Dating While HIV-Positive: Knowing What You're Worth

It doesn’t matter what your status is. Confidence is sexy on anyone.

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Tyler Curry

www.advocate.com/commentary/tyler-curry/2014/12/31/dating-while-hiv-positive-knowing-what-youre-worth

Nine Ways To Avoid Sex For The Next Year So You Can Donate A Pint Of Blood

The FDA has decided that the blood coursing through your veins isn’t a lifetime threat to the American public — just a year-long threat. So sometime next year, you can start donating blood.

Or more accurately, you can start the clock running on when you can donate blood in 2016. Because to do so, you have to avoid “sexual contact” with another man for at least a year. For your ordinary homo, never lacking in opportunity or desire, that’s an extreme challenge.

And don’t forget that sexual contact means everything because the FDA thinks everything you do is equally risky, even though it’s not.

So to donate blood, you need to get ready now, which means giving up sex for a year.

To help you meet this noble goal, here are ten tips guaranteed to strangle your libido…

1. Watch a Pat Robertson marathon.

Every night, you can spend time among the wreckage of the televangelist’s psyche by watching the hundreds of hours he’s spent on CBN. Let Pat remind you that gay sex isn’t very pretty, that you can catch AIDS from towels, and that being gay is like demonic possession. You’ll be so turned off sex or laugh so hard that the effect will be the same.

2. Take a walking tour of the deep, deep South.

You know, places like Tupelo, MS, the headquarters of the American Family Association and Bryan Fischer. Or Alabama, where you can count the number of antigay license plates you see. Or Louisiana, which refuses to remove an unconstitutional sodomy law from its books.  Just be sure to stay clear of New Orleans, or you won’t be able to donate blood until 2017.

3. Visit Russia.

Yes, the land of Vladimir Putin, which has been proven to cure homosexuality (at least in the case of Gerard Depardieu). Alternately, Putin’s fellow homophobes can beat you to a pulp if they suspect you’re gay, in which case you may need blood before you can ever donate it.

4. Join the Catholic celibacy movement.

Yes, it’s officially a trend, because the mainstream media has reported on it. You can be a perfectly good Catholic by denying one of God’s greatest gifts and at the same time satisfy neither your puzzled LGBT siblings or the conservatives who would just assume purge you from the Church. But you will be able to give blood. (Obviously, celibacy doesn’t apply to priests.)

5. Become a Salvation Army officer.

Catholicism isn’t military enough for you? There’s always the Salvation Army. It’s every bit as repressive, but it comes with a uniform.

6. Borrow an Ebola quarantine tent from Chris Christie.

Want to cut yourself off from any human contact? Chris Christie has a bunch of tents left over from his disastrous (and unscientific) decision to throw a nurse who helped Ebola patients into quarantine. The downside? No cable.

7. Start swilling soy sauce.

Soy reduces testosterone levels and with it sex drive. Put soy sauce on your corn flakes in the morning, have an edamame shake for lunch, have a soy burger for dinner. After a while, you’ll probably feel nauseated as well, which will help you reach your overall goal.

8. Take up a really boring hobby.

How about collecting old phone books? Or sculpting butter? Or photographing roundabouts? (It helps if you’re British for that last one.)  Plus as a bonus, you can shop at Hobby Lobby and contribute to the erosion of LGBT rights at the same time!

 9. Become a Republican. 

Never mind. No one’s that desperate to donate blood.

JohnGallagher

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/9p_CAQoUoRQ/nine-ways-to-avoid-sex-for-the-next-year-so-you-can-donate-a-pint-of-blood-20141231

ICANN Can’t Even

The organization that determines the world’s URLs has decided that .gay doesn’t need a responsible administrator.

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Savas Abadsidis

www.advocate.com/world/2014/12/31/icann-can-t-even

It's Official: Obama Won't Renominate Michael Boggs
WASHINGTON — It’s over for Michael Boggs. Like, really over.

Georgia Sens. Johnny Isakson (R) and Saxby Chambliss (R) said late Tuesday night that President Barack Obama won’t renominate Boggs next year for a lifetime post on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The news is a major victory for progressives who have fought Boggs’ nomination all year.

“It is with regret that we announce that the President will not re-nominate Judge Michael Boggs to the United States District Court for a third time. We were informed of the President’s decision by Denis McDonough, the President’s chief of staff, prior to Thanksgiving. We regret the President’s decision, as we have supported Judge Boggs throughout this process and remain steadfast in our support,” the senators said in a statement.

They continued, “Throughout the process, Judge Boggs has exhibited enormous restraint and the temperament expected of a jurist. These traits will serve him well for the opportunities we are confident the future holds for Judge Boggs. We wish him the best and thank him for his service to the people of Georgia.”

A White House spokesman confirmed that Obama won’t renominate Boggs, but offered no additional comment.

Progressive groups and Senate Democrats threw everything they had at Boggs this year, determined to sink his nomination over his socially conservative track record. Abortion rights groups objected to votes he took as a Georgia state legislator to create “Choose Life” license plates and to post online the names of abortion providers at a time of high clinic violence. Civil rights leaders opposed him because of his vote to keep the Confederate insignia on the Georgia state flag. Gay rights groups opposed him for sponsoring a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

It became clear earlier this fall that Boggs wasn’t going anywhere this year, when Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced the Democratic votes weren’t there to confirm him, and suggested that Obama withdraw the nomination. The lingering question has been whether the president would renominate Boggs in the new year, when Republicans control the Senate and would likely back him.

The White House calculation appears to be that it’s not worth picking another fight with Democrats over the nomination.

Obama had initially nominated Boggs as part of an all-or-nothing package of seven Georgia judicial nominees agreed upon by the president, Chambliss and Isakson. Some, like Boggs, were GOP picks and others were Democratic picks. The other six in the package were confirmed this year, but Boggs was held back.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/31/obama-michael-boggs_n_6398986.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices