Canadian synth-rockers Young Galaxy are not your normal indie band. For one, at the time of this interview their lineup is Stephen Ramsay, his 8-months pregnant wife Catherine McCandless and their drummer Andrea Stone, who I was informed minutes before the interview is a lesbian. Combine this with their showstopping new record Shapeshifting and its strong threads of spirituality, transformation and elementalism and you know you’re not at an Art Brut show.

Here on TNG I complain. A lot. I complain with the frequency and intensity of a colicky infant watching an episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia during a Columbia Heights 4th of July. So I try to scale back. Be positive. Write about things I like. Music, TV, Frank Kameny. But I can’t always do it. Some things in this world are abominations, brown smears down the fresh white sheets of gay life, and I can’t keep my mouth shut about them.

Silicone-based lube is one of those things.

Last year, after he let slip an F Bomb at a fellow rocker, The Black Lips’ Jared Swilley cleared the air with me and sealed it with a kiss. This year, he gave us some of his time to discuss his dad Jared Swilley, an Atlanta megachurch pastor who came out to his congregation. Not because he was caught on tape, not because of any scandal, but because he wanted to make the world a more tolerant place by being honest. Jim is a hero to me for that — watch him come out and see if you feel differently — and Jared is also pretty damn awesome for being so open on the subject. The worlds of religion, sexuality and indie rock rarely collide in a positive way, so its nice to see it happen here.

When a band like this bows, when a massive hole is left in the collective musical lexicon, I refuse to believe that it means nothing. That is to say, this band was both important and “important” and they are going to leave a void. The musical one is obvious, but what about the culture? No one moved the so-called hipsters to dance like James Murphy did, and no one was as self-aware and questioning about what that meant than he. We can consider it the apex of late 00′s defining sound, and as I said earlier an apex is inherently followed by a fall.

Without Newsradio, we would be unlikely to have a show as propuslively slapstick, as perfectly timed and as overwhelmingly loony as the UK’s hit Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd. The show is ostensibly about Jen Barber, a technologically inept woman who lies her way into a job managing a glamorous office building’s filthy, basement-kept IT department and its deceptively-attractive resident nerds Morris Moss and Roy Trennemen.

I woke up on the morning of March 23rd, 2003, and proclaimed to my friends “I’m tired of being a virgin. Tonight’s the night.” In the resulting severe case of “careful what you wish for” (and I’ll spare you all the gory details) I had clumsy, obtrusive, lucky-I-knew-where-to-put-it sex with a gorgeous, smart friend of mine who really deserved a better way to end her Saturday night. Though much about the event was unfortunate (on my part, to her chagrin) the only thing you really need to know is that I ended up sleeping in the condom and then slinking into a woman’s bathroom the next day to throw it out.

Australian synth/guitar god Cut Copy gave Zack a couple minutes of their time at DC’s 930 Club and its worth watching. Members Tim Hoey and Ben Browning are both extremely well-dressed and willing to illuminate the process of their latest album Zonoscope. From the world’s created within, to the albums’s debt to the Beach Boys and what happened to the guitars (hint: they’re not as gone as you think) this is a fun interview from a band that is clinically proven to make people dance with every new song.

Few figures in pop culture, let alone straight female ones, have sparked in my the instant feeling of “You are so fucking cool” that ex-Hole/Smashing Pumpkins bass player Melissa Auf Der Maur sparked in me as a 14 year-old boy. I used to spend every Sunday night of my adolescent life parked in front of the kitchen TV, enjoying a quiet house and the chance to watch 120 Minutes on MTV. This is where I saw my first Rufus Wainwright video, for April Fools, and Ms. Auf Der Maur’s cameo within. She went at that moment from just a bad-ass redhead bass player to someone who also would probably be cool with me as an out gay man, and that really mean something.

The only functioning straight relationship on the show is between The Monarch and “Dr. Mrs. The Monarch,” and even they are bonded equally through love and villainy. In this universe, then, where men and women do not represent an ideal pairing, it only makes sense that queer characters and relationships are featured prominently.

Nose, hair and penis aside, I’d be hard-pressed to call myself a visible minority. My kind of intersectionality comes with much more privilege than most. In contemporary times, at least, and in this country, being Jewish is not a liablility. This wasn’t the case for my parents. Born in the shadow of the holocaust, at a time when casual anti-semitism was as prevalent as poodle-skirts, they had to build up defenses that last to this day.