By: Brandy Black

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“Speak The Truth” was the theme of the Human Rights Campaign “HRC” gala dinner in Los Angeles.  It was a star-studded evening and I had a chance to chat it up with some of the fabulous celebs that walked the red carpet before the big event.

Michael Manning- Real World DC

B- How was coming out on National TV on Real Word DC?

Michael- “Think of the hardest thing you’ve ever done and have a million eyes on you while you’re doing it.”

B- Any advice you’d give LGBT youth?

Don’t let other people tell you how to live.  You’re born a certain way…just be who you are, show the world that we’re your doctors, your lawyers, we teach in your schools, we drive your busses, we’re just as boring as anyone else so give us the same rights.

Jillian Michael’s from The Biggest Loser

This is a cause that I’m very much behind.  I think it’s extremely important that we support this.  I actually don’t even know what to tell you; it doesn’t even make sense that we’re even here right now, but I’ll do whatever it takes to be supportive.

B- Is this your first HRC event?

Jillian- Yes it is and I’m here to support Suze Orman and KT, her lover; they’ve been tremendous friends and mentors of mine.  I’m very excited.

Kathy Griffin’s mom-

We need marriages to last – I think everyone should get married.

Louis Van Amstel- Dancing With The Stars

Meredith Baxter

Suze Orman and Portia Di Rossi dashed past to the gala right before dinner began.  The room was full of beautiful people laughing and toasting.  Suze Orman opened the evening  by saying,

I find it strange that we need a campaign for all the people in this room, including me.

The crowd cheered.

Over the clinking of dishes and bubbling champagne there were many moving speakers throughout the evening.   Joe Solmonese, the President of the Human Rights Campaign, gave an eloquent speech about how far we’ve come and where we are going.

We are the aggressors and they are the victims, that’s why the Perry trial couldn’t be televised…we are winning…changing laws is what makes life better.

US Senator Barbara Boxer received a standing ovation when she stepped onto the stage.  She spoke in support of the crowd before her with a determination to repeal “don’t ask don’t tell”.

“It is a privilege and honor to work with the HRC.  It is a powerful force and they ask just one thing from their country –to be treated equally.”

She went on to explain that we need to focus on the victories. “After more than 10 years of debate, the Matthew Shepard bill got signed into law.” She talked about ENDA- Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
“I’m going to pick up the baton and do everything I can until ENDA is signed into law.”  Barbara ended her speech  with,

marriage equality is a civil right, plain and simple.  If you make a commitment to honor and love, that’s marriage isn’t it?  I stand for marriage equality strong in my heart- from me to you.

Chelsea Montgomery-Duban, age 16, gave a speech full of laughter and tears.  She has been attending the HRC events with her two dads since she was 9 years old.

“My parents didn’t feel the need to run off and get married right away, but it was important to me. You see, they are both listed on my birth certificate, they are both my parents, but they were strangers in the eyes of the law…my family should have every basic right that is given freely to other couples in the country.  No one has the right to tell them who they love.  My generation isn’t going to sick back quietly and allow people that we love to suffer discrimination.  While I can’t vote yet and I am just getting used to driving, my drive for equality is unstoppable.  This is why I love HRC.”

Kathy Griffin rocked the house with screams and hollers.

“Hello gays and people that support them!”

As expected, she cracked some funny jokes, pitched her “My Life on the D List” show, and boasted about her dress for the gay men in the audience, but after the laughter she brought the house to tears when she began talking about the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy.  She read letters from a gay man in the military and his partner of 10 years regarding their feelings on the matter.  Their words were heart wrenching and a reminder of how truly unfair it is that gays and lesbians are serving a country that they believe in, yet that very country doesn’t believe in them.

Betty Degeneres (Ellen’s mom) introduced Portia de Rossi for the Visibility Award.  Portia explained that she felt awkward receiving an award from the HRC when they do so much and thanked them for their work on her behalf.

