SLIDESHOW: JMG Pride Party

Last night's JMG pride party (and marriage celebration!) at the Gramercy Theater was LOTS of fun. Promoter Chip Duckett staffed the room with a small flotilla of leggy drag queens who kept the booze and nibbly bits flowing, but my favorite part was when the JMG cookie trays went around the room. (See above.) Reportedly, I'm not as bitter and cynical tasting as you might expect. I met readers from all over the country, as well folks from Singapore, Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa. Huge thanks to all for coming out! Hit the slideshow below for lots of groovy faces. Full-screen versions here.

TONIGHT In NYC: Free JMG Pride Party & Marriage Celebration With Open Wine Bar & Legendary Drag Performer Jackie Beat!

If you're in Manhattan tonight, please consider joining me and fellow JMG readers for a special Pride Party in the private lounge at the Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23 Street. Beginning at 10pm we'll have an open wine and champagne bar courtesy of Barefoot Wines. Slurp! Come celebrate one of the greatest victories in LGBT history!

AND the first 20 people to respond to this email: JMGParty@gmail.com will start the evening with free tickets to the new show by legendary drag performer Jackie Beat, Pray Away The Gay. (Enter the discount code "JMG" for $18 tickets if you don't make the freebie cut.)

I'm looking forward to seeing lots of you there!

JMG Reader Meet-Up Tonight At 10PM

After last night's visit to the Saloon, the consensus is to have tonight's JMG reader meet-up at the Eagle/Bolt, which is at 515 Washington Ave South. I'll should be able to get there by 10pm, based on what tonight's Netroots schedule looks like. Hope to meet some of you there!

Notes From Netroots

My blogging schedule may be somewhat erratic all this week as I attend the various lectures and seminars at Netroots 2011. Today I'm attending Mike Rogers's LGBT pre-conference, where most of your favorite activists, bloggers, and writers will gather. You can follow the goings-on on Twitter at the hashtag #NN11LGBT. By the way, I have very fond memories of the Minneapolis gay bar scene and we'll definitely put together a JMG meetup somewhere for this Friday night. I'm thinking Saloon?

JMG Reader Sean Chapin Convinces SF Giants To Create "It Gets Better" Video

JMG reader Sean Chapin has convinced the San Francisco Giants to become the first professional sports team to create an "It Gets Better" video. Chapin's petition to the team on Change.org had drawn over 6000 signatures.

In an interview Monday, Chapin, a 35-year-old accountant who lives in San Francisco and works in Oakland, described the team's decision, announced Monday, as a "breaking bubble" that will have profound reverberations. Giants spokeswoman Staci Slaughter said that the team had been thinking of joining the campaign before Chapin started his petition drive, but that his efforts speeded things up. She said the exact content of the video and which, if any, players or members of the coaching staff will participate have not been determined. Originally, the plan was to produce the video for the Giants LGBT Night home game in August, Slaughter said, "but now we're trying to get it done sooner than later."

Congratulations, Sean!

Blogger Outage Update

Some of yesterday's posts have magically reappeared, but sadly your incisive and thoughtful comments have not. Boo, hiss and all that jazz.

Daily Grumble

For those unaware, Google/Blogger experienced a global outage for the last (approximately) 24 hours, taking down tens of millions of sites and doubtlessly losing them zillions in ad revenue. For now, things appear to be working. You'll notice, however, that all of my 25 or so posts from yesterday have vanished. We'll see if they reappear. Thanks for hanging in there.

JMG Blog Year Eight Begins

Today is the seventh blogiversary of this here website thingy. As is tradition for today, here is my very first post.

April 27th, 2004

I was born and raised in rural North Carolina.

My fondest childhood memory is of playing in the dense, acrid, poison fog that was belched out by the county mosquito control truck during its daily dusk-time trip down our dirt road.

The cry of "Smokey! Smokey!" would fly up and down Nine Foot Road once the first faint sound of the pest control truck's generator was detected in the distance. Trailer screen doors would slam open and kids would pour into the street for ten minutes of gleeful, giddy, mad dashing around in the thick white clouds of DDT. We would smash into each other with full force in the blinding swirls and just scream and laugh hysterically, pick ourselves up and start running again. Parents had not a whit of concern about their children playing directly behind the spewing pipes of a pest control truck. In fact, NOT being allowed to play in the poison fog was often held out as potential punishment for misbehavior.

I think this explains a lot about me.

I appreciate all of you being here for these last seven years. Help yourselves to some cupcakes and punch. Please don't let the cat out.

And onward to JMG year eight.

Quote Of The Day - Sen. Ruben Diaz

"If the affront to my personal safety wasn't enough, it was embodied in an article that was so poorly researched. The two factual errors come to mind: first of all, if as you say my chief-of-staff is gay, no one has bothered to tell her. Also, if any of your readers are interested in attending a counter-demonstration, they shouldn't bother taking your directions to gather at 181st Street expecting the end of our rally there, I and the thousands of New Yorkers who believe in respect for human life and sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman will be found praying near the Bronx County Courthouse at 161st Street and the Grand Concourse. It's so sad to see people in journalism abuse their positions, but it's outrageous to see how the editors of the Village Voice use their editorial discretion to facilitate and encourage homicide." - New York state Sen. Ruben Diaz, responding to a Village Voice blog post in which a commenter made a death threat against him.

RELATED: On May 15th Diaz, who signed the above letter "Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz," will stage what may be the largest anti-gay rally in state history. A similar rally in 2009 brought over 20,000 Hispanic evangelicals to midtown Manhattan, most of whom arrived via out of state church buses. LGBT groups have noted that Diaz' rally is scheduled to conflict with NYC's annual AIDS Walk in order to diminish counter-protests.

ALSO RELATED: Please do not leave comments making even the most idle of threats of physical harm or property damage against any persons or places. Longtime readers may recall that in late 2009, anti-gay and Christianist websites launched a campaign against JMG, claiming that readers were making "terrorist threats" against supporters of Proposition 8. Please contact me via email if you see any threats or calls to violence and I will dispatch them at once. Our enemies are reading every word you write.

On Those Banner Ads

Several times a day I get emails objecting to some of the banner ads here on JMG, which as I always explain are often triggered by the content of my posts. For example, if I mock Crazy Eyes, there's a good chance you'll see an ad for her reelection campaign or whatever. If it makes you feel any better, the same thing happens on wingnut blogs, where you're just as likely to see an ad for the ACLU or whomever. So please, enough with the screen shots, folks.

Today In Useless Trivia

This here website thingy is presently running at about 1.7M - 2M pageviews per month. As you can see above, Mac owners are highly overrepresented among JMG readers, which I'm sure has something to do with y'all being all artsy and shit. Pageviews via iPad have gone up tenfold in the last couple of months, a trend I expect to continue. I do find it rather fascinating that over 10% of you are here via handheld devices.

Boston Pops Announces Judy Garland YouTube Sing-Along "National Choir"

The Boston Pops writes us today to invite JMG readers to participate in a Judy Garland tribute. Post a YouTube clip of yourself singing Over The Rainbow and you may be featured in their "national choir collage" to be played at Boston Pops performances all this season.

To pay respect to the shared cultural heritage of the American Songbook, the Boston Pops is asking for video submissions of fans singing “Over the Rainbow” for inclusion in a video collage to be shown at Boston Pops performances throughout the season. Voted number one on the RIAA and NEA’s “Songs of the Century” list, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” is an American Songbook selection that unites generations and ties the 2011 Spring Pops Season together—from the Opening Night Judy Garland tribute to the finale “Triple Crown” performance celebrating America’s Heartland. The signature Boston Pops sing-along has long been an audience favorite, so this year the orchestra is opening the sing-along to a national choir. Participants of all ages can submit video of themselves singing “Over the Rainbow,” by adding a video to YouTube and emailing a link and contact info to overtherainbow@bso.org. Videos will be featured on the Boston Pops YouTube channel, on the Boston Pops website, and at Boston Pops performances throughout the season. All video submissions are due by Saturday, April 26, 2011.

There's more than a few of you that I'd love to see do this.

About Those "GetEQUAL" Comments

I've been getting quite a few emails complaining that someone purporting to represent GetEQUAL has been spamming the JMG comments with requests for donations. Last night I'm grumbled about it on Facebook, after which GetEQUAL's Robin McGehee immediately called to let me know that they are NOT behind these donation requests, which have been appearing across the LGBT blogosphere.

As it turns out, the spamming campaign is being done to discredit GetEQUAL, rather successfully so, considering how you folks have reacted. In fact, multiple sockpuppet accounts have been created on LGBT blogs wherein the same anonymous person or persons then attack GetEQUAL for daring to request donations. Pretty clever, eh?

