I’ve been thinking a lot about how I present myself to other people. I tend to sort-of explode at a person I’ve just met: lots of gesticulation, weird references, excitability. Part of me wonders whether my self-expression is a queer thing, that the explosion is a result of having kept stuff inside for too long. This week I wanted to run a sort-of test. I wrote to the TNG staff, “Ever had somebody you just met go “tell me about yourself?”

Complications aside, the activists with the most access to Washington, DC’s police have, from 2010 and into the present, developed a functional relationship with it.

In 2009, DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier cut the Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit down to four officers, and the unit’s core officers stopped investigating hate crimes like they once did. Activists got angry–but kept working with the unit.

Washington, DC’s mayor implied that he’d bring a once-beloved Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit of the police department back to full strength, following some demoralizing policy changes. Local activists who work with the unit say that isn’t going to happen.

When policymakers consider putting anyone other than heterosexual males in combat, such policymaking elicits this freaky protective reaction from right-wingers.

When I write about queer issues, I feel like it’s almost impossible to adequately explain what I mean. It’s hard to write clearly when you feel like every term has a caveat.

The Human Rights Campaign, with its fancy building evincing extensive resources, couldn’t squeeze ENDA or a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal out of the Democrats in Congress and the Executive Branch. But as I was about to be told, Log Cabin, preparing for Republican takeover of the House in an office suite, believed it could get more out of John Boehner and company.