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<title>Opinion at Metro Weekly (Newspaper Magazine of Gay and Lesbian Washington, DC)</title>
	<link>http://www.metroweekly.com</link>
	<description>Weekly gay publication of Washington, DC including features on news, arts, politics, lifestlye, film, music, as well as events calendars, classifieds, home ads and free personals. </description>
	<language>en-us</language>
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	<title>How To Be Gay: In which Bret Easton Ellis is totally correct to defend his right to be such a prick</title>
	<link>http://www.metroweekly.com/news/opinion/?ak=8351</link>
	<description><![CDATA[
Opinion: I&#39;ve been many different gay men over the course of my life&#46; Like most of us&#44; I started off as the closeted gay man who sometimes overcompensated with my behavior so I wouldn&#39;t appear feminine&#46; I&#39;ve also been the newly out gay man who overcompensated in the other direction and spent more than a few months flouncing around campus in misbegotten Chess King outfits&#46; I&#39;ve been the activist gay man&#44; with the meta twist that I posed as the activist gay man in the old Unofficial Gay Manual&#46; I&#39;ve been a party&#45;focused gay man who transitioned into a respectably professional gay man&#46; These days I&#39;m a suburban gay man who occasionally dallies in being the &#39;&#39;I&#39;m at a bar reliving my youth&#39;&#39; gay man&#46; In effect&#44; there is no one way to be gay&#46; That doesn&#39;t stop some people from insisting there is&#46; ... (more)]]></description>
	<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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	<title>The Search Must Continue: Halted HIV&#45;vaccine trial may be a setback&#44; but it&#39;s not a defeat</title>
	<link>http://www.metroweekly.com/news/opinion/?ak=8350</link>
	<description><![CDATA[
Opinion: As HIV&#45;vaccine trial participants&#44; we grow accustomed to the routine blood draws&#44; interacting with study staff and taking our computer&#45;assisted interviews that catalog our risks&#46; And&#44; of course&#44; the risk&#45;reduction counseling to help us reduce our sexual risk&#45;taking behavior&#46; For almost three years this quarterly experience was a part of my life&#46; It was a piece of my routine until I received a phone call that changed it all&#46; It was an unexpected end to something that I thought I&#39;d still have years more to be engaged with&#46; Two weeks ago I found out that the trial&#39;s independent safety board recommended stopping immunizations because the experimental HIV vaccine was not showing any signs that it would be effective in the prevention of HIV infection&#46; Nor would the candidate vaccine help a person to better manage the virus should they become positive&#46; The HVTN 505 study began in 2009 and was testing an investigational vaccine&#46; The U&#46;S&#46;&#45;based trial enrolled gay&#44; bisexual and men who have sex with men&#44; as well as transgender women&#46; The trial was the only large&#45;scale vaccine study in world&#46; Matthew Rose ... (more)]]></description>
	<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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	<title>A Star Is Born: He may not be the first&#44; but Jason Collins is a pioneer just the same</title>
	<link>http://www.metroweekly.com/news/opinion/?ak=8331</link>
	<description><![CDATA[
Opinion: Jason Collins is not the first active professional athlete to come out&#46; Tennis star Martina Navratilova came out in 1981&#46; Her courageous act&#44; however&#44; was no threat to male heterosexual dominance&#46; Few people even know that baseball player Glenn Burke came out in the late 1970s&#44; because sports writers at the time responded with a wall of silence&#46; Most recently&#44; top WNBA draft pick Brittney Griner came out on April 17&#46; The girls are way ahead of the boys here&#46; None of this diminishes the import of what happened when Collins came out in Sports Illustrated on April 29&#46; It was a game changer&#46; As Martina said&#44; it &#34;will save lives&#46;&#34; ... (more)]]></description>
	<pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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	<title>Creating Space: The Next Generation Awards honor and encourage young LGBT leaders&#44; but we all have a role to play</title>
	<link>http://www.metroweekly.com/news/opinion/?ak=8332</link>
	<description><![CDATA[
Opinion: