Tag: gay

Stephen Gately

On Saturday, Stephen Gately of Irish boy band Boyzone passed away from natural causes in Majorca, Spain. Stephen made big news in 1999 when he came out as gay to the British tabloid The Sun. He was a pioneer in that sense and possibly paved the way for others in the business to feel more comfortable with the idea of coming out. His coming out helped to dispel the idea that being out could ruin your career in the music business. I admire him for his courage.

Boyzone was recently making a comeback after splitting up so members could pursue solo careers.
I was never a huge fan of this group but I do have a few of their songs in my iTunes collection.

Unique Wi-Fi Name

On Wednesday night my friend Erin and I went to Kobalt (gay bar) here in Phoenix. While I was using my phone, I was alerted to the fact that a Wi-Fi network was available. Take a look at the screen shot below for the unique name they chose.

Milk Weekend #2

For the second week in a row, Milk made over a million dollars at the box office. The first weekend, the film was at 36 screens and pulled in $1.4M. This weekend, the screen count increased to 99 and the film grossed $1.6M.

It will be interesting to see what kind of numbers the film pulls this weekend as the film goes into wide release. That being said, I plan on seeing the film this Saturday. Anyone who is interested in tagging alone, let me know!

Work Benefits – Updated For The Worse

I work for a company that has locations all around the country with quite a few in the state of California.  When same-sex marriage was legalized in California, the question of how benefits would be provided to those same-sex spouses must have come up in company meetings.  Below are two photos.  One shows what our benefits package said for 2008 and the second shows what our benefits package says for 2009.  These are the “rules of eligibility.”

After consulting with a few people about this change, we are all wondering if people’s benefits are going to be taken away by this change.  Does anyone know?  Let’s say that I lived in CA and got married.  Under the 2008 rules of eligibility, I have a qualifiying event to add my spouse to my benefits.  Under the 2009 rules of eligibility, my marriage is no longer recognized by my company’s benefits package.  Does that mean my spouse would be dropped from my 2009 coverage?  Most likely.  How shitty is that!?

Miss Coco Peru @ Charlie’s

Last night a few friends and I went to see Miss Coco Peru at Charlie’s.  It was a special performance to celebrate the 500th edition of Echo Magazine.  The show began at 9:30 and the plan was to be there no later than 8:30 but, of course, that didn’t happen.  We arrive at about 9:15 to a full parking lot and had to find parking on the street.  Not a big deal but kind of a pain considering the street that runs by Charlie’s is a dead end.  Anyway, we get inside and it’s wall to wall gays.  Sylvia turns to me and says “There’s no way we’re going to make it close to the stage with all these people here.”  I grabbed her hand and we forced our way through the crowd until we were as close as we could possibly get.  I think Sylvia got the short end of the stick because she was stuck wedged up against a drunk drag queen (good times!).  Aynsley and her work friend Brandon arrived late (surprise, surprise) and ended up having to watch from the bar on a TV.  The drinks were cheap, the show was great and I think everyone had a good time.  Catch a clip of Miss Coco Peru below.

That’s So…

GLESN and the Ad Council have collaborated on a campaign called ThinkB4YouSpeak.  The campaign will seek to educate young people about the use of homophobic language through print, the web, radio, and TV.  In my opinion, the TV ads with the celebrities in them are pretty weak.  You can check them out at the campaign’s website which is linked above.  Below is one of the ads that will soon be showing up in magazines young people read.  Thoughts?