“I was an extremely closeted actress for the first few years of my career…I wouldn’t even drive down Santa Monica Blvd because I was afraid people would see me through the window and wonder what I was doing in the gay part of town.  Back then I thought it was no one’s business that I was gay…but over time I came to realize how selfish that is and how important it is to be visible. Because acting, while it’s a fine profession, isn’t really an important thing to do with your life compared to what you can do to advance acceptance and equality in society.  Despite the fact that TV executives tell me that being gay is no longer an issue, it will remain an issue as long as actors continue to hide their sexuality…there are only a handful of actors…brave enough to come out…”

She went on to explain how Proposition 8 changed everything for her;  she found herself having discussions with “so-called ‘liberal people’” about marriage:  “I developed a knack for turning any question into a discussion about gay marriage.  For example, ‘what are you wearing?’ I would say ‘a wedding ring’…talking really is the key ingredient to changing people’s opinions into real lasting change.”

It was a beautiful evening full of truth and a celebration of being one’s self.  So to those of you hiding in the shadows, come out, come out, wherever you are.  Cheers.

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By: Ann Brown

The setting for my dreams is always outer space now. I float, free-falling in the vast darkness, surfing uneasily on undulating gusts of wind. Sometimes I am dressed in a space suit, but a dorky, homemade  space suit – the kind we used to make at summer camp during “Astronaut Week”: A helmet made from half a Clorox jug covered in aluminum foil, a mask of swimming goggles and a tissue paper-covered Slinky for an air hose.

Note to self: it’s your dream. Why must you scrimp, always going with the schmatte bargain wardrobe in it? Spend a little on the damn spacesuit; you’re worth it. Get Edith Head to design something fabulous. But nothing tucked in. I am an “apple” shape and – dream, shmeam, subconscious, shmubconscious -Mama don’t do tuck in.

I haven’t had an Earthly dream all week. I close my eyes at night and slowly hover above the ground, surfing away from my spaceship, drifting into the nothingness. I am lost, untethered, in both my waking and sleeping lives.  This morning, I stood in front of my bedroom window and wrote please help me in the frost. The “p” in “help” started to melt and ran down the glass to the sill in little frost tear drops.

I have been cut off from Facebook.

On Monday morning I received a notice that due to being phished, FB has disabled me. If you think that term, disabled, sounds a tad violent, let me just tell you that it pretty much describes the situation perfectly. I feel as violated, as pulled apart and subsequently, as marginalized as if Facebook thugs had come directly to my home in the middle of night, yanked me out of bed, wiped the Regenerist Night Repair serum right off my face, broke my bite guard in half, poked holes in my Breathe Right strip and left the toilet seat up. And then, oh cruel coda, came back to force me to tuck my pajama top into my pajama bottoms.

Where is Victim’s Assistance when you need it? God, I should have voted for the Republican Sheriff and Attorney General when I had the chance. What good are the bleeding heart, soft on crime Democratic  candidates to me now? I want revenge.

I got no Facebook wall to write on. No Facebook fan page. No daily Facebook salon with my girls. (Do you even remember me???) I got no Facebook Pathwords game at which – with a score of 1620; 1620! – I was number 2 of all my friends. No Facebook Scrabble at which I regularly get my ass kicked by my LA cousins and various online friends. Has someone started a “bring dr. strangemom back to Facebook” Facebook fan page? Did anyone even join????  How will I know what is going on in the world without my friends’ status updates? Is Barbara taking her dog for a walk today? Did Susan get my private message about Gary? Is Erika having salmon for dinner??? I will never know. I mean, you can’t count on Newsweek to report the essential shit.

If my blog had a soundtrack, right now it would be playing, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town”. I don’t know why.

