A lifetime spent understanding the power of a good story.

I was born in Dallas, less than two years after the Kennedy assassination. As a sickly kid whose parents divorced at a young age, much of my childhood was spent watching everyone around me tell stories that cast them in a better light. In 1991, my story changed when I moved to Boston to come out and get involved in politics. The next nineteen years became the story of my dreams as I did indeed get involved in politics, came out, got married, started a successful consulting business and built the kind of life I could not have imagined as a little boy.  But then in 2006, I threw that story away and, fueled by a from-out-of-nowhere spiritual reckoning, started a new life as a writer in New Orleans. My LoveNOLA column  and radio commentary told of the tug-of-war that both the city and I were going through between what had always been and what was trying to be. In 2013, with the encouragement of an agent who soon ghosted me, I moved to Taos, New Mexico where I began writing a memoir…and fell in love with an amazing man and a gift-from-above shelter dog.

That memoir is still being written (though I have promised my mother and my editor that it’s almost done). I’m also still working with a select group of consulting clients to help them sort through the politics and the possibilities of their own stories. And I’ve started two new projects. One is a blog about caring for my elderly mother who lives in assisted living. The other is a series about being a white guy who has been trying to have a very different conversation (with myself and with others) about race.

A lot of people have said a lot of things about me (we’ll leave it at that). That agent who ghosted me even said that my writing reminded him of a cross between Carlos Castenada and David Sedaris. A gay friend of mine heard that and said, “Oh honey, no. You’re more like the lovechild of Cher and Rumi.” Either works, but in the end, whether I’m writing, speaking, consulting or listening, I just try to do the only thing my mom ever asked me to do: Be the best BWT I can be.

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