Last week I was having a conversation with someone that I’ve known for over ten years, and I was telling him about an incident that happened at work.  I explained that a colleague had come to me about a student issue, and I found myself not feeling very sympathetic about the situation.  In another time and place, I might have had a different response, but I felt no sympathy at all.

As much as the anti-homosexual, “un-Christian” message of Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church sickens me, I agree with the Supreme Court’s decision today to uphold the free-speech rights of the church to stage protests at events like funerals.  Protesting at a funeral has got to be one of the most inhumane and uncivilized actions that anyone can participate in, but then again, many believe that a romantic/physical relationship between two people of the same sex is inhumane and uncivilized.  Of course, I don’t agree with that, but tolerance (I dislike that word) needs to go both ways.  Freedom is not only guaranteed to those that we agree with, and the same goes for the protection provided by the Constitution.

I just watched the new Lady Gaga music video for “Born this Way,” and I’d like to ask for everyone to stop calling the song a Madonna knock off.  The ancestry of the song and the video can be traced back to Madonna, but so what? 

This past Friday evening the project that I have worked on for the past six weeks finally came to fruition with a successful opening night performance to a very receptive audience.  Anyone who creates something and then presents it to the public, regardless of format or discipline, knows that the opening/launch can be terrifying.  In the past I’ve always found myself wringing my proverbial apron, unable to let go of the project, and wanting to run out of the theatre as the performance unfolded.  This time, I feel like I turned a corner in my practice as a director, and I learned to just trust the work that I’ve done, and more importantly, to trust the other people that I’ve made the work with:  the actors and the production team. 

So media outlets are all abuzz with the Obama administration’s statements today about the Defense of Marriage Act.  I first learned about it when the American Educational Research Association (AERA) queer sig list-serv exploded in a flurry of emails this afternoon, and since then I’ve had a chance to read CNN.com and the New York Times coverage.