It is so fucking weird, being cut off from Facebook until they determine if I can be invited back. I imagine that before I am released of my persona non grata status I will have to take some sort of Karen Silkwood cyber shower, you know, scrub me down to my private password, put all my belongings in a plastic gray bucket, take off my shoes and my earrings and pass through the scam detector. With my luck, Facebook probably has one of the new “I-can-see-you-naked” machines which will surely set off alarms as they notice that full frontal me, nekked, bears absolutely no resemblance to the from-the-neck-up photos of my profile pictures, taken, oh, a million years ago. That’ll put the nail on my coffin.

For now, I am stuck here; waiting, as it were, in the hallway outside the Facebook Principal’s office, not knowing if this is a suspension or an expulsion. And I didn’t even do anything wrong, although my son suspects I missed a few early signs that I was being phished. It’s all so unfair. The last time I was in this situation was high school, when I was a part of a group that took over the Administration Building in order to end the war in Viet Nam. (Are you snickering at our hubris? Really? Well, did the war end or not? I’m just asking.) We were one scary, badass militant gang back there at Ulysses S. Grant High School. Stormed the Administration building, yes we did. Locked the motherfucker administrators out. I joined arms with Nina and Katherine and Davia and Rina and Allan and we sang “We Shall Not Be Moved”. Or maybe we sang “Sweet Baby James” because, let’s face it, that is a totally better song. We sang and chanted “get your asses out of classes” and we roared our terrible roars and gnashed our terrible teeth and we laughed our scary badass laughter when we got the word they were calling the pigs on us. Well, actually, we opened the doors and quickly filed outta there when we got the word they were calling the police, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I am bereft without Facebook.

And never mind the upside, which is that I suddenly have found, like, a gajillion more hours in the day to get shit done. In the time it used to take me to come up a pithy status such as, “Ann is…..going to get shit done today”, I can actually clean out the droppings of petrified lettuce and cabbage from the refrigerator crisper, wash all of Molly’s forty thousand dog beds which are scattered throughout our two thousand square foot house, add my name to the MoveOn.org and Humane Society petitions filling up my email Inbox, schedule a mammogram, cancel a colonoscopy,  and run out to get a bowl of Pho from that hidden joint in Southeast. Not that I did any of those things. I’ve mostly just been sitting here at the computer, robotically typing in my old username and password over and over again, and despairing at the “you have been disabled” notice I get every time. It’s like pushing the “replay” button on those old answering machines just to keep hearing, “you have no new messages”.

Thank God it’s Girl Scout cookie delivery week; otherwise, there’d be absolutely no reason to go on living.

If you are on Facebook, tell the others I have a new post out. Speak of me kindly.

I’ll be out by the spaceship, catching the waves. Cowabunga dudes.

By: Amy Forstadt

I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of TV talk around here lately, so I thought I’d weigh in with a handy-dandy guide to popular kids’ tv shows. And when I say “popular,” I mean “ones we watch at our house.”  Enjoy!

Arthur Arthur is the most emotionally evolved aardvark there ever was. I find his company extremely soothing. He’s deliberate, thoughtful, and more mature than most people I know. Arthur may not be the life of the party (leave that to D.W.) but he’s the one who’ll make sure you get home okay and hold your hair while you puke.

Blues Clues Like my seventh grade boyfriend, Blues Clues started out really irritating but eventually won me over through sheer persistence. Sure, no grown man should have Steve’s haircut, Blue makes weird guttural sounds like a choking dolphin, and the salt and pepper shakers have some sort of illicit relationship. But still, it’s kinda cute.

Bob the Builder The anthropomorphic construction vehicles kind of give me the creeps, but aside from that Bob the Builder is just fine with me. I enjoy watching him ride the tension/anger/guilt rollercoaster when his father comes to visit. And as for his obvious attempts to woo Wendy, well, let’s just say her cement mixer might spin the other way, if you know what I mean.

Calliou Oh how I hate that little mofo. This goddamn show is so fucking wholesome it makes me want to yell obscenities at the tv as loud as I possibly can. Also, have you ever seen the one where they go to the beach? No-one in the family has nipples! Goddamn wholesome no-nippled Canadians. I won’t expose my son to that kind of element.

