Gay.com Personals (gay.com/personals/) – this site has a huge gay and lesbian personals community with over 8 million gay singles!

For years, gay.com has been rated the best site for gay, lesbian and bisexual online dating. The site is the oldest of the gay online dating sites and has developed a following of more than 3 million members. It now offers online dating as well as articles and information relevant to the gay community.

Introduction
Sometimes, the way that people talk about religion makes us feel like we have no right to it if we’re gay. That feeling hurts.. and the wounds go deep.

We had only a couple hours in Milwaukee and we were pretty tired after our 24-hours with the GSA conference in Madison. But what a treat it was to meet up with Nate and Joey, two brilliant guys who had a perspective on sexuality and religion we’d always understood but never heard articulated so well.

We came out when we were at the end of our teen years. Before those days, we were Straight. In other words, for us, being an adolescent meant being a Straight adolescent. We never really got to have relationships that felt complete in what could be called our “formative” years. It’s easy to be bitter over something like that, but we’re grateful that we at least came out before our twenties and rejoice in the fact that we feel like we’ve made up for lost ground.

The Power of YOUth conference was held on the weekend of November 17th and 18th in Middleton, Wisconsin. About 100 youth from area high schools convened for a lock-in weekend of community-building, friendship-making, educating, and action-taking. YGA was the keynote speaker for the conference.

We set up shop in one of the classrooms and interviewed conference participants as they streamed in and out of the room. At times there were heated shouting matches. At others there was heartfelt support and warmth. It was all good. There were some amazing heroes that worked to put this conference together, people who dedicated so much of themselves to making this a healthy, safe, positive, beautiful weekend for Wisconsin’s GLBT youth. A big Thank You goes out to Jason Rasmussen and GLSEN who invited us to participate. We wouldn’t have missed this weekend for the world.

We had the fortunate opportunity to visit with Video Machete in their ultra-slick headquarters in the middle of the Midwest’s largest city, Chicago. Video Machete is a fantastic organization that gives queer youth the chance to create their own media by learning how to film and edit short video movies. Check it out at www.videomachete.com.

There are so many important issues concerning young gay women, yet there’s such a glaring lack of media outlets and representation. Young gay women need their own media! We need magazines, TV shows, thousands more movies sorta like But I’m A Cheerleader but way better, and it won’t happen if we sit around and wait for it. We have to get out there and start something for ourselves. If you’ve got the drive, the determination, and the connections – and in the gay world connections are easy to make – go for it. Create a new media outlet for young gay/bi/trans girls. Start an email list. Do something! Get the word out. Get in touch with YGA and we’ll help you out as best we can.

On the day we drove from Northern Indiana back into Michigan, we had time to kill before we had to be in Kalamazoo. A few weeks before, we’d received an email from Bruce and Mario who run a gay café in Grand Rapids, an hour north of Kalamazoo, so we thought we’d check it out.

The thing is, we’d also received emails WARNING us about Grand Rapids. “Oh, thank God you’re not going up to Grand Rapids it’s a scary place!” “I’d be impressed if you braved grand rapids!” We were more than a little curious.

Kalamazoo has a cool name and an even cooler downtown, with beautiful glass museum buildings, churches, a park, theaters. We were surprised. The GLBT youth group in town meets inside one of the big churches. We were invited to interview people there and were surprised by the happiness of the crowd.

In Fort Wayne, we got a slice of Indiana life. Our friend Scott Mertz invited us to the Up The Stairs Community Center to meet with a group of guys from the Fort Wayne area. Scott ordered pizza and the yummiest breadsticks for everyone. Afterwards, Scott showed us the impressive Library at the community center and gave us some highlights of gay Fort Wayne history. Trust us, if there’s anything you want to know about homosexuality in Indiana, Scott Mertz is the guy to go to. Email us and we’ll get you in touch with him.

See those boys in the picture above!? You don’t wanna mess wif em. 🙂

So we’re sittin’ here in the Birthplace of the Republican Party, Jackson, Michigan. Woo-hooo! Hope we see Trent Lott so we can hock a big loogie in his face. Homophobic jackass.

In the last coupla days, we’ve seen a lot of Michigan malls in a lot of Michigan towns, and they all look the same. The roads leading up to them look the same, the same chain stores, the same car washes, the same oil stations, the same drug stores, the same Borders, it’s like you’ve never left when you go into another town.

Halifax has seven Universities, making it one of the most educated cities in North America. One of those schools is Dalhousie University, home of the Dal Tigers, and also home of DalOUT, one of the most vibrant queer student associations around. We joined the DalOUT gang at the Grad House, a campus pub which is the Place to Be on Wednesday nites. They even have Karaoke, which we hear some of the Dal students are stars at. Maybe we’ll tape-record an upcoming show and put it on the site next time we’re in town.