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......

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." So what is the proper course of action for Congress regarding the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, bill? The bill would ban employment discrimination......

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? Tonight, there's Ryan Adams at the Moore. He's no longer the junkie hot mess he used to be, so this time around he probably won't go nutso if......

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......

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......

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. -Seattle Men's Chorus explores the complex love-hate relationship between God and the gays in Scared Faithless at McCaw Hall. Friday-Saturday // 8pm // 321 Mercer St // $15-$57 -The Wildrose (and dragtastic Ursula Android and Jackie Hell) hosts their annual all-weekend party, with approximately nine million performances by......

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......

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......

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! But first, we want to highlight some special events: · A Conversation with Julien Temple, with musician/critic Sean Nelson, will no doubt cover Temple's three music......

--A portion of all Sonics/Storm ticket sales now go to opposing civil rights for gays!. --Local bloggers watched the Oscars: Slog, Northwest Progressive Institute, Blatherwatch, --The brackets for the 4A state boys and girls tournaments are set. --The best and worst of customer service in Kirkland. --The Pacific is learning how we talk about the weather in Seattle. --Why is the 48 called the Tiger Woods of the bus system?......

MUSIC: For the nine millionth time, get your ass to Easy Street to see Aqueduct's all-ages in-store performance. 7pm // Easy Street Queen Anne, 20 W. Mercer St. // Free OPERETTA: The Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society presents their production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow. Expect lots of romantic entanglements and disentanglements rife with misunderstandings and mistaken identities. 7:30pm // Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave. // $26 DANCE: Get your rumba on with......

--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. --"I have no beef with gays, upscale condos, hotels and the free market," but all together somehow it pisses Sound Politics off. --"Is that crack smoke coming out of your mouth?" - KOMO springs a public toilet trap on a couple of guys in......

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. The premise of The Moth is simple: storytellers get ten minutes on stage to tell a true story. No notes. The benefit, as host and first storyteller Jonathan Ames put it, is that you......

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......

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. Mars Hill is a Ballard Megachurch which practices......

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......

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. Getting on the wrong train sucks. Getting on the wrong train and becoming the victim of what will later be described as a "stabbing spree" really sucks.......

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......

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......

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......

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? Just as they watched Steve Largent break the all-time consecutive-games-with-a-catch streak together, on October 6th, 1986, David S. and Seth will be watching the Super Bowl together. Expect lots of knocking on wood, screaming at things that aren't there, speed dialing Comcast, and, if the Hawks......

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......

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......

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. You don't even have to read the entire first sentence of the AP's report to feel......

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......