According to numerous folks, this dumbass campaign is the work of "AndrewW", a prolific commenter recently banned on sites such as The Bilerico Project and Pam's House Blend. McGehee has tried in vain to learn of AndrewW's true identity, even offering a personal $500 reward to anybody that can out him. Some IP traces have placed AndrewW in Plano, Texas, but searches I performed on three different IP's left here on JMG turned up locations in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. That suggests that either AndrewW has cohorts or that he is adept at spoofing IP addresses.

Jump into the comments on this post with your tips and information about this issue, including clues (and there do appear to be some) to AndrewW's identity. Regardless of what you may feel about GetEQUAL's political tactics and mission, they don't deserve this bullshit. As I told Robin McGehee last night, we here at JMG have an army of of very, very smart IT bear geeks at our disposal. Fly, my winged monkeys! Fly!

Michael Hartney For AT&T

JMG reader and stand-up comedian Michael Hartney stars in the latest commercial for AT&T. Hartney's laugh in the clip has already been remixed.

Happy New Year!

Well, it was quite eventful year for this here website thingy. We saw over 15 million hits on just under 8000 posts where all you crazy kids left about one million comments. As a friend of mine likes to say, blogging is like a homework assignment that's never done but always due. But somehow after almost seven years of JMG, I'm having even more fun than ever, thanks largely to hugely participative nature of what we do here and all of your emails, tips, and hard work.

Here's just a few highlights from a very busy JMG year: We got some nice recognition from a major media personality for our part in bringing down a loathsome homophobe. We freeped polls, crashed the website of an anti-gay gubernatorial candidate, and sent uncountable minions demanding redress from corporations. We were thrust unexpectedly into the national media due to the hate speech of a Senate staffer whose equally homophobic boss was forced into a public apology. I made my network television debut and cohosted my first fundraiser for a U.S. Senator. For the cherries on 2010, I was humbled to be honored by the Ali Forney Center and to be named Best Political Blog by the Village Voice.

And I was lucky enough to meet hundreds of you great folks at JMG meet-ups in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, Philadelphia, and Montreal and New York! Whew! I'm grateful to all of you for continuing readership, for your unflagging commitment to equality, and for your, ahem, vociferous participation here in the JMG community. Tonight, I'll be raising my glass to each and every one of you. I'll be raising it a lot! Thank you all.

E-Z JMG Tips

It's time for our year-end E-Z JMG reminder for your lazy-ass convenience. You can subscribe to JMG via any RSS reader (my feed link is also in the left sidebar) and all posts will appear in full in your reader. (I recommend Google Reader for its simplicity.) New posts are also automatically pinged to my Twitter feed (click "follow") and I'll often post breaking stories to my Facebook fan page. And if you're one of them there iPhone people, you can create a JMG icon for one-touch access to the blog. You can probably do the same for the Android, I assume. Sit down, stay a spell. Nice folks are to the left and right of you. OK, maybe not to the right.

SLIDESHOW: Fort Lauderdale JMG Readers

We had a fantastic group of guys show up for our JMG readers meet-up in Fort Lauderdale/Wilton Manors. Thanks to everybody for coming out! I'll add some more photos from Father Tony's camera shortly. Man, I look tired after a week at Island House. Yikes.

FORT LAUDERDALE: JMG Reader Meet-Up At Georgie's Alibi, Tomorrow At 9PM

Just a reminder that we'll be having our Fort Lauderdale JMG reader meet-up at Georgie's Alibi in Wilton Manors tomorrow night at 9PM. My apologies that this one is on a weeknight, but anything else doesn't work with Xmas falling over the weekend. I'm looking forward to meeting lots of you tomorrow!

FORT LAUDERDALE: JMG Reader Meet-Up At Georgie's Alibi On Dec. 21st At 9PM

We'll be having our Fort Lauderdale JMG reader meet-up at Georgie's Alibi in Wilton Manors on Tuesday, December 21st at 9PM. Apologies that this one isn't on a weekend night, but that doesn't work out during Xmas week. I'm looking forward to seeing lots of you there!

JMG Reader Joe Shaw Elected To Huntington Beach City Council

JMG reader Joe Shaw, who comments here as "Another Joe," has been elected to the Huntington Beach, California city council and is currently the only openly gay elected official in all of Orange County. From earlier this week, here's his opening speech to the council. Congratulations, Councilman Shaw!