This is one of the reasons I love your work, and the work of other queer people who comment on cinema (and other storytelling art) through a queer lens.

I understand your work is memoir and deeply personal to you, but who better to comment on queer issues in film than a queer actor and filmmaker?

I love your thoughts on the arena and access to it. So many of our stories are lost because we don't have access.

Just this morning, I was commenting under another Prism & Pen story about the gay bar I used to go to in Des Moines, Iowa after I graduated high school.

In the 1970s and '80s, the lives of at least hundreds of queer people intersected in that space that didn't even have a formal name — just a glowing pink triangle above a back-alley entrance.

I have fond memories of the place, and I've written a few stories about it. In the process, I tried to find documentary evidence that it had existed.

After a long search, I found nothing, until another Prism & Pen writer wrote to me that he used to go there in the late 80s. He isn't sure when it closed, but it's gone now.

Think about that. For more than two decades, that bar was central to the lives of so many queer people in central Iowa; some of them traveled to Des Moines for the weekend just to go there.

But not even a whisper of it remains, because we have for so long lacked access to the arena to tell our own stories.

Things are getting much better today, of course, and people like you are one of the reasons why. So, thank you!