Curious George I am mesmerized by Curious George. But it’s not because of the antics of everyone’s favorite monkey. No, it’s the apartment. That fabulous, fabulous apartment. What does the Man in the Yellow Hat do that he can afford such an incredible place? Those arched windows! The doorman! The rooms and rooms and rooms! It’s probably a rent-controlled, pre-war building on the Upper East Side. Some monkeys get all the luck.

Dora the Explorer This one I don’t get at all. Crappy animation. Some sort of video game theme with no context whatsoever. A random band of little creatures that shows up and plays music for no reason.  But someone, somewhere must have read that this is the toddler power trifecta, because my kid is hooked.

Elmo How do I love Elmo? Let me count the ways. First of all, the shows are entertaining and adorable. Second, all the characters have New York accents. Do you know how funny it is to hear a muppet refer to itself as a “mon-stah?” And third, most of Elmo’s cohorts seem Jewish, gay, or both.  It’s awesome. There’s even an episode with a big, fruity tiger who just can’t contain himself during the final song and yells out “And remember! Stripes go with everything!”  I dare you not to love it.

The Wiggles Bunch o’ freaks. You’re on your own for this one. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Happy watching everybody! Or happy reading books or playing educational games or mandarin-flashcarding or whatever it is you non-tv families do.  If you need me, I’ll be singing along with Elmo.

Amy also have a podcast The Because Show

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By: Ann Brown

This is our four-year anniversary, Molly and me. As you know, I adopted her from the animal shelter on the day Michelle Kwan dropped out of the Olympics so the Winter Olympics will always remind me of my dog.

Speaking of which, where IS Michelle K? I haven’t seen her in the stands at the Pacific Coliseum, so unless she is being hidden from the camera by the obscuring presence of that ridiculous bong-totin’ galoot, Michael Phelps, I guess she’s not in Vancouver. I hope she is okay. I hope she is doing better – four years later – than Molly is right now.

Poor Molly. She is not doing great. She’s old, lame and incapable of sleeping for more than two hours at a time. I am back to living the life of a new mommy – up every hour, stumbling and lurching my way towards the back door to let Molly out and then falling asleep on the kitchen counter while I wait for her to come back. Not that I put my newborns out in the back yard to pee while I slept on the kitchen counter, no sireeee. I stayed awake back then. And had headaches all the time. And I was very bitchy. Very bitchy. In fact, Robin once said to me, “I guess the beauty of you being a bitch every day is that no one will ever accuse you of having PMS.”

And now, almost thirty years later, here I am back in the world of the sleep-deprived, only without a baby. In fact, come to think of it, I am the one who sleeps like a baby these days, not Molly:  I wake up every two hours, cry, and then eat until I fall asleep again. All night long. If my pants get any tighter, I am going to have to take to wearing those stretchy Onesies with the snaps on the crotch.

It’s totally fucked up that at the two stages of life when everyone around us most needs their rest – babyhood and infirm old age – we are the worst sleepers. And exhausting the people who are in charge of our very survival is probably not the smartest thing to do. Robin once put that red-hued, gum-numbing medicine in our son’s nose because he was too tired to keep his eyes open while taking his turn soothing our teething baby.  He did it, like, four times during the night and when I saw the poor kid in the morning, he looked like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.  My friend Julie once got her baby’s toe fungus medicine mixed up with the pink-eye medicine.  You’d think that squirting toe fungus ointment into your baby’s eyes would sober one into paying closer attention, but it just so happens that a few years later, Julie ignored her daughter’s complaints about boogers bothering her nose -ignored her for days – before realizing that the booger in there was actually one of Julie’s pearl earrings.  Oh, and my friend Wade once left his newborn baby in the car after dropping off his wife at a restaurant before he went searching for a free parking place. Which was five blocks away. Which was where he left the car – and the baby – and sprinted to the restaurant, ready to enjoy a nice dinner. Until his wife asked him where the baby was. I bet after that, it wasn’t such a nice dinner with the wife.

