Happy New Year, JMG Community!

Yet another eventful year has come and gone for this here website thingy, which hit the decade mark back in April. In 2014 we saw about 28 million pageviews on about 7000 posts on which you crazy kids left over a million comments. As I mention in this post every year, blogging is like a homework assignment that is never done, but is always due. Nevertheless, you all make it a lot easier with your emails, your story tips, and your encouragement.

Last year I noted that 2013 would be remembered as one of the most momentous years in our movement's history due to the fall of DOMA, Prop 8, and the advance of marriage equality into several more states. While we saw no such landmark rulings in 2014, the nearly unbroken avalanche of pro-equality decisions that swept the nation will certainly put this year into the history books as well.

I thank you all for your robust opinions and for making the JMG comments section the most lively in the entire homo-blogosphere. I'm happy to have met so many of you at JMG meetups and look forward to meeting many more of you over the next year. Tonight, I'll be raising my glass to each and every one of our flying monkeys. I'll be raising it a lot!

Happy New Year!

Yet another eventful year has come and gone for this here website thingy. In 2012 we saw about 23 million pageviews on just over 11,000 posts on which you crazy kids left over a million comments.  As I mentioned in this post last year, blogging is like a homework assignment that is never done, but is always due. Nevertheless, you all make it a lot easier with your emails, your story tips, and your encouragement.

I traveled a bit more than usual in 2012, covering various LGBT and progressive events around the nation. But as you can tell by the photo above,  the highlight of the year was attending the Democratic National Convention where I got to meet and share the messages of so many of the heroes of our movement, not the least of whom were the hundreds of openly LGBT state caucus members, folks who are truly doing the unsung heavy lifting for us in their home communities. Another very memorable 2012 day was sharing the stage with Dan Savage for some lovely recognition from the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.  And hey, I also got sainted!

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! The last year was surely one of the best in the history of our movement. I look forward to working with all of you to make 2013 even bigger and better!  Thank you, everybody!

SPECIAL THANKS: Extra gratitude goes out to JMG's behind-the-scenes copy editor Betty (AKA Birdie) who corrects my inelegant syntax, careless typos, and brain-freeze misspellings. Mwah!

Happy New Year!

Yet another eventful year has come and gone for this here website thingy. In 2011 we saw over 20 million pageviews on over 10,000 posts on which you crazy kids left over 1.2 million comments. Each of those figures are up about 25% on last year, so...go US! As I mentioned in this post last year, blogging is like a homework assignment that is never done, but is always due. Nevertheless, you all make it a lot easier with your emails, your story tips, and your encouragement.

JMG garnered some nice notices in 2011, such as our repeat as Village Voice's Politics Blog Of The Year, CBS News New York's Most Valuable Blogger award, and GLAAD's 2011 Outstanding Blog award. Winning the last of those awards rilly rilly pissed off the anti-gay hate industry and the homocons. We call that a win-win-WIN situation. Heh.

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.

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!

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.

Thank You, Governor Paterson

As his final day in office winds to a close for Governor David Paterson, LGBT New Yorkers should offer him our thanks for being the most relentlessly and loudly pro-gay governor in state and arguably, national history. Our state movement's two most important pieces of legislation, GENDA and marriage equality, remain unattained, but that, of course, is due to our clown car of a state Senate and is no fault of the governor's.

Paterson, to his everlasting credit and over the loud protests of bigots, issued an executive order protecting state employees in New York from discrimination based on gender identity and expression. In May 2008, he directed state agencies to recognize out of state same-sex marriages, a move countered by numerous (and unsuccessful) lawsuits. And if there was a marriage equality rally or an angry protest, we usually showed up to find Governor Paterson at the podium or on a bullhorn. Probably my most memorable moment of Paterson's tenure was watching him stand in a pouring rain in Washington Square to deliver an impassioned speech against the bullying and abuse of LGBT youth.

And let's not forget Gov. Paterson's unexpected selection of an obscure upstate legislator with wobbly bona fides to fill the formidable shoes of then Sen. Hillary Clinton. Many questioned that move at the time (myself included), but Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has surprised us all and turned into a powerful and effective advocate for LGBT New Yorkers. Sen. Gillibrand may turn out to be Paterson's most enduring legacy for the good of our movement.

