"Question everything." I have that posted above my desk in my room.

It’s a principle I live by. Always has been. At least since I was 16 and announced at Thanksgiving dinner that I didn’t believe in god anymore. My Roman Catholic family didn’t blink. They kept on eating Mama’s homemade lasagna. They were used to me saying outrageous things.

Mama had decided early on that I was well-named. “Doubting Tommaso,” she called me. She had a habit of mixing English and Italian. The nickname was a reference to the apostle who didn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. 

The priest in religion class wasn’t as understanding. He had me stay after school for the rest of the year, to sweep floors and scrape gum off of the bottom of desk tops. As if that was going to make me stop wondering how Catholics could believe in three gods, yet still be monotheistic. “It’s a mystery of the faith, you’ll understand it when you die,” just didn’t cut it for me.

Writing was my salvation. Mama had an old Underwood typewriter in her bedroom. I’d stand on a small stool to reach the top of the bureau it sat on. She wouldn’t let me take it into my room, even though she never used it. For hours, I’d tap away on that keyboard, churning out pages that I hid under my tee-shirts or carried with me in my back pack.

I could put anything I wanted down on paper. Even my most secrets feelings. Like how I lusted after the Sicilian boy with the black hair and olive skin who lived two blocks away. If anyone ever found it, I’d say I was writing from the perspective of a woman. Writers did things like that. They were expected to be weird.

My father didn’t react well to my pronouncement that I was going to be a writer. “You’re gonna waste your life!” he yelled before he stormed out of the room. Eventually he came to accept what I wanted to be. Sort of. “Do whatever you want. Just don’t write nothing about this family or I’ll beat the crap outa ya.” 

My brother helped me understand that rebelliousness was a time-honored tradition among writers. He gave me a copy of a play he had just read. “No Exit” changed my life. I read everything by Jean-Paul Sartre I could find in the underground bookstore in Center City Philadelphia. It was a dingy hole in the wall. I spent many hours in those narrow aisles soaking up some of the greatest thinking of the 20th century. Not to mention breathing in dust that Walt Whitman had probably dragged in a century before.

As my hair grew longer and my feet carried me to antiwar marches and eventually gay liberation meetings, I carried Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in my back pack along with the “Communist Manifesto.” I quoted Jean Genet and James Baldwin to guys who picked me up when I hitch-hiked to and from college, even though some of them were more interested in something other than literary matters.

The first public reading of my work came after I won the Temple University “Young Poets” contest (1971). I had just come out of the closet. I walked to the mic and introduced the first poem, mentioning that it was written for a guy I had been romantically involved with.

No one breathed until I finished.

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la famiglia e' tutta



staring at papa
from a chair by the window
of that warm hospital room in south philly

two strokes and he is
shrunken
caved in
not at all the goliath who could
anesthetize me with a word
slay me with a glance

motionless is the hand
that kept me in line
mute the voice that reminded me
time and again
how much I disappointed him

the queer activist son
who put his passion for social justice
ahead of his duty not to shame la famiglia

now like the prodigal son
I have returned
answering the call of genes and chromosomes
voices echoing from a place I can't define
"la famiglia e' tutta"
family is everything

I ask my aunt if there's anything I can get him
she's sitting in her quiet vigil by his bed
her fingers caressing the large brown beads
of an old rosary
"what he can't have back," she says
"his son"

published in Philadelphia Poets, 3/08

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the peaceniks

music with a social conscience

featuring:

Tommi Avicolli Mecca:  Guitar, vocals
Diana Hartman:              Vocals
John Radogno:               Guitar

to listen to the peaceniks:
click here or on the picture


the videos



"Silent Night, Homeless Night"

featuring the peaceniks
and Renee Saucedo as the homeless woman

(click on picture to see it)








"America loves immigrants:
Part One: The Italians"

opening video from
Italian.Queer.Dangerous

(click on picture to see)