I’m really looking at this right now as someone who is a Quaker and pacifist. On February 28, 2022 I shared a 2019 post on Facebook with photos of 19-year-old Ukrainian soldiers who have been killed and words, “It hurts… It’s not when your son doesn’t want to do his homework, but when he gives …
Bill was born on January 23, 1978 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And he died by his own hand in Olympia, Washington at 17 years old on May 8, 1995. Not completely by his own hand. His story is far more complicated than that – wonderful and impish early on and then a nightmare storm at the …
May 8, 2020 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day our son Bill committed suicide after and in response to being assaulted in a bashing based on his sexual orientation. I knew it was coming but when I woke up that morning it hadn’t struck me yet when our son Noel sent me a text …
My husband, Alec Clayton, wrote this on February 12, 2020, and it makes me very happy and proud to know he feels this way about my art: My wife, Gabi Clayton, makes art. For all the thirty some odd years that I was painting and exhibiting my paintings in galleries, hardly anybody even knew she was …
I am so proud of the young people who marched yesterday. I had to work but listened on the radio there. And remembered Bill. This was written on 01/16/91 when he was just under 13 years old: “I have not yet written about what is happening in this world, in this country, and in my …
On this anniversary of 9-11 I am sharing some stuff that was on my old website that I think is worth saving, starting with this, the first public statement I made soon after September 11, 2001: I want to recognize that this is a time when we all are aware of the vulnerability of our …
In an Empty Green Room – by Gabi Clayton there are times now when I recognize that I have forgotten you spaces now where you are absent even in the everyday minutiae until my finger brushes against the tag from the crematorium kept in the same glass tray I keep earrings in and I recognize once again that you will always be seventeen you …