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 all of the domestic news on the gay rights front, it’s sometimes hard to remember that news in this area is being made all over the world. And when you add to that equation the fact that the T is often ignored in favor of the LGB in most instances, it can be difficult to find the latest headlines in the trans rights movement throughout the international community. It turns out, however, at the moment, there’s a lot going on around the world, so let’s check some of it out.

Most people my age may think about future things like what kind of cool car they want to own, what kind of horrific names to impose on their future children, or what kind of fancy job they think they are going to automatically get after graduating college. Yeah, I consider some of those things and things like that, everyone does at some point, but they are not what tends to drift through my head and its imaginary plans. Personally, I like to think about what kind of badass facial hair I would like to envision myself having one day.

Of course it happened that the “Snowpocalypse” of the Mid-Atlantic started on my birthday; I’m just kind of lucky like that (I also had a pop quiz that day). I would say this totally tops the time a few years ago when my birthday fell on Superbowl Sunday a few years back.

Information travels quickly, especially in a tight-knit area. I’d rather get through this period with as less difficulty as possible…Does this make me a bad trans and queer person for remaining mostly closeted?

 It really hit me more than usual during a dogpile of frisky gay men on a couch at a New Year’s Eve party. No, I wasn’t in the dogpile. I was to the side, watching with amusement and the sting of longing. How I wished I could be a part of that easy intimacy, to be desired and accepted without question in the community of gay and queer men. I sometimes feel as if I am just some token anomaly to be tolerated, not just “a guy” or even “the short, awkward lad with glasses”, but “the transgender dude.”

This month Seventeen magazine published an article titled “My Boyfriend Turned Out to be a Girl”. The article portrays Sheri, who dated a female-to-male transman named Derek (which means ‘he is a he,’ not the offensive ‘he is a she’). Once Derek was outed as trans, Sheri depicts him as a deceptive liar. The article features other girls’ stories of “total betrayal” from a boyfriend. Examples of ‘total betrayal’ listed include: a drug addict, a pervert who cruises craigslist looking for casual sex, or an older man who knowingly pursues a girl young enough to be his daughter.

The Gossip’s Beth Ditto and Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste, for example, have emerged as two of indie music’s most visible gay musicians. Droste traffics in beautiful (if soporific) CSNY psych-folk and Ditto does such thorough justice to the stylings of Page and Plant that her band should consider buying rights to the name Lez Zeppelin. Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga may have their place, but the more “gay music” breaks from its reliance on dance-floor edifice the more I feel that individual gay people can do the same.

The songs below are featured because they are either quality songs by out gay artists, or straight-penned songs that I feel have gay themes worth bringing above the surface. What unites them is they provide a window to the past, queer or otherwise, that is too often missing in coverage of contemporary gay culture. This list is highly subjective and by no means comprehensive, so feel free to leave suggestions and additions in the comment box.

In all honesty, I was planning to write about something completely different today. What changed is that trying on my new binder I almost got trapped and feel like I almost dislocated my shoulders trying to get out of it. You know how you try to put on an old sweater to see if it still fits, but it gets stuck over your shoulders and your arms are immobile over your head in the sleeves? It was like that except 10 times worse.

I might have fucked up with this package of cheap boxers (Fruit of the Loom, oh yeah) that I bought yesterday from my local Target. They might size too big. Granted, I did pay $7 for the pack and am trying to shrink them a bit in the dryer, but still I feel kind of stupid. At least these weren’t meant to be sexy underwear by any means (unless you dig baggy knit boxers in colours like teal, gray, and navy).