We've had the occasional disagreement with Gov. Paterson, in particular the continuing exclusion of indigent HIV patients from the state's rent relief program for the seriously ill. But even that bad decision grew out of the state's financial morass and not from animus. Today, let's thank Governor David Paterson for his support of the LGBT community and hope that one day soon, we'll again see thousands of New Yorkers happily marching in the NYC Pride Parade wearing stickers proclaiming "We Luv Our Guv!"

JMG Thanks Reader Dave Evans!

As a very active week on JMG comes to a close (almost 200 posts!), I'd like to take a moment to thank reader Dave Evans of Cleveland, who via his video news clipping work provides us with many breaking items of LGBT interest. Dave scours the cable outlets and chat shows for relevant items and often has them posted to his YouTube channel many hours (or days) before the networks themselves.

Best of all (for us) he can often track down clips upon my special request, even if it means the kid stays up half the night waiting on a news show rerun. And as some of you have noted, some proprietary video players (CNN, Vevo, Logo) can cause browsers to crash, but Dave is always there to repost the clip to the relatively browser-friendly YouTube. So snaps to gay news junkie Dave Evans from us all for helping keep JMG as up-to-the-minute as possible.

Some JMG Stuff

As our JMG comment threads frequently now reach far beyond 100 responses, the comments service provider has helped me increase the one-page comment limit to 500. (It used to be 20!) If you'd prefer shorter comment thread pages, let me know.

And as I mentioned last week, I've just about reached Facebook's (arbitrary) friends limit, so I've been forced to create a JMG fan page. I'm still reposting JMG items to both my personal Facebook page and the fan page, but eventually I'll be primarily using the fan page to post breaking items, updates, and other news-ish bits that don't make it to the blog. I encourage to you post your own items there as well, even just to share with others on the fan page.

Also there's the JMG Twitter feed, which automatically pings all new blog posts and to which readers send me many news tips. As readership on this here website thingy continues to mushroom, my blogging process is becoming, probably necessarily, even more collaborative with you folks. I don't say it enough, but I very much appreciate all the emails, the tweets, the Facebook tips...everything...even if I often can't get back to all of you personally.

Finally, yet another reminder about commenting decorum. Please be aware that the enemies of our people often harvest your comments here for publication elsewhere. (And as the staffer of a certain GOP Senator recently learned, there is NO such thing as internet anonymity.) As I've said here often, one of the reasons that JMG has the most, ahem, robust commenting community of the LGBT blogosphere is that your words are unmoderated and uncensored.

So feel free to run your filthy fucking mouths, shout down the asshats, and say whatever needs to be said. But you may absolutely not make threats of physical harm, however idle. Please email me at JoeMyGod@gmail.com if you see such comments and I will dispatch them. Bear hugs and tall frosty beers to you all.

Happy 2010, Y'All

It was a year of homophobes and haters, but also one of heroes, milestones, and some pretty terrific victories. I cranked out about 6000 posts on this here website thingy and you folks responded with over 300,000 comments as traffic more than doubled. JMG got some great notice from the Anti-Violence Project, the Advocate, Instinct Magazine, and After Elton, although I'll admit that I took special pleasure from that whole FBI terrorist threat nonsense.

I marched in the NYC Pride parade for the first time (with 50 other LGBT bloggers) and covered many marriage rallies, protests and celebrations, Broadway fundraisers, and other LGBT charity events. And sadly, a sobering number of hate crime vigils. On a more personal note, accompanied by two dozen dear friends, I had an unbelievably great 50th birthday trip to San Francisco, where I was stunned with the city's Joe Jervis Day proclamation, then followed that up with a fabulous week-long press junket to Key West. And wahoo, my interview with Rachel Maddow made the cover of the national Pride Magazine.

So, yeah, it was an exciting, aggravating, fun, angry-making (but overall groovy) year here on JMG and for me personally. I humbly thank all of you for being there for the ride. Here's to 2010! Raise up our heroes and screw the asshats!

Sen. Ted Kennedy Dead At 77

Ted Kennedy, friend and hero to LGBT folks, people with HIV/AIDS, minorities, the disabled, liberals, and progressives over his decades in the U.S. Senate, succumbed to brain cancer late Tuesday night at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. This is a tremendous loss for the nation, losing what many Americans, including myself, consider to have been the greatest elected official of our lifetimes. We salute you, Mr. Kennedy. Every gay person in America owes you our everlasting gratitude.