I was halfway through a vitamin C tablet at four o’clock this morning while waiting for Molly to finish peeing outside before I realized that it wasn’t a vitamin C tablet at all; it was seven Wheat Thins with Laughing Cow cheese on them. Okay, well, I guess I knew about that, but who can blame me? When you are tired, you do not make good decisions.

I’ve been through this before. Blacky was an old cat, and for most of her life she needed nothing from us. The kids found her when we lived in LA – she was a stray; self-sufficient and completely independent. It was a relationship that knew no demands. When we moved to Oregon, Blacky came with us and adjusted to her new life by settling herself in the upstairs of our new house and never setting foot outside – or downstairs – again.

By the end of her life, I hated Blacky.  I loved her, too, because sometimes even after she’d shit on my carpet and barfed up a bloody hairball in my bed, and even after we had to have all her teeth extracted  (to the tune of a thousand dollars) so all she could eat was baby food, I could still look at that dainty cat face of hers and feel my heart stretch out and soften. But I was exhausted all the time and she cried all night long. She needed a spoonful of food at 3 AM, and then another spoonful at 3:30 and then she pooped and then she meowed that mournful, primal meow for about a half hour.

I used to lie in bed and listen to her calls. Murr-ahow it began, in a soft guttural clearing of her throat. Murr-OHWHW it crescendo-ed, louder and more alien, but I pretended not to hear her. Once, I swear, she jumped on my bed and over-articulated her meows right into my ear, the way we speak loudly and slowly to non-English speakers. Me-ow. Do-you-understand-this, you idiot American human? ME-OW.

A few years ago I complained to my mom about how Blacky was taking over my life. “It’s not worth it, you’re exhausted” she said. “Put her to sleep. You need your sleep.”

I was aghast. My mom just laughed.  “Oh, come on. Stick a little poison in some brisket and give it to her. She’ll eat it right up.”  I didn’t know if she was joking or not.

But either way, I still make sure my mom eats the first bite of her brisket at Passover. I mean, I used to keep Mom up a lot when I was a baby. She might be holding a grudge.

By: Tanya Ward Goodman

Last night, when I opened the door to greet my daughter as she arrived home from school she looked up at me and said, “When our friends and family members die, my heart will break open.”

She is five and a half going on thirty.  Part Hello Kitty, part Sarah Bernhardt.  She is devastatingly sad and ragingly angry and her heart (broken or not) is huge and juicy and filled with passion.  She is clearly the child of my womb.

I moved aside, to let her walk into the house.

“Did something happen to make you sad?”  I asked.

“Just thinking about death,” she replied, skipping into the dining room and doing a little twirl.  “Look what I’ve got.”

She held out a white paper tub.  Beneath a circle of mesh on the lid a mass of small black bodies moved together — shiny black legs and abdomens and an occasional flash of enameled red wings.

“Ladybugs!  They’re ready for an aphid buffet.”

As Sadie made plans to set the ladybugs free in our cauliflower bed where they would decimate the population of aphids, I went back to stirring the risotto on the stove.  My kids have been to several funerals and memorial services.  They are interested in cemeteries and know what a casket is for.  Sadie will often tell people that we have three pets and three graves, which, though slightly disconcerting, is true.  We’ve lost an old cat, a hamster and a fish and we’ve still got an old cat, a hamster and a fish, so chances are this loss is not going to stop.

My dad died just over seven years ago.  When Sadie was three she could not stop asking, “So your Dad is dead, right?”  At first this question brought tears to my eyes, but after awhile, I kept answering and answering and it opened the way to a lot of long conversations.

“Yes, my Dad is dead,” I said.  And Sadie and her brother wondered what happened next.  We talked about heaven and reincarnation and the possibility that this life, here and now, is all we’ve got.  Theo likes the idea of heaven because he wants to know he will continue to move around and Sadie hopes there are angels because they have beautiful wings.  We talked about how dinosaurs might be reincarnated into people, but how they most likely evolved into birds.  We all think it’s nice to imagine that there is a kind of observatory where our loved ones can train telescopes on our lives and gaze at us for a few minutes.

