In a new short story, Corey gives glimpses of lives just out of their own grasps.

Pictured above is a typical door to a small warehouse space, but for us, it’s a little piece of history. Complete with a Frank Kameny signature ‘Gay is Good’ bumper sticker, this was the door to our first Washington DC LGBT community center, which first opened in March 1972. Sadly, this center founded by the Gay Activists Alliance closed this door for good just 18 months after it opened.

This was the first attempt to build a permanent home for the LGBT community of DC, but not the last. The current DC Center, of which I am proud to serve as Executive Director, represents our third time at bat.

I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if this center had survived its nascent period and had the chance to grow. Would we have a permanent home for our community? How would the center have grown over the years? Would we be like community centers in other cities?

DC ranks in the top five metropolitan areas in terms of same-sex couples according to census data, along with Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Yet, for some reason, we are the only one of these cities that doesn’t have a permanent home for our LGBT center. Each of these cities has LGBT centers with multi-million dollar buildings and multi-million dollar annual budgets ranging from over two million to well over forty million. Our entire operating budget this year, in contrast, is less than 10% of the lowest of these budgets.

We have a long way to go. But the proposed changes to the 2010 District budget, which would cut all city support for The DC Center by 60%, are moving us backward, not forward.

It’s a familiar story. And not even in the “personal narrative sense,” but in the “over-covered trend piece” journalistic sense. Pretty much every gay publication (including this one) has spilled some ink over the scattering of the gay people from one all-encompassing gay mecca (think Queer as Folk’s Babylon) to a more diverse array of smaller bars, mixed sexuality clubs and speciality nights

So yeah, I listened to too much Grandaddy and decided I needed to get out of town. A weekend trip to Pittsburgh fell apart last minute, so I found myself tagging along for the night on a good friend’s birthday trip to Baltimore.

Why I’m Never Going Back to Rehoboth

I suppose I wanted to be part of the cultural moment. To feel connected to the parts of this city I never bother to appreciate. It took a lot of willpower to head down there, on my own, into the swarm of tourists and impeding rain. But I felt unsatisfied by the trip. I never got out of my head.

Mark Doty is one of the poets I go to in moments like this, when I’m struggling to wrap my arms around an experience. “Human Figures” is one of those poems. It embodies that feeling of moving through a city and trying to fit the strange, private moments of others into your understanding. Masterfully, it succeeds— tying messy, disconnections together in a spectacular arrival by the end. It is also a mysterious poem, much more moving than I expect, each time I read it.

We ask the staff if they’ve ever gone on a “gay vacation.”

The Indie Rock Fag does San Francisco… on weed!

I’m currently sitting in a pie shop on the corner of Mission and 25th streets in San Francisco, California. I’m here on a short vacation centered around the wedding of a good friend. It’s interesting being back in this city, where I lived for 18 months or so during my time doing graduate work at UC Berkeley. I’m enjoying getting reacquainted with this city, remembering how to get from one neighborhood to another, discovering all the things that are the same, and those that have changed. I’m having a great time hanging out with fun people and eating lots of good food. So one might wonder if I’m asking myself why I had ever left.

On Friday evening, the unthinkable happened, something I hadn’t encountered in four years at Georgetown. And yet there it was in black and white: my email inbox was empty. No starred messages to return, no requests for which I needed reminding, no notes left unopened – nothing.

I was set to graduate in just three weeks with my future still very much up in the air. But though I felt more than ever that I needed guidance, I found myself staring for the first time at a totally empty slate.