It’s been a rough few days. I’m currently traveling on the Acela to New York for an awards show (my company was nominated for an award by PR News Magazine), and I’m a little shaken by the news coverage I’m reading right now. Apparently tales of me getting my ass kicked are circling the globe through various newspapers and blogs. I was particularly disturbed by the New York Daily News culling status updates from my Facebook page and the New York Times calling my mother in an attempt to contact me (It upset her because she didn’t know what was going on). I’ve been contacted by what seems to be every newspaper and television station in New York. Apparently this is a big story there.

Images from Saturday, September 25 at Phasefest, an annual Queer music and arts festival dedicated to the development, exposure and interaction of queer and queer-allied musicians and artists, both national and international. The quality of this year’s (three days) performances was exceptionally high.

The Washington, DC-based Ganymede Arts, which focuses on LGBT arts programming, is staging the famous musical about the cluttered minds and well-intentioned hearts of those who embody the modern family. The play also uses the AIDS crisis of the 1980′s as a symbol of how tragedy ties the frayed strands of family, regardless of time and context. According to Ganymede, “Falsettos is a universal story of the modern day family. It focuses on a man named Marvin who leaves his wife and young son to live with another man yet ends up alone. Two years later, Marvin is reunited with his lover on the eve of his son’s Bar Mitzvah, just as AIDS is beginning its insidious spread.”

This is a concert recap of shows by Louisiana artists Trombone Shorty, Anders Osborne, and Tab Benoit, that took place this weekend (August 13-14, 2010). This is the first submission by TNG co-founder Ben Carver in nearly two years.

Attribute to BenHe was spiritually and psychologically abused by his family and then later in life by people motivated more by money and power than friendship and love. He was worshiped and despised, and likely died unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone. A cautionary tale, yes, but despite what conservatives and general haters say, Michael was more than that. He was someone who made you dance and do so with a smile. My hunch is that those who don’t understand the importance of this fact don’t know how to follow a beat.

Maybe you see him standing on the platform and decide to stand next to him, even if it made more sense for you to board the train on the opposite end of the walkway. You’ve recognized each other on many mornings and you feel close because of this, and you wonder if he feels it too.

The conception of “the beach” is framed in the minds of most as a place where life is generally better, where men diminished by the demands of the savage inner continent can be restored and rejuvenated. Despite this escapist notion, a weekend on the Delaware coast captures much of the same ambiance as a summer weekend in DC.

Last week I avoided the crowds and toured the tidal basin just before sunrise and took some good photos of the cherry blossoms. It’s too late now, but next year I highly recommend that you push yourself out of bed, fix a thermos of coffee, bundle up, and haul someone you like to the Jefferson Memorial. No one is out there except photographers and the odd couple snuggled on park benches, and it’s a great way to spend the morning. It was hard to get out of bed at 5:30, but walking the perimeter of the basin in the crisp dawn air before the world is awake energizes you for the rest of the day. I felt like I took a mini-vacation in my own backyard.

Last week was a big deal for gay equality. Iowa and Vermont made gay marriage legal and DC decided to honor gay marriages from the states where they are currently legal. I’m pleased about this, but reaction did elude me for a couple of days until I heard young Evan Jeter testify before the Vermont legislature on behalf of his two moms. I was in my kitchen preparing food for my boyfriend when I heard him speak passionately in front of a room full of adults, many of which disagreed with him:

Evan Jeter Speaks the the Vermont Legislature(Click to Listen)

I’ve marched in protests for gay marriage, engaged the opposition in debate, and even helped start a failed non-profit focused on achieving marriage equality. I did all these things because of civic duty, but in my heart I didn’t give a shit. Marriage has always seemed like a gift meant for someone else, a party I would rather not attend. It’s a feeling I can’t quit. Yet, when I heard Evan Jeter speak, I was moved. Since then I’ve thought about the future arc of my life, the sacrifices and pleasures of commitment, a boyfriend that sticks around, and a perfect little boy who held the hands of his two dads while walking through Thomas Circle on my way home from work. These thoughts fill me with questions I can’t answer.

Maybe you see him standing on the platform and decide to stand next to him, even though it made more sense for you to board the train on the opposite end of the walkway. You’ve recognized each other on many mornings and you feel close because of this, and you wonder if he feels it too.

You don’t want to speak to him, but you think about where he might be from, where he goes when he ascends the escalator, and what his bedroom looks like when he leaves it in the morning. Maybe you crowd in to a rail car, and as your bag gets caught in a closing door a cute brunette with perpetual five o’clock shadow reaches out and pulls it free. He makes a joke or engages in small talk that hangs in the air with no place to go, so you both just smile and enjoy your manufactured innocence. Maybe as you squeeze through the semi-permeable membrane of stoic commuters you find yourself standing next to a preppy young man holding a coffee cup. You catch him staring at you and he looks away. As the crowd shifts between stops you are squeezed together, and you both reach for an empty spot on the overhead handrail. Out of necessity you face each other, a foot apart, each of you with an arm raised in leverage. He looks away but you examine the details of his face, the knot of the tie he wears behind his v-neck sweater, the way he likes his barber to trim the hairline at the base of his neck, and the erection that seems to be forming behind his trousers. Each of these experiences ends the same way. One or both of you walk through metro’s open doors, and you leave each other with something gained, shared, and undefined.