The risotto finished cooking, my son hopped out of the bath and Sadie returned from the garden smiling.  She’d tipped out her little bucket of live things and now she was set on making a necklace for the cat.  Sometimes the workings of her mind are so fluid, it’s hard to keep up.  My dad was this way.  I hope he’s watching.

By: Cyndi Whitmore

So I took a plunge from one of the skyscraper high diving boards of parenting today and talked to Tyler (and Halle) about huffing. I’ve been dreading having to do this for so long… you just never want to have to be the one to tell your kids about the bad stuff. But if he doesn’t hear about it from me first… I don’t want to think about where and how he’ll learn it. He’ll be in Jr. High next year. He knows that drugs are bad, and says all the time that he won’t do them… he understands that there are legal and illegal drugs, etc. But huffing is something he might not understand is a ‘drug.’ I’ve been getting these newsletters from www.theantidrug.com (that’s me, btw, in case y’all haven’t heard the PSA’s), and today there was a link to a newspaper article about a couple boys in Michigan that died (Second Bay City teen dies after ‘huffing’ accident). I took it home and had him read it, and we talked about what it means to get high… he thought it meant get taller. Can you just imagine, my little baby who is always complaining about being short and wanting to grow, being offered a way to ‘get tall?’ He’d sign right up. So I explained that sometimes people use drugs to get high, and it’s kinda like people using alcohol to get drunk. And I told him how I hope it never happens, but that some time someone might ask him to get high by breathing some fumes, or smoking something, or taking a pill, or sniffing something into his nose, or injecting something in his arm with a needle. I told him how sometimes kids think that it’s not dangerous to breathe in fumes from paint or gas because you can buy it at the store, but that it’s still really dangerous… it makes you do stupid things like light cigarettes by gas and cause fires, and the chemicals can hurt your body so bad that you can be sitting at home and just fall over dead, even if you’re only 14 years old, or 12 years old, or 10, or 8. I told him that getting high can make you hurt people, and steal from people, even people you love like your family. I told him how if a woman is pregnant and does drugs it can hurt her baby so bad the baby can die, or be born with something wrong with its body, or with brain damage that would make it hard for the baby to learn in school. He wanted to know how I learned so much about drugs, so I told him my introduction to the concept (Elvis) and then he looked at me like I was stupid and commented, ‘you know I’m going to think about this tonight when I’m trying to go to sleep’ and I told him I wished I never had to ever tell him anything scary or bad, but that I have to make sure he understands how dangerous huffing is. But he’s sleeping sweetly now, so hopefully ‘Pirates Past Noon’ was what he was thinking of after I turned out the light.

Cyndi Whitmore

By: Ann Brown

I may have mentioned I have this little, er, quirk wherein I imagine kicking the butt of a man near me. As I said before, I believe this is solely a function of wondering about my own strength and not a sign of any latent violent tendencies within me. Still, I am not unaware of the reaction my confession evokes. I see you scooting your chairs away from me as you read this.

And I feel a need to explain myself.

I read somewhere that the most important thing women over fifty can do to keep themselves healthy is stretch every day. As a woman over fifty, I generally discard the advice I read because so much of it  centers around changing my negative attitude about aging and, frankly, my negative attitude about aging is all I have left of my youth so I want to hold on to it.

But this stretching thing got me to thinking. They’re right. We rarely stretch ourselves. We don’t use all we’ve got.

After The Revolution, when we all live on my commune in side-by-side yurts and grow hemp, stretching ourselves to our limits will be a regular part of daily life. I mean, just chopping wood and folk dancing to the water hole will fulfill the 10,000 steps a day quota that the makers of New Lifestyles pedometers warn we all need to stave off premature death. And I bet our children would be perfectly well- behaved because after a day of using up all they’ve got, they’d be tired. In fact, we’d all be tired. The good tired. Not the tired I usually am, bitchy and distracted by afternoon, licking the morning coffee grounds from the compost pail for a buzz, and updating my list of transgressions the world has committed against me (most recent: water in my ear that is making me dizzy when I look down to type. Ow.)

