Biography

I'm a fifty-something, gay, white¹ cisgender man.²  I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, was raised in nearby rural eastern Arkansas near Forrest City, and was in the top ten students of my high school graduating class.  Subsequently I attended Mississippi State University, majoring in anthropology.  I've been with my husband, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, since 1993, and we've been legally married since 2009.  I've worked for my employer, a big-box home improvement retailer, for over twenty years.  I live in Memphis with my husband and our tortoiseshell cat, Lucy.

I'm also an ordained minister³ , a notary public, a professional photographer (published in several periodicals), and a published author (an obscure magazine article in 2000).  

As for non-professional interests, within the LGBT+ community, I've been an educator and the longtime president of a local leather organization.  Since 2014, I've been an official photographer for Memphis Roller Derby, our WFTDA-affiliated women's roller derby league.  I do still love shooting and developing film in addition to digital for my personal photographic work.  Keeping up to date on advances in biblical scholarship and anthropology takes up most of my reading.  Music has always been important to me.  I love progressive rock/metal and the 1980s-early 1990s music of my youth, and I've even been a volunteer church organist.  I was raised Southern Baptist, converted to Roman Catholicism in early adulthood including becoming an advocate of the Traditional Latin Mass; and then, as my study of biblical scholarship deepened, I've mellowed to a Catholic-flavored agnosticism.  Politically I'm a moderate liberal and a yellow-dog Democrat:  after Dubya and then Trump, the Republican Party is forever disqualified from earning my vote.  Over a series of visits, I've recently become enamored -- or one might properly say enchanted -- with the state of New Mexico, its people, and the richness of its singular blend of cultures.  I daydream about retiring there.

I acknowledge that I live in the traditional territory of the Quapaw and Chickasaw nations.

¹ Specifically, Anglo/German.

² My preferred pronouns are he/him.

³ Universal Life Church and American Marriage Ministries