Book Tour ~ Six to Carry the Casket and One to say the Mass by Bill Hulseman

 

reflections on life, identity, and moving forward

LGBTQ+

Date Published: July 8, 2025

Publisher: Peanut Butter Publishing

Six to carry the casket and one to say the mass: reflections on life, identity, and moving forward offers the unique opportunity for its readers to start a new dialogue, take an active hand in creating culture and reshaping the world, and think about making meaning from formative experiences and relationships. From family dynamics and professional challenges that bolstered and battered him to the TV shows, films, books, and people who impacted his queer identity, Bill deconstructs the world that he inherited and begins to reconstruct the person he wants to become through short, poignant, thought-provoking, and frequently hilarious essays. The post-2020 world revealed to Bill that social transformation only comes with individual choices. If he wanted the world to change, he had to truthfully and compassionately understand how choices made long ago brought him to this moment and how the choices he makes now shape the future.

This book is not didactic or instructional; not self-help or psychology; not academic philosophy or cultural criticism. It is an exercise in honesty and a portrait of Bill, his family, and how we construct multiple identities—sexual, religious, philosophical, political, familial, relational—without reducing them to a monolithic whole, without being argumentative.

For anyone looking to make meaning out of their lives and the world around them, this book offers a model.

 

My mother had a way with words. At a party to celebrate her eightieth birthday, about three months before she died, I was nominated (read: instructed) by my older sisters to give a toast. I decided to share some of her “greatest hits,” the phrases that made their way into our memories, or at least into my memory. Hers weren’t zingers or one-liners aimed at anyone in particular. They were observational, almost footnotes that filled in missing links to conversations or ideas, or that efficiently and wittily wrapped them up. She was succinct, and sometimes, she was too succinct, offering only an occasional hmm to let you know she was still listening. Her phrasing was pithy. She made you think quickly to discern the hidden joke, which wasn’t always clarified by her tone or gesture, and her deadpan was convincing. Most of her recurring phrases were useful. She kept an arsenal handy for lagging chatter or to cover awkward transitions. She knew how to keep a conversation moving, and she knew how to wrap things up. She could engage and detach in one fell swoop. Inane arguments, whether at her dinner table or on the nightly news, would end not with her opinion but with a declaration that “Semantics is the problem with the world today.” 

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