Courtesy of the Saint-At-Large, today’s swag giveaway is two tickets to their official post-Pier Dance party at Pacha featuring DJs Stephan Grondin, Jonathan Peters, and Junior Vasquez. The Saint At Large, gaydom’s premiere dance party for over 28 years, presents CHAMPIONS – The Official Afterparty for Dance on the Pier. Heritage of Pride, the non-profit organization founded to produce New …

“The Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest gay-rights group, recently announced plans to spend at least a half-million dollars to defeat the California Marriage Protection Act. What a waste; gays and lesbians have far more urgent needs. The Golden State constitutional amendment poses no substantive threat to them – it will take nothing away from same-sex couples but the word “marriage.” …

Yup. New York City Opera has commissioned American composer Charles Wuorinen to write an opera based on “Brokeback Mountain,” a love story about two U.S. ranch-hands that won three Oscars when it was turned into a movie. The opera house’s spokesman Gerard Mortier said in a statement on Sunday that Wuorinen had accepted an invitation to compose an opera based …

New York Magazine has posted an excellent dissection of “who still dies of AIDS, and why.” By the time [Mel] Cheren learned he had AIDS [in 2007], he was already suffering from a rare, drug-resistant pneumonia, what infectious-disease specialists refer to as an opportunistic infection, and he had lymphoma, an AIDS-related cancer that had spread to his bones. Within a …

Continuing its expansion of LGBT rights, Cuba has announced that it will pay for sex reassignment surgery for any citizen that qualifies. The move is the latest in a series of changes implemented by President Raul Castro since he succeeded his elder brother, Fidel, in February. Raul Castro’s daughter, Mariela, heads Cuba’s National Center for Sex Education, which strongly backs …

Colton Ford lends his bod to Cyndi Lauper in this video shot at NYC’s Splash Bar. Meanwhile on the dance chart, Lauper’s collaboration with Rich Morel rockets into the top five. Will this be Morel’s 6th number one as a remixer/producer? The highlight of last week’s True Colors show at Radio City for me was Lauper’s performance of Set Your …

Via the Independent (UK): A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared. In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department …

World famous pregnant man Thomas Beattie, now in his 8th month, has revealed that he and wife are expecting a girl – and that the couple plans on having more children. “I’m 36 weeks now and almost due but I feel fantastic. Every day Nancy and I think about how we just cannot wait to hold our daughter for the …

JMG reader Kurt sends us this photo of a bear contingent at the pride parade in Boquerón, Puerto Rico this weekend. Kurt says that the pride events in Boquerón draw bigger crowds than in San Juan. Yesterday the Puerto Rican Day Parade took place here in NYC, drawing millions and stopping traffic on the Upper East Side for most of …

Via USA Today: Jeff Friedman and Andrew Zwerin were high school sweethearts on Long Island. After college and graduate school, they returned to New York to Rockville Centre. When they adopted Joshua, now 4, Friedman quit his job as a lawyer to be a stay-at-home dad. Despite deep roots in New York, they will fly to Los Angeles this month …

Manhattan is a pretty miserable place to be when it gets this hot, innit? Be glad this only happens a few times a year.

I’m spending the weekend in the Poconos with Chris and Aaron at Hillside Campground. Site 62, stop by and say “Hello.”

The wacky sad deluded “ex-gays” are having a conference in Orlando this weekend and have peppered the city with their dumbass billboards. (But this one is a parody done for this blog a couple of years ago by musical theatre star Steve Schalchlin.) Hey, why did the “ex-gays” pick the same weekend as Gay Days at Disney World? Hmmm. Anti-“ex-gay” …

Via Queerty, in this amusing viewer-created film from Current TV a kid has to break the news to his dads that he’s straight.

Cubicle life can cause people to lose their minds, as amply demonstrated by this man going berserk in his office. And here we thought the Norwegians were so placid. There’s no audio, so provide your own sound effects. And here’s an audio version (with fuzzy video) of the same incident caught on a coworkers cell cam. And as for this …

– Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s musical Bounce will play the Public Theatre from Oct. 28 – Nov.30th, with a possible extension through the end of the year. Tony winner John Doyle will direct. – A new movie version of Lerner & Lowe’s My Fair Lady is coming from Columbia Pictures. Keira Knightley is in talks to star. – Via …

Earlier this week, my shot of Columbus Circle prompted some commentary on the makeover of 2 Columbus, now home to the Museum of Arts & Design, so here’s a better shot that I took from the fifth floor of the Time-Warner Center. And below is what it used to look like. Before the makeover, the building was listed by the …