthologized in The Year 2000: Essays on the End, Edited by Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (New York University Press, 1997)

Chuck Strozier, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Queens and an expert on Millennialism, asked me to write something for a volume of essays he was putting together to anticipate the coming of Y2K. In retrospect the essay forms a trilogy with the two later pieces I wrote on Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz and is a further tribute to the East Village art scene of the late 70s and early 80s, in which I’d participated as a film artist. More…