Results tagged “gays”

Some things go together so naturally that you wonder how they ever existed apart from each other. Peanut butter and jelly, Spencer and Heidi, the gays and Halloween. And now a musical double-header that seems to be a match made in heaven: Rocky Votolato and Jesse Sykes (and the Sweet Hereafter). Thanks to Barsuk (their shared record label), the two singer-songwriters are on the road together, and their joint appearances promise to be something special.

The Stranger has endorsed a No vote on the RTID Proposition 1 (along with the Seattle Times, but thankfully with more logic and, er, research). Their reasoning? "Rather than letting compromised politicians tell us what's possible, the people should tell the leaders what's needed: more light rail without massive roads expansion."

This is a big weekend due to the Esurance® Capitol Hill Block Party alone. Tickets are not sold out yet; if nothing else, just by 'em at the door. But what to do if you want to avoid the Hill and the confluence of all those hipsters?

Seattlest grew up in a tiny town you've never heard of in Central Florida, where a real sandy ocean beach (on which you could drive) was 20 minutes in one direction, and a crystalline gulf beach was an hour and a half in the other. Now that we live in the Land of the Rain, we wait all year for weeks like these, when the sun is high and hot, the breeze is soft and frequent and there are enough daytime hours to book it to the lake beach after work.

It's fantastic that Rev. Hutcherson's pro-discrimination ballot initiative died a sad, lonely death recently. The fortunes of domestic partnerships in our state are on the rise, Democratic Presidential candidates seem to have their gay houses more or less in order and Seattle Pride just wrapped up its second go-round Downtown. Things seem to be looking up, but Seattlest likes to judge which way the wind blows by figuring out where the money goes. The local money is in Redmond. Er, Medina... Meaning Bill Gates has it. And he's investing it in PlanetOut to the tune of $26.2 million via his private investment firm Cascade Investment LLC.

Considering this is Pride Weekend, you've got a bevy of options for live music in between bouts of sodomy, muff-diving, tina-using, and/or trips to Home Depot.

Okay, okay. So Pride is actually going to happen. Even now, on the precipice of this extraordinary weekend celebration o' gayness, all our friends have no effing clue what's going on. If they, in all their gay glory, don't have a clue, we figured maybe you don't either. But Seattlest is here for you in these tough times and that's why we're gonna break it down all easy-like and tell you what we think is worth bothering with.

The clock is ticking down on statewide ballot initiatives that hope to throw themselves into the field of vision of voters in November, and an article in Sunday's Olympian has a good rundown on who's going to make it and who's a laughable crank. The article mentions the boring-but-important initiatives that are likely to appear on ballots as well as all of the hilarious hits like the initiative that would apply the death penalty in cases of election counting errors, the initiative that would nullify straight marriages if they don't lead to offspring and--the most hilarious of them all--the initiative that would roll back the equal rights measures enacted by the state government last year. Unless that last one's not a joke, in which case it's the least hilarious. The Olympian article talks about how initiatives generally have to raise a shitload of money to get on the ballot, but that there could be an exception in the case of this most/least hilarious initiative.

This week the weather's cooperating a bit more. Nothing like escaping rainy days with a film festival (except if you get stuck in a downpour while waiting in line, so pack that umbrella). Once inside you'll be golden thanks to your perusal of Seattlest picks. Trust us. Golden!

--A portion of all Sonics/Storm ticket sales now go to opposing civil rights for gays!.

MUSIC: For the nine millionth time, get your ass to Easy Street to see Aqueduct's all-ages in-store performance.

--Defective Yeti is live-blogging as he reads Moby Dick. And on the other end of the intellectual spectrum, Seattlest Seth is live-blogging as he watches every episode of The Rockford Files.

That's one thing we learned from The Moth Story Tour on Sunday night at Town Hall. Actually, we learned that from the brochure, which explained what local voices were going to appear in which cities. Cho in LA, Savage in SEA.

This guy, Buju Banton, is going to stand up on the Neumo's stage on Wednesday and play a song called "Boom Bye Bye." "Boom Bye Bye," in the context of the song, is meant to convey the fact that Buju has just shot a fag in the head and is bidding him adieu. It seems like an odd booking choice for Neumo's, because the club is located in the heart of Capitol Hill - a mere block from the Wild Rose, which just a post or so ago was credited for helping make Seattle one of the most lesbian-friendly cities in the world - and this is the year 2006, although the song is from way back in the year 1992, when apparently shooting fags was an ok thing to talk about in a pop song. If you happen to be near Neumo's on Wednesday when people are going in or coming out, remember they're there to hear lyrics like the ones below, and maybe you should say to them, hey, shooting gays in the head is stupid.