I took a lot of dance classes in college. Mexican couples dances, Indonesian Gamelan dancing, Greek dancing, every day was filled with dance classes. (Note to the college bound: be an Ethnology of Non-Western Music and Dance major. Totally rocks. And when you graduate, the world will offer you a smorgasbord of jobs. Bitchin jobs. Like, once I sang Jewish folk songs in a maximum security prison in Tracy, California. Try to land that gig with a degree in, say, medicine.)

What was my point?

Oh, right. Dance classes. At the end of a day, I was wonderfully, satisfyingly, deliciously spent. I slept like a log (as opposed to these days when I sleep like a baby: wake up every two hours and cry until I eat). I believe that when we move to the commune, there will be no fighting, no bitchiness, no whining, no interrupted sleep because we will all – children, adults, parents – be well used up. Also, because we can smoke our hemp tunics when life gets stressful.

But in modern life, here in suburbia, we live such contained lives. We have to share armrests in movie theaters. We have to refrain from jumping onto the moving clothes rack at the dry cleaners and taking a ride. We are not even allowed to finger wrestle prospective employers when they shake our hands. And we are left with a bunch of leftover energy that has nowhere to go. We are left wondering just how strong, fast, loud, obnoxious, fearless and mighty we can be.

So I check out the men in my classes. I take in their upper body strength, the contour of their forearms, their overall look and I fantasize bopping them on the nose, kneeing their groins and, occasionally, swinging them over my head and twirling them round and round like Brutus used to do to Popeye before the can of spinach magically appeared.  I have no reason to feel threatened by men. I’ve never been in a situation that would warrant a need to hurt them or get away fast. Well, once a guy forgot to pay me for a parenting consult but he remembered as soon as he got home and he came back. With a ten dollar tip, as apology. No need to break his kneecaps.

My point being, there is no rational reason to fantasize about this. And, let’s be honest, unless a man was in the middle of a serious heart attack, I’d probably not be the victor. I mean, I am no weakling but my 45 minute daily stroll in the park with my dog and the occasional foray into Curves isn’t gonna get the job done against a forty-something dad. I suppose I could just sit on him and that would be that, but I am too vain to use my weight as a weapon because what if he lived, and told everyone, “she fucking sat on me and she weighs a ton. I thought I was dead” and then the papers would sleuth out my actual weight and report it and, yikes. Yikes.

Still, I crave real-life experience. Tae-Bo with TV Billy Blanks in my bedroom is like practice- kissing your pillow, you know? So with my late-fifties around the corner, I am going to do a little more stretching in my life.

I believe I will begin by reaching over my computer to that glass of wine.

Ow, my ear. Damn it.

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Ann Brown

By: Tom Butts

Okay, I find this odd, maybe even offensive.  Sean Hayes, who played “Jack McFarland” on Will & Grace is gay as…well, gayer than a three dollar bill, right?  When I saw this headline I thought to myself, wow, now you’re going to tell me that Richard Simmons is gay.  You want to know why this pisses me off, well; I’m going to tell you either way.  I equate closeted people with those Republican hypocrites that take wide stances in toilet stalls at Midwest airports.  Seriously, how can we move forward and just be part of every day life if people pretend they are someone they’re not.  My rant continues below…

After years of refusing to directly answer questions about his sexuality, Sean Hayes finally sits down with a major gay publication to reveals that he is indeed gay. Some quotes from his interview in the April edition of the Advocate:

“I am who I am. I was never in, as they say. Never.”
(What the f*ck does this mean?  Sorry, still a bit pissed off about him at this point.)

