My cousin James was mysteriously absent from Christmas Eve dinner this past December. We would learn that he had surprised his girlfriend with a cavalcade of packed suitcases and two tickets to Rome, where he would ultimately propose to her in a romantic little cranny of the Coliseum. I overheard Aunt Lucille telling my mother all about it, my mouth full of kielbasa and a half-empty glass of homemade krupnik in my hand. I thought about the previous Christmas I had spent in Japan with Guillermo, how we had proposed to each other at the foot of Mount Fuji, and how we never even told anyone about it.

The USS Iowa, rebuffed by San Francisco because of the military’s anti-gay policies, may find a home in southern California.

All week, we’ve been bringing you coverage of the National Equality March. This weekend’s march was something that was incredibly important for me; it was the biggest call to political action I’ve experienced.

I’ve mentioned in previous columns that while at school, I was lucky enough to have a great professor who really mentored me and inspired me to become much more interested and involved in the queer political movement. That professor was Melinda Plastas, and she was not only a great influence on my academic career, but also a great personal influence. She taught me that having a clear and thorough understanding of what the queer community has done in the past is incredibly important–without understanding what queer activists have done in the past, our own work can fall short.

In the early ’50s, Joe Shuster, a one-time boy genius who had, with his childhood buddy Jerry Siegel, created the greatest of American fantasies, Superman, found himself in a difficult middle age. He was always a shy, badly-dressed fellow, even at the height of his celebrity. A cop once mistook him for a vagabond. After a court case in which he attempted to salvage some of the riches Superman had wrought from DC Comics, he found himself destitute. At one point, he was reduced to working as a delivery boy. When he made a delivery to DC’s offices, the boss recognized him, slipped him a 20-dollar bill, and told him not to return. Now this small man from Cleveland was drawing for an illegal underground magazine, Nights of Horror, distributed by the brutal mob boss Eddie Mishkin, the “Sultan of Smut.”

The story of Joe Shuster’s great fall is told and his work from this little-known period is collected by the comics anthropologist Craig Yoe in his new book Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster (Abrams Comic Arts, $24.95). But before delving into Shuster’s story, we may want to ask about the worth of the work in the volume. I tend to be of the belief that great art is pornography that outlasts the death of its author. And I guess, based on that shallow definition, Shuster’s Nights of Horror illustrations may very well obtain. But is it all a mere cultural curiosity or accidental genius?

This week NPR showcased a story from its Radio Rookies program where Victoria Cruz told the story of her and her girlfriend being voted “Best Couple” at their South Bronx high school, though she is worried about coming out at home. NPR’s title, “For Some, Coming Out at School Easier Than Home,” struck a chord with me, because that has always been my experience.

While I didn’t grow up in the South Bronx, I grew up in the Deep South–New Orleans, LA. And, unlike Victoria, I never had the courage to be out in my small, all-girls, private high school. But my best friend did, and she and her girlfriend went to prom together and were met by complete acceptance by the other students and the school’s faculty.

Minnie Bruce Pratt is a gay who writes poetry about being gay— a perfect candidate for this column! And with Sunday being the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, it seems like the perfect time to share some of Pratt’s work. So why do I hesitate?

This week, I’m swamped with term papers and exams. So as the last of my 19 years of consecutive education comes to a close, I’ve chosen to reflect upon an adventure I made back in the summer, when it was still warm and sunny outside.

Washington tends to be a more transient city than most in America. As a result, many of us move here from other regions with little knowledge of the ground upon which we are standing. Sometimes, however, we can find traces of the past which give us clues about what the Captial City was like long before we left our hometowns. History has long fascinated me, and I’ve always enjoyed finding little slivers of the past which remain in the urban fabric today. That’s why I was so excited to finally go on a tour of one of Washington’s most complete historic artifacts. I invite you to take the trip with me.

In high school, I imagine we read “What Happens to a Dream Deferred” because the language is straightforward, it is useful to illustrate the use of simile, and it’s historically important. I imagine many people in my generation can almost recite it from memory.  But there’s something rote about that way I’ve learned his work. And I realize I’ve ever considered any of Hughes poetry removed from the oddly canonized place his work lives in elementary education.

When I think of Walt Whitman, I think of December 1, 2005, when I went to an event that billed itself as a dramatic reading of “Song of Myself.” That night, it was raining, but the auditorium was packed.

On the side of the stage was a fiddle and a folksy guitar. Generic nature photos flashed from a projector on the wall behind the stage. In front of the photos, twenty people dressed in black sat in folding chairs, awkwardly getting up and moving around to read different parts of the poem. Music, photos, and performance, at once? It was only going to get worse.

When the black-clad people on stage weren’t shuffling their way up to the mics, they stayed at their chairs, standing and sitting like gophers and shouting their lines in a dramatic cacophony. Every time there was a segment about “negroes” a Black guy would go up to the microphone to recite it. Whenever there was something about children or babies, a very short Asian girl would get that section. Really clever, guys.

But the thing that really tweaked me were the sections about love.

The column stands alone amongst the trees. People come from thousands of miles to make pilgrimage to its nearby peers, but this object is easily overlooked. Unfortunately, the plight that it represents also went unrecognized for forty years. The gray pillar is less than a year old, but the controversy surrounding it goes back decades.

Over two thousand concrete stelae rise in a wavy, undulating pattern steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Meant to create a sense of uneasiness and to show a system fraught with disorder, Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was completed in 2004. It’s often referred to as the Holocaust Memorial, but that name is not accurate. Officially, it only memorializes the Jewish victims of the Nazis.