Shameless plug for poetry!

I have poem up on anderbo.com!

Check. It. Out. (Along with all the other great work!)

 

HIV or Health Insurance?

It’s not even close to a fair choice. There is a new dimension to the health care debates — taking HIV medications as a precaution after rape apparently gets you docked for a pre-existing condition. Yeah, if this woman hadn’t, she may have developed the actual virus and then where the hell would she get coverage? All I can say is WTF?

READ THIS IMMEDIATELY.

We should send this to every punk in Congress who’s fighting Obama on change.

 

A Ghostly Comparison to Your Tolerance…

An email I wrote to Andrew Sullivan, following the posting of his “Dissent of the Day,” 10/13/09.

Wow, heterosexual love can produce a universe?

I had no idea. From the way I understand it, heterosexual sex sometimes, but not always, produces a child. Hunky dory for you.
 
Maybe I’m just a little oversensitive about some anonymous person calling my love a “ghostly comparison” to theirs. Maybe I’m finally coming into (or returning to) my angry dyke phase. Maybe I’ve just read far too many comments like your reader’s. But I am sick and tired of this pissing contest. It’s the origin of every argument against gay marriage, DADT, and gay rights in general. It’s the concept that there is only one absolute in life and if you don’t abide by it, you’re a second-class, subhuman being.

And what if being gay were a choice? (And personally, for me, I think it’s a combination of several factors, so choice may be involved.) I don’t know if it is, but I do know I choose to be with the woman I love and she chooses to be with me. We choose to support and take care of one another, to help realize each other’s dreams. So if that commitment is somehow “beneath” the heterosexual model, well then I’m happy to choose it.
 
By the way, you know what else a sperm and an egg produce? Gay people.

 

10 Signs You Know You’re in a Fancy Restaurant

Apologies for the hiatus! I’ve been making excuses again. But, seeing as how all other forms of writing are back on the horizon for me, I figured blogging could squeeze its way into my schedule as well.

Here is a little something to satisfy your palates – literally. I realized with all the wining and dining I do in New York, it was high time I wrote some commentary on the subject.

This is a list that I started after a dinner at the West Bank Cafe, located at 42nd and 9th.

Enjoy!

1. The bathroom stalls have floor-to-ceiling length doors and sinks that look like bowls of pottery.
2. There is at least one item on the entree list that is in a foreign language – even if the restaurant is not ethic.
3. The “pre-meal” item does not consist of bread.
4. Sorbet is served between courses to “cleanse” the palate. We all know it’s served just because it tastes amazing.
5. The cognac list is as long (if not longer) than the regular dessert list.
6. Gratuity is automatically added to your bill regardless of party size.
7. The waiter is incredibly skilled at opening bottles of wine – you’re not sure, but you think you just saw him do it one-handed.
8. You don’t get a choice of salad dressing and there are no croutons.
9. There are no children in sight. If there are, they have napkins neatly folded in their shirts.
10. You know it’s going to be a night you’re everywhere you want to be – VISA is in your back pocket.

 

Musical neighbors

Something about having a new trumpet-playing neighbor whose music wafts through my open windows makes me feel even more New York.

I get to create a whole back story for this person – perhaps they’ve always lived there, but they just started playing. Or maybe they are someone’s child who has just started taking music lessons or an out-of-town relative staying for an extended period. It doesn’t really matter, plus, the mystery of it all is part of the fun.

It reminds me of another set of windows where another instrument could be heard. During my sophomore year of college, I lived in a dorm that was part of a  pseudo-quad set up. A very talented drummer lived across the way in the dorm just diagonal from mine. It was the only kind of noise I didn’t mind distracting me from a paper or reading. In fact, I welcomed it.

Now, here I am, six years later, in my apartment in the city that was only a dream back then…

 

The Pride of Jersey

You can take the girl outta Jersey, but you can’t take Jersey outta the girl.

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2009/09/15/Corzine__NJ_Gay_Marriage_This_Year/

Granted, my homestate is a bloody mess in almost every other respect, but it’s nice to know the governor cares about marriage equality – even if, in true political fashion, he’s using it for votes. Civil unions yesterday, marriage tomorrow.