“Why would you go down that path with somebody who’s done so much to contribute to the gay community?” he asks. “That was my beef about it.  What more do you want me to do?  Do you want me to stand on a float?  And then what?  It’s never enough.”
(The level of arrogance…ugh)

“I feel like I’ve contributed monumentally to the success of the gay movement in America, and if anyone wants to argue that, I’m open to it.  You’re welcome, Advocate.”
(Because he played a gay character…WTF…thank you Sean, you have liberated the GLBT community…)

Okay, I’m finished with my comments.  I’ll just end by saying, “he’s no Ellen Degeneres”.  RANT COMPLETE.

By: Jillian Lauren

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The guys saw the tour out with a hometown show at Irvine Meadows. We watched from the side of the stage and Tariku picked up a classic move from the folks in the front row. He’s now pumping his fist with the best of ‘em. He had extra time to practice, as we stayed to watch Blink’s first few songs. By that time, people were giving me the I-can’t-believe-you-have-your-baby-out-after-10pm stink eye. But they don’t know my baby. He was thrilled to party all night then sleep in until 9, splayed out across the pillows with a bottle still clutched in his hand and a dog on either side of him.

Here’s a pic of the gang backstage. That’s me, T, the very lovely Nicole Amdurer (Josh’s babymama and soon-to-be bride- someone finally told those nice kids that they were living in sin), Josh Freese, and Jen and Pat Wilson. The best part of the evening was seeing Jen out and about, crowned with soft, blond hair and facing her very last radiation treatment the next day. I feel privileged to have been a part of her life over the past year as she kicked the ass of some really awful breast cancer. I learned a lot from her about honesty and courage and how being the perfect mother doesn’t mean always being perfect.

Sayonara, tour. Next stop….. is a secret. The new album comes out in October.

By: Brandy Black

I couldn’t have said it better than Elizabeth Gilbert in her most recent book Committed…

“Interracial marriage was illegal in the United States until fairly recently.  All of this changed in 1967 with the case of a rural Virginia couple named -poetically enough- the Lovings.  Richard Loving was white; his wife Mildred was black.  When they decided to marry in 1958, interracial unions were still illegal in the commonwealth of Virginia as well as in 15 other American states.  So the young couple sealed their vows in Washington DC instead but when they returned home after their honeymoon they were swiftly apprehended by local police.  The fact that they had married each other at all rendered the couple guilty enough to haul off to jail…

The Lovings moved to Washington DC with the understanding that if they ever again returned to Virginia, they would face a jail sentence…

The Supreme Court in 1967 sealed the legality of “the Lovings” union in a 9 to 0 ruling.  At the time, I must also mention, a poll showed that 70% of Americans vehemently opposed this ruling but the courts were morally ahead of the general population on this matter…

You won’t be surprised will you if I now take a few moments to discuss the subject of same sex marriage…what I can say about the subject is that legalized same sex marriage is coming to America in large part because non-legalized marriage is already here.  Same sex couples already live together openly these days, whether their relationships have been officially sanctioned by their states or not.  Same sex couples are raising children together, paying taxes together, building homes together, running businesses together, creating wealth together and even getting divorced from each other.  All these already existing relationships and social responsibilities must be managed and organized through rule of law in order to keep civil society running smoothly…I recognize that conservatives are worried that homosexuals will destroy and corrupt the institution of marriage but perhaps they should consider a distinct possibility that gay couples are actually poised at this moment in history to save marriage. Think of it!  Marriage is on the decline everywhere, all across the western world.  People are getting married later in life, if they’re getting married at all, or they are producing children willy-nilly out of wedlock, or (like me) they are approaching the whole institution with ambivalence or even hostility…So why not let them in?  Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic ne’er-do-well, heterosexual deadbeats like me.  In any case, whatever happens with gay marriage, and whenever it happens, I can also assure you that future generations will someday find it ridiculous to the point of comedy that we ever debated this topic at all.”

This is an excerpt that I couldn’t resist sharing.