Getting advice from a Dom? Be careful what you wish for.

What do The Gossip, Grizzly Bear and now Vampire Weekend have in common? Well, yeah, since the latter’s keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij came out you would be correct if you said “they are all bands with out, gay members.” But the real answer I was looking for is that they are some of the highest-profile and most-loved indie bands playing in America today. And unless I am sorely out of the loop,hey have hardly been greeted with a loss of fans, dropped sponsorships or boycotts by the religious right. The earth beneath your local record store did not open and swallow passerbies with an assortment of writhing, pink tentacles. In fact, it would be pretty safe to say that no one really fucking cares.

Each week, I’ll be picking a particularly good shot from the TNG Flickr pool to give one of our contributors some special attention. This week: John Foster Cartwright.

As adults, we feel more comfortable swearing, telling potentially inappropriate jokes, and risking offending our peers, but in a classroom, educators have to responsibility to provide a learning environment free from fear and hostility.

Schools should be safe spaces. And I believe that homosexuality should be discussed openly and honestly in schools. This doesn’t mean talking about “gay sex” or about young people engaging in sex at all. It means that should not stigmatize gay parents of students, students who feel they may be LGBT, or students who support the equal rights of gay people, by keeping the issue quiet, unspoken, shameful.

I have been on the fence about coming to my college’s gay student group since the beginning of first semester.

…It is now the middle of second semester and I still haven’t made up my mind whether or not to really start attending. Personally, I don’t really like groups in general (people make me very nervous, a group of people I don’t know makes it worse), especially groups of my peers. However, it would be nice to maybe find some solidarity that is more readily available than having to go the way into the city, and possibly make friends on campus.

With the recent attention and international backlash aimed at Uganda over the last few months, more and more Ugandan ex-patriots have come forward to fight against their government’s hateful policies. One such activist goes by the name Moses and you may recognize his voice from a clip like the one that played during an episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, which features a young man appearing at a press conference for an event protesting the National Prayer Breakfast with a bag over his head to protect his identity. Below, Moses shares more of his personal story with TNG.

Hello all. If you have been missing my drunken musings about music—because we all know a week without Driveway to Driveway is a bad week—the wait is over. If you didn’t know I had a column (as well as providing you your songs,and doing the colorful Weekly Music Roundups), well I do, and here it is.

Mom, I know you’re reading this.

Don’t worry everyone – you can keep reading. This isn’t some syrupy son-to-mother ode about how much I love my mother and how wonderful she has been over the years, from helping me come to terms with my queer identity when I was a self-loathing Evangelical Christian to working multiple jobs to support my siblings and I. I’ve done that many times over and I needn’t embarrass her with yet another public account of my cloyingly clichéd “my mother is my hero” bit.

Instead, I’d like to embarrass her by talking about my sex life.

If there is one stereotype of lesbians I’ve always hated, it’s the vegetarian one. I am very, very proudly not a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian all through high school (though primarily used as a dieting technique, not really a stance on animal rights) but quickly went back to my meat eating ways after my first rugby match in college. Also when I realized that if I wanted to eat in my college’s dining hall and didn’t want to eat tofu, it was going to be time to start eating meat again. After depriving myself for four years, I realized that meat was glorious. I made a few attempts to stop eating meat after that, but I would just quite literally forget that I was a vegetarian.

Brooklyn has never had lobster. How is that possible?! So, I invited him to dinner at the home I am house sitting at and I plan to wow him with my culinary skills. To start? A simple arugula, pine nut, and shaved parmesan salad with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. To end? Pate de Fruit in assorted tropical flavors. To drink? New Zealand S.Blanc from the Marlborough Region. Amazing? Yes, it will be.