 

Not just gay, but human.

As I take in the glory that is Queer as Folk, I’ve been making a mental list in my head of things I want to discuss in a future blog. (Almost at the end of Season 4- one more season to go!) Last night’s episodes particularly had me reeling from the characters’ painful dilemmas. And that’s when I got to thinking – I wish people would see us, our lives as not just gay, but human.

Then I stumbled across this article. The writer, Jon Rauch relays a personal essay about his cousin and his cousin’s partner during a tulmultous hospital ordeal. Rauch sticks it to the conservatives by posing (over and over and over again), “If gays aren’t allowed to get married, then what CAN they do?” which of course, exposes a larger problem in Republican politics: they don’t offer any alternatives to gays.

Thank you, Andrew Sullivan for continuing to post pieces about the hopeful future we should look to. No one is going backwards anymore.

 

Gay sightings in Canada

Last week, I went on a cruise to St. John, New Brunswick and Halifax, Nova Scotia. While in the quaint port town of St. John, I stumbled across this posting outside of a bar:

There isn't a caption to do this justice.

Meanwhile, in Halifax, Nova Scotia I found a more sobering message:

Gotta love those Canadian churches.

I was touched by both sightings for different reasons. But the one commonality? It made me remember why I love traveling, especially outside of the US. It’s the reason why people like Bush could never understand what life is like in other countries — because they had never bothered to investigate.  And you could argue that Canada isn’t all that “foreign,” just our neighbor to the north. Well,  if that’s true – then why don’t I find more church signs like St. Matthew’s in the US instead the “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” lot? (No joke – I actually saw one of these on a highway in Delaware several years ago.) It may be a minor thing to some, but I believe what an outsider observes  is powerfully revealing. I wonder what those Canadians think when they cross the border….

 

One Small Step for Man…

I wake up to a radio morning show I normally dismiss as nothing more than my annoying alarm, but today, this semi-decent station was actually hosting something really interesting. They found a web site celebrating the 40th anniversary (gosh, there’s a lot of those around recently) of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

I felt like the clock had jumped off my dresser and hit my head. Say what? 40 years since we landed on the moon? No way. But yes, it has been that long.

We Choose the Moon is full of interesting factoids about the shuttle’s mission – from the stage tracker to 1969 costs of living, I could play around on this site for hours. But the most amazing thing – and the main attraction – to this site is the real-time broadcast of the mission, as it happened. You can listen to the entire transmission between the astronauts and mission control!

I’m particularly jazzed up about this because I didn’t find any of my favorite blogs posting about this today.

So go – follow Buzz and Neil – even if you weren’t there 40 years ago. And if you were lucky enough to be there, relive it.

 

Explain it to me like I’m a six year old.

(Yes, I’m quoting Denzel Washington in Philadelphia.)

I was tempted to post a very angry rant/lecture about how transgenders/sexuals should play nice with gay people. And then I took a 3 hour break from the interweb and tried to calm down.

Earlier today, I stumbled across a post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish (heart) about Obama’s strategy with the gays. The blog linked out to this site where I discovered a rather upsetting comment from a trans woman. She left a link to her own blog, so like the glutton for punishment that I am, I went there. 

I found two entries regarding gay people and gay sex. Some of the observations/opinions were really hard for me to read from a transgender woman – a person who in many people’s eyes (though not my own) would be considered abnormal, crazy, gross, an abomination. Yet, here she was proclaiming it was gay people who were all these things, kicking in the bricks of the very foundation of why there’s a fucking T at the end of LGBT: because most of society tells us we are perverted, amoral, disgusting, sick.

I have known several trans people (admittedly none who had undergone a full, surgical transition, but still) and I found them to be nothing but welcoming and warm toward ALL kinds of people.

Oddly enough, just recently I had heard of some kind of anti-trans movement within the gay male community. (I still don’t know why the articles/sites/etc. I have come across specifically state MALE, but maybe I’ll figure it out eventually.) I was just as appalled that these men were hurling insults back at trans men and women like they hadn’t experienced the same kind of bullshit.

This kind of interfighting really sets me off – from either side.
So, for all those concerned out there – why can’t we just get along?
I’m curious to hear your thoughts.