Why is it that all the of the really seductive ideas that are flowing out of Seattle right now and gaining currency around the country come from groups that we barely acknowledge the existence of, much less revere as city institutions? First, intelligent design has its fifteen minutes in the sun, and now Mars Hill is taking over the planet, at least according to Salon this week.

The first weekend of summer is here and Steve Pool told us last night that we're actually going to have some weather that befits the season. We got us a second opinion today that verifies it! It's pretty nice outside right now at 74°, but tomorrow the high is listed at an incredible 82° and even gets a few degrees warmer for Sunday (and Monday also at 85° if you want to stretch the weekend). Woo hoo! It's not only hot and summer time, it's also Pride Weekend.

San Francisco is proud host of a new reality show called "How to Get the Guy" that's unfortunately not a descendant of Will and Grace, Queer Eye, The L Word, American Idol etc. Also a biodefence lab is coming to the East Bay and SFist teaches wine pairing.

That giant snapping sound you heard this week was the gay and lesbian community splitting in two over the proper way to celebrate Pride Weekend in Seattle. On the one hand the festivities, particularly the Running of the Gays, have gotten too large for Capitol Hill. We have a sense that the phrase "too many straight people" belongs in that last sentence somewhere. On the other hand, there’s a strong feeling that the proper place for Pride events is the Hill and only the Hill. What to do, what to do...

The Rev Sims vs Rev Hutcherson title fight went down last night and although we couldn't attend there's enough written material about it to keep us reading through the weekend and into next week. It would be cool if the Stranger guys could throw up a video or at least a transcript of it somewhere... Anyway, it sounds like Hutcherson brought a posse with him by bus so the crowd wasn't as one-sided as the venue, the organizers and the subject of debate would suggest. We're happy to hear there were no physical assualts.

Did you ever read the book The Chocolate War when you were a kid? Maybe you were an adult when you read it, but for Seattlest it was a long while back. There's a scene in there near the end of the book that portrays a boxing match between two students. The way the boxing match works is that both boxers take suggestions from the crowd for what kind of punch to throw. It's like reality boxing, but way before reality TV. So the first suggestion is unfolded and it says something like "boxer A, who everyone likes, hits boxer B, who everyone hates, with an uppercut." It goes on that way for a little while, the boxers trading blows, until one of the suggestions reads, "boxer A, who everyone likes, hits boxer B in the balls." It all goes nutso from there and poor boxer B gets real messed up by a series of illegal blows. We remember that scene vividly and again we read this book a long long time ago. Well, either we read it or it actually happened to us.

There's one day this weekend that counts--Sunday, when the Seahawks play in the Super Bowl for the first and assuredly only time. How will Seattlest spend that glorious day?

Tim Eyman, no doubt making a healthy living these days on the backs of Eastern Washingtonians, filed an initiative to undo the civll rights bill the state legislature finally got around to approving last week. He's been branching out recently from his usual fare of initiatives against economic and transportation infrastructure progess in the state to include attacks on social progress as well. If we actually believed that Tim was anything more than a figurehead filer these days we'd wonder what would cause someone to petition the state goverment to repeal a law against discrimination.

We'd like to alert you to a couple gay-centric blogs out there, and no, we're not talking about the Slog. Seattlest has long considered the Queen City Cruise News' blog to be the authoritative faggy blog in the city and we're sure that they'll continue their great work, but yesterday they posted on the launching of a Seattle Gay News affiliated blog. Our soggy little heart warms just a few degrees every time we see a print pub launch themselves into bloggy space (don't expect a print version of Seattlest anytime soon, though) and we have high hopes that the SGN guys will iron out a few HTML kinks and help keep us appraised as to the whereabouts and goings-on of the gays far into the future. Welcome to the neighborhood - Expect us to come knocking with a welcome basket any time now.

The cardinals in Rome have let the white smoke fly and announced the new head of the Catholic Church today. The flock didn't have long to wait to find out whether the new pope would come in the form of a healer or a hard-ass, and the word is that he's a hard-ass dressed up as a healer.

Many major cities around the country have a neighborhood that is considered the hub of the city's gay activity; Capitol Hill right here, Boy's Town in Chicago, Castro in San Francisco, Chelsea in New York. Seattlest has always been intrigued by how these districts come about. We're sure that each one has its own history, but we're equally sure that all of them have been pretty organic. It's something that just happens. You don't generally see a Pride parade march into, say, Laurelhurst, throw up a bunch of rainbow flags and call it a gay quarter.