On Wednesday, I went into NYC to go to my high school. My old German teacher had gone to the alumni office and gotten emails of all her former students, because this year would be the 20th year that she had run the high school's Oktoberfest cabaret show. Since this year would be particularly big, she wanted some alumni to come back. I was one of 5 ( Read more... )

From the newsticker on NYT:

"Alaska's first gay marriage took place in Barrow, the northernmost community in the United States. It is an Arctic coast town so remote that it cannot be reached by road and yet the gays still got there."

(with a little add on from me)

To celebrate after a grueling weekend and Monday of grading final exams in time to submit senior grades by the 4pm Monday deadline, we bought tickets to see a staging of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With Thirteen Moons at the Yale Rep tonight. It's a story of a man, Evan (Bill Camp), in love with another man, despite not being gay. The ( Read more... )

From the obituary of Richard Adams: In April 1975, Mr. Adams and his partner, Tony Sullivan, wed in Colorado, one of a half-dozen gay couples granted marriage licenses there by the Boulder County clerk’s office. Though Boulder County stopped issuing such licenses almost immediately, the couple’s marriage, which lasted until Mr. Adams’s death, was ( Read more... )

I forgot to post something after the election last week: Congratulations to Tammy Baldwin, the Senator-elect from Wisconsin. Not only is she the first openly gay person to be elected to the U.S. Senate, she is the first math major from Smith College to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

Needless to say, I'm happy that the gay marriage vote happened this past week. I was worried that it wouldn't be put on the voting schedule before the end of the session -- a purely procedural way to block the bill without having to register an actual vote (and I had little doubt that it would pass after the second Republican revealed his support, ( Read more... )

Something you would never see in France, but we already encountered in Buffalo:

A young gay man with a goatee, black and red shirt and jacket ensemble, and the look of a serious D&D storymaster. The clincher for me, however, was the large gold C3PO pendant hanging from around his neck.

From here“[Republican NY State Senators] won’t let me address them,” Mr. Motley [a prominent same-sex marriage opponent] groused, before returning to huddle with a group of local pastors. “God has defined what marriage is, and the government doesn’t have the right to redefine it ( Read more... )

New Haven, Connecticut has a lot of hidden secrets to offer. For instance, the quaint neighborhood of Dixwell, which is not too far from the Young Men's Institute.

This is such great news. The situation had been forced since the legal grounds for upholding the law were weak. The government would either have had to show ( Read more... )