I’m a recovering disability attorney who now writes full-time since closing my law practice in 2024. I write primarily nonfiction (memoir and personal essays). My debut memoir War Boys, which I started working on 27 years ago, was published by Trio House Press on July 1.
War Boys is about my Russian dad’s adoption by the Nazis who murdered his family at the start of the Nazi invasion of Belarus, and the wartime trauma my dad carried into parenting me and my dozen siblings.
My next projects are a Queer YA novel called Let Him Be, which looks at romantic obsession or limerence, between two high schoolers, and a second memoir called Fat Boy Fat, about what it’s been to live in a fat, queer body in America.
My writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, The Audacity, and on PBS’s Stories from the Stage, where my story “Sing” is the most viewed in the show’s history.
What’s your age, where do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I’m 49 and live in northern Connecticut, but I spend the warmer months of the year on a lake in Massachusetts, where I was born and raised.
How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
I identify as Queer, gay, and nonbinary.
What is your relationship status?
I’m married to my husband Dave.
Do you have an “ideal” relationship status?
Being married was never very important to me but it was to Dave, and it feels good to me, and it makes me happy that it makes him happy. Ideally, I just get to spend time with my favorite person.
When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
There were slim pickings in my high school so it took until college. It was with my first college boyfriend and I was crazy about him.
How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
I define it as the work we put in to being there for each other and hopefully upping each other’s peace and happiness in life.
Does the relationship fill your deepest needs for closeness with a person? Or do you prefer not to share every part of yourself?
It’s deep closeness and peace hopefully, for myself and the other person.
When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
When I was about 16, so in 1992. I came out to four of my good friends and then threw up immediately, it was such a release. Shortly thereafter, I came out to one of my sisters and then my parents.
Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-gender or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
Even saying the word gay felt off limits. I remember most images of Queer people being used as jokes or warnings for how a Queer life equaled death or loneliness.
My biggest Queer role model ended up being my friend Ellie, who came out to our entire high school in 1991. I’ve written extensively about Ellie, including in my memoir War Boys. Our community’s mistreatment of Ellie, including cornering her in a hallway and pelting her and her girlfriend with pens, pencils, notebooks, etc., until they had to flee out an emergency exit door, changed everything for me.
I pivoted into allyship at first, and then came out, and you couldn’t shut me up about Queerness once I was out.
Are there any pivotal pop culture moments that you credit for teaching about love and/or relationships?
I think of Ellen Degeneres’ coming out in 1997 on the cover of Time as pivotal. Going back to the sense that even saying the word “gay” was off-limits, suddenly the word was emblazoned across a magazine within the phrase “Yep, I’m gay.” It shifted the word—in my perspective—into more popular usage.
Do you have a chosen family?
I do. The writer Bilie Lezra taught me the phrases biological and “logical family,” so logical family is what I tend to say when talking about my chosen family. It includes my husband’s family, who’ve healed a great deal of my biological-family trauma by making me a part of theirs.
What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
I prefer not to engage with them if possible. I was raised in an alcoholic, abusive environment.
What do you (did you) like about dating as a LGBTQ person? What do/did you dislike?
It’s been a long time since I dated anyone other than my husband. I remember disliking men who showed that they barely knew how to be a friend, let alone a boyfriend. I remember going on a date with a guy who asked me not a single question, but he did a lot of talking.
At the end of the date, he asked to see me again—of course it was a good date for him, he got to sit across from an engaged listener. I was like, “Uhh, no, you didn’t ask me a thing about myself.” He apologized and asked for a re-do (a second date), to which he brought a written list of questions. It was sweet and weird and, ultimately, I didn’t want to teach him how to be a better dater, and that was our last date.
“Knows how to have a conversation” became a must for me after that.
I remember liking all the varieties of sex and people that were readily available. I remember being about 25 and sitting with my straight friend Sara, showing her Gay.com, a prominent hookup site at the time, and explaining to her that I could find someone to have sex with in 30 seconds. It took me 10.
Have you had any difficulties dating or finding/keeping a relationship?
I experienced a good deal of unrequited love in my twenties, from both sides. I had two long-term relationships before Dave and in both, I always felt, as I lived them that, though they were good experiences, they wouldn’t last.
What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
I love knowing people for a long time, and seeing them hopefully change and grow. Most of my friendships are many decades old, some from grammar school, and it’s a joy to find out something new about someone I’ve known a long time, or I see them shift in a profound way. That moment of “Wow, I didn’t know that about you” is always a welcome surprise.
Have you experienced heartbreak?
I felt like the king of heartbreak in my twenties.
Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-gender or queer relationship?
My favorite thing has always been laughing with my partners, and Dave makes me laugh all the time. We’ve done a lot of traveling together, I think we drove something like 2,000 miles during our honeymoon, and we spend a lot of time riffing on stupid ideas to pass the time and make each other laugh.
Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
It’d be lovely if whether we could/should be married weren’t up for discussion among people in power or who are not Queer. That peace of knowing your choice of love will be left alone—that must be nice.
Have you ever been in a polyamorous relationship or would you like to be in a situation that doesn’t involve just two people?
I haven’t, but if that ever makes sense/is of interest for me and Dave, I think we’ll figure it out.
What’s your experience of being married?
We’ve been married for 10 years and together for 16. I never really wanted to be married, but Dave did. It was tough on him that I didn’t want to be.
I had a pivotal conversation with my friend Amy Levin-Epstein as I was working my way through my thoughts about marriage. She observed that I saw many examples in my family of people staying married even though they were unhappy, so I worked to get comfortable with the idea of divorce, which was a no-no in my Catholic family.
It’s rather anti-romantic, but once I got comfortable with the idea that, if my marriage becomes unhappy, divorce is an option, marriage was on the table for me.
Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
Not really. I still think of it as Jason and Dave. Yeah, we’re husbands, but that is less important to me in the day-to-day than just being two individuals. I go back to my individuality and his much more often than I do to roles.
Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
It’s not new advice but I’d advise someone younger to spend time on figuring out what makes you happy, and date a lot if you want to find love; vet those would-be relationships and move on in the nicest way possible if it’s not the fit for you. Look for the person who is happy in themselves, and together you might increase the happiness.
We all need more inspiration. Here, Jason recommends something that influenced or helped shape him significantly that he’s now recommending to YOU!
Book: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. It’s legacy work.
TV Show: RuPaul’s Drag Race. Team Jujubee and Katya forever.
Movie: It’s My Party. It’s terribly dated but it was my first exposure to a connection between two men on screen that made me feel like: “Yes, I want that.”
Song: “Heart to Break” by Kim Petras—because it’s a bop by a fierce trans artist.
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