As a fashion enthusiast, I always found shopping for clothes incredibly fun, but challenging because I always found things that I liked, but nothing that I ever loved because there was always something wrong with it, or something missing.

I made this phrase up after getting asked many questions that were completely ignorant (but well intended). Sometimes I think that folks just didn’t have adequate words while sometimes people were just mean spirited but humorous in and ‘did that really just happen?’ way.

A gay gym’s locker room, however, is not. It is a quotidian horror show of the oddest, most egregious, and downright bizarre behavior you will see in a gay man outside of a bar with a patio on gay pride. Locker rooms are all about blurring the public and the private – nudity and decorum, the ability to be dirty while getting clean – and some guys boundries of normal behavior falter when faced with such a dichotomy. Below is a list of 9 guys you might meet in your locker room. And as usual, this is meant to be a joke. If you’re going to call me an asshole or a homophobe or a crumbbum it’ll fall on deaf ears.

I’ve written about the intersection of queerdom and the workplace in a few other pieces. I haven’t had any new and noteworthy experiences in the workplace since, up until about a month ago. As I mentioned earlier, workplace turnover provides us with regular opportunities to come out to people. My organization recently hired a new employee, and I can tell for a fact that I don’t have to come out to him any time soon. Why? Because he’s gay. How do I know this? Oh, it’s so apparent.

In all my visits to Chicago, and now that I’ve permanently relocated here, my very favorite thing is visiting my niece. Although I majored in Education and I worked at Girl Scout Camp for many summers, I have
almost zero experience around babies. Seriously, almost negative amounts of experience. For example my niece is almost 13 months old and today I changed my first diaper.  As a kid I didn’t babysit — there weren’t a whole lot of babies around who needed sitting on, I had other sources of kid-income, and frankly I wasn’t really interested. I don’t know if I ever had a “baby doll” that I loved dearly – but in my mind I only hold sweet memories of stuffed animals. Now, I adore my niece in a way that I didn’t know my heart could bend, and making her laugh warms me in a creepy hallmark way — but it also reminds me of my complete and total lack of interest in baby-having. Why do people who choose not to have children evoke pity from others?

Dear Alcohol:

It’s time we had a little chat. We’ve been close friends for quite some time now. Over 15 years! Unfortunately, I don’t think I can keep up with you any longer. I love you to bits, but whenever you leave my system you leave me feeling really rough. It’s starting to bring me down a bit. Let me explain.

First off, your allure is so enticing. You come in so many shapes and forms, most of which are delicious. If you can recall, I first fell for you in the form of an amaretto sour. Remember those days, where I’d sip you down, under-aged, in a bar near GW’s campus where anyone with any photo ID could gain entry and partake of you? Remember how scared I was when that police officer walked in, and how he turned out to be picking up a carry-out order? That was great!

At my predominantly gay gym in the nexus of the Dupont/Adams Morgan/U Street homotopia, a guy can encounter some pretty strange things. Especially in the locker room. You can see penises in colors, shapes and sizes that you didn’t think existed in nature. You can smell the guy who thought it was ok to wear some kind of toxic coconut conditioner into the sauna, creating Mexico City air quality within its confines. And several days ago, you would have heard someone yell “NO! THAT IS NOT A CONSENSUS DECISION,” loudly enough to permeate the sleepy chamber of the tanning bed, to disturb the “ohm shanti”s of the third floor yoga class, and to function as ultrasound therapy and cure a heretofore stubborn Charlie Horse afflicting some hapless squatter.

Zack has been featured on Russia Today’s coverage of the National Equality March.

To be perfectly honest with all of you reading this, I really did not feel like writing this week. Yet here I am anyway, because writing down how one feels (even if it isn’t positive) is better than writing nothing at all.

Part of it was me not being able to pin down exactly what I wanted to write about. The other part was that I have generally just feeling kind of shitty despite the long weekend. I have pretty much been keeping a low profile lately. Homo/Sonic was my last big social outing, and I wasn’t exactly social when I was there.

I think a large facet of the issue could be with my confidence…The fact that I have very little of it.

No doubt you all have heard about the stabbings on Q Street in DC last week. When I read the news online later that day, I have to admit, while I was shocked, I was also not entirely surprised that an event like this happened.