Regardless of how much I look forward to seeing T, I was feeling anxious last Thursday. I hadn't slept much the night before. C and I had gone to a fundraiser called New York Loves Japan, a huge, crowded, hectic, loud sushi and sake event, and then for pizza afterwards with friends, all of which I enjoyed but it wore me the fuck out. I have always had to summon a special kind of energy to deal with crowds, and now that when I am in noisy rooms I only hear about 20% of what people are saying, even when they're only a couple feet away, well, I know I complain about it relentlessly but whatever, it's exhausting.

After a long cab ride in heavy traffic on FDR Drive, we got home near midnight, wound up, not ready to sleep. We watched American Idol and went to bed at about 1:30. I slept fitfully and got up at 6:30 for work. That afternoon, as I struggled to keep my eyes open, I nearly emailed T to cancel our date. But we had some Lizzie Borden business to discuss.

C decided to get Chinese takeout since he was alone for dinner, and the Chinese place is next to Nueva Espana, the Dominican restaurant where I was meeting T, so we left the house together. On our way out the door, C noticed the big plastic bag full of plastic bags that I had left in the hallway.

Dull.

To recap, I went to North Carolina for the weekend for a Super Bowl party with a military family who are for all practical purposes now my in-laws. Can we count the words in that last sentence that blow my mind?

Another reason that occurs to me, for not writing much about C. and me, is that I don't feel at all up to the task of describing just how good it is: I could never get it right or convey how happy I am or how wonderful this man is. Even going back and reading that last sentence disappoints me, how thin it sounds compared to what these days are like.

I will share this, though. I - the original love skeptic, the anti-marriage crusader, the free love tutor, Mr. Monogamy-Shmonogamy - have, for the first time in my life, made a vow to be sexually exclusive.

Somewhere, somehow, in my move from Austin to New York last fall, I lost a small file case containing every one of my "important papers": birth certificate, passport, Social Security card, and the title to my car, among others.

I should say, hoping not to sound too defensive, that, in spite of the instability that has characterized my adult life (or maybe because of it), I am not one to lose these sorts of things. I can't remember ever losing my wallet, or keys, or credit cards, or plane tickets (back when there were plane tickets). I haven't kept much stuff over the years, but the important stuff I don't lose. And by "important" I don't mean significant in any real sense. I just mean those things that are a pain in the ass to replace. So I'm baffled. I had the file case when I was packing in Austin, and I don't have it now.

This particular profile struck me as a perfect example of our contemporary (and, I would say, problematic) view of marriage not as an inextricable part of the social and economic life of a community, but as the culmination of a thing we call "falling in love."

Since the gays have been fighting to be allowed to marry, there's all this talk, from people opposed, about the "sanctity of marriage," and how allowing gays to marry sullies it. But the story of Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla illustrates beautifully that it is not the marriage itself that is sanctified but the love affair that is, or is expected to be, its basis. If marriage were sacred, then Carol and John would not have divorced their spouses and abandoned their children in order to marry each other, or, if they had, we as a community certainly would not have found it romantic and sweet.

The unstated assumption of this story is that when two people "fall in love," marriage is inevitable and ultimately good, despite whatever disruptions and emotional trauma it might cause everyone around them.

At the party I saw friends I haven't seen in years and friends I still see frequently. I was struck with that sense of destiny-in-hindsight that reunions conjure up. A great deal of what has been important to me in the last 25 years of my life -- relationships, my work -- I can trace to my friendship with Kristin and the opportunities she gave me to create music for theatre, something I had never done before.

Which follows in the long, noble tradition -- well, there's only one other that I can think of off the top of my head, but there must be others, right? -- of eviscerating songs to make them palatable for bland holiday records by the likes of Kermit the Frog (for real).

There was a black-out and a white-out Thursday and Friday as over a hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say enough is enough.

Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president's daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government's Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital's local daily, the Washington Post, which apparently didn't even think it was a local story worth publishing.

Right next to all the stories today about DADT being repealed was the more routine news that the House approved millions more (without debate) for the endless foreign wars for oil. Pay attention people. Is it really that hard to make these connections? Go fight your war. Go kill some people. But let's be honest. This is not your civil rights battle. They need bodies, y'all, and queer bodies will do in a pinch.

"Myth" is not the same as "falsehood." Myth is a narrative structure used to convey some of the deepest truths we humans can glean. Myths are not believed in but unpacked and lived.

At this point, the only thing that will redeem Glee is if, in the end, we discover that fundamentalist Christians are killing high school students and replacing them with perfectly lifelike robots whose sole purpose is to keep the gays happy with soulless, nostalgic entertainment while they take over the world.

Dear God, I know you don't exist because if you did you would spare me this reactionary nightmare we call gay culture in 2010.

Troughton lays out a sweeping hypothesis which rests totally on the (unstated, unquestioned) assumption that there is a natural state of man, which is essentially masculine -- a word he does not define -- and that, left alone, we will return to it. Feminine men are aberrations.

Troughton's problem is a poverty of imagination. He suffers from the white, middle-class disease: a tendency to assume that what is true of me is true of everyone. Instead of recognizing that there are many ways of being heterosexual and many ways of being homosexual, he tries to make a case that effeminacy in men is a twisted artifact of more fearful times, that men are normally masculine, and that "camp" (that is, feminine) behavior will disappear as we are all folded into one homogenous mainstream:

When I say typical, I mean that their pants were more than halfway down their asses, and while I'm on the subject I've been wondering: does the average kid on the street or the train or wherever, a suburban grocery store, does he know that homosexual men are flipping out inside at the sight of a young guy in, essentially, his skivvies in public? Does he know?

It's a real puzzle to me. I don't know how to interpret the trend except as some kind of sexual display, but it's their asses they're displaying. What? It's rebellious, so I like it. It makes regular folks blow a gasket, so I'm all for it.

But aside from the discussion of what it means for young men to be offering up their backsides to public view, what I find even more interesting is the sheer quantity of attention men are giving to their pants, constantly adjusting, tugging, touching them. Have pants ever before in their history been so interactive?)

Anyway.

I worked in the fine arts department on the first floor, selling paint and brushes, pencils, sketch pads, charcoal, etc. I brought home $125 a week -- I remember that number because when I left that job to work in the stockroom of the bookstore at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my paycheck went up to $146 a week, which felt like upward mobility. The rent for our apartment on 10th Street and First Avenue (a tiny, cheaply-renovated, rent-stabilized 2-bedroom) was 400-something split with my roommate and good friend JG, so I was spending about half my income on rent. I don't remember feeling particularly impoverished. We ate dinner at Odessa or Leshko's (the bill was probably under $10 for the two of us) once a week or so, and otherwise we cooked our meals at home and lived simply.

Part of my job at Pearl Paint was to unload trucks full of boxes of art supplies, so all winter I was in and out, from the bitter cold into the overheated store and back and forth all day. Just after Christmas I got very sick with a cough which got worse and worse until one night I was coughing so hard I couldn't catch my breath, and JG and a guy I was dating at the time took me to the emergency room at Beth Israel just up First Ave. We were there all night, and some time the next morning I saw a doctor who X-rayed my chest and told me I had pneumonia. He sent me home with antibiotics.