I rarely read anything on the Huffington Post. I’m just a bit too conservative to buy into the liberal-leaning site. However, somebody posted a link to an opinion, and I got sucked in.

The Big Gay Chip on My Shoulder

Here are two different items that caught my attention:

I believe the fact that an atheist, who doesn’t believe in God at all, is allowed to enter into the holy land of marriage while a gay Christian is not, shows that this law is arbitrary. Are we to believe that anyone who doesn’t live their life according to the King James Bible isn’t protected by the same laws that protect those who do?

I believe that to deny this right to the gay population is to say to them, “this god is not your god and he doesn’t love you.” There isn’t one person who is against gay marriage that can give me a reason why it shouldn’t be legal without bringing God or their religion into it.

Amen to that.

I’ve been a fan of the San Francisco Gay Men’s chorus for a really long time. I first heard of them when I went to the Castro Street Fair in 1997. I was in San Francisco for the Lotus Developers Conference. That was my first trip to San Francisco and my first exposure to a gay men’s chorus. They had a booth, and I bought ExtrABBAganza, which had just come out.  A few years later, I bought Naked Man.  When I heard “I Come From Good People”, that was the moment I knew I wanted to be part of a gay men’s chorus.

I’ve been digging through some of my gay music and movies lately, getting in touch with my inner homo, and at some point today, I came to a realization: I’m incredibly fortunate.

Had I been born just a few years earlier, I would have been part of a generation of gay men who were losing friends at an alarming rate to the AIDS crisis. A big chunk of a generation was lost due to an epidemic that just ravaged the gay community. Ask anybody a few years older than me, and they can name the friends they lost to AIDS. So much of the gay movies and music deal with the loss of friends and lovers to AIDS. I came out in a time and place where I wasn’t exposed to that loss.

Don’t get me wrong. I lost a few friends. In fact, I lost a friend from high school to AIDS. The worst part is that I didn’t know until college that he had died. I had met a guy, and he had a picture over his fireplace, and I commented that I had gone to high school with Michael. That’s when he explained that he had died of AIDS. I hadn’t seen him in years, and knowing that I’d never see him again didn’t make it any easier.

Medical science has come so far in the past 25 years. Testing HIV+ is no longer a death sentence. Today, we celebrate the friends who are surviving and still with us. And we practice sex in ways that hopefully prevent the spread of this disease.  HIV and AIDS is still a serious threat to not just our community but the world as a whole. I hope that my generation and the generations to come don’t lose sight of just how awful this disease was.

That said, I think I’m in touch with my inner homo.

When I’m trying to stay focused, I’ll put something on my iPod that isn’t too distracting. Listening to the news on my Sirius receiver will certainly be a distraction.

Yesterday, I put it on my Pet Shop Boys playlist that grabs everything where the artist is the Pet Shop Boys, all 11.9 hours of it.

Wow.

Some of that music really takes me back to a really good place in my life. I used to listen to the Pet Shop Boys a lot when I was in my twenties. Yeah, we’re really talking so gay it hurts, here. There’s just something magical about that time in my life. It seems like I had no worries, no commitments, and my entire future was in front of me. My weekends were spent clubbing, sex was abundant, and everything was possible. I didn’t have to worry about managing my money nor my credit.

Sure, I’m totally romanticizing that era of my life. I had no idea what I was capable of back then. I wasn’t dealing with MS. And in retrospect, I was pretty poor. I made a lot of mistakes back then. My focus was a job, not my career. I trashed my credit. Today, I’m still cleaning that up. And I’m going to buy a house in the next couple of years. The friends I have today are real, not just bar buddies. And of course, I have Reggie.

Yeah, so gay it hurts.

The other day, I was at the ATM inside my bank and I heard a song that brought back some serious memories. The song was Captain and Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together.

This is the stuff I grew up listening to with my mom. I remember singing along with my mom as a little kid. Oh, she should have known I was gay then.

This morning I bought Captain and Tennille’s Greatest Hits from the iTunes Music Store.

Yeah, so gay it hurts.

So today’s events with my office crush got really interesting. Let me start from the beginning.

When I got into the office about 7:30, I got an IM from my coworker, Trish. Trish, I really hope you don’t mind my sharing this.

Trish: o
  m
  g
me: what?
Trish: Guess who broke up with his bf?
me: NO!
  NO!
Trish: yes!

It turns out that one of the women he works with came over to tell Trish right away that the couple had broken up. Over the course of the day, Trish let it to slip to his coworker that she thought somebody in the company had a crush on him.  And then later I got a message from Trish saying that he was up by her office. I was up there in about 6.3 seconds to ask Trish what she was doing for lunch, even though I was covering the helpdesk.

Now, he still doesn’t know that I’m the one with the crush on him. Well, he may have figured it out by the fact that I stopped up by Trish’s office a few more times than normal today. And he may have picked up on the fact that I stopped by to say hello to him after lunch.  I’ve never done that before.

As I told Trish, this is all so very high school. And you know what? It’s been a lot of fun.

My friend Tatjana commented a while back that office relationships are always a bad idea. She’s probably right. My company has a ton of them. We have a lot of married couples. But that’s getting WAY far ahead of everything here. I just met him last week, and it’s just a crush. And it’s been fun. Just like high school. 

The bitter old queen in me is reminded that he lives with said ex-boyfriend which always leaves the option of reconciliation. Still…

Has anybody seen the chemistry.com commercial where the guy looks at the girly magazine and says “Nope. Still gay.” They’re picking on eharmony.com for not allowing gay people.

That guy is good looking, and I’d give him some love.

I just downloaded another Barry Manilow CD from iTunes. This one is the Greatest Songs of the Seventies. They’re performed in a way that only Barry Manilow can do them. One of my favorites on this one is He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.

I know…. So gay it hurts.

I’m a big fan of the Big Gay Sketch Show on Logo. This is quite possibly one of the best skits they’ve done.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QNRO63vEm40

Sometimes it scares me to think that I’m part of the gay “community.” Maybe it’s just the company I keep.

I have been chatting online with this guy who just started school here. We met up today for brunch. He’s a really smart kid and pretty funny. He just moved here from the west coast.  It turns out that we have several mutual friends. On top of that, we have sex partners in common, too. That scares me.

I needed a couple of Barry Manilow songs for a project, so I downloaded Ultimate Manilow from iTunes.

Oh, god, I’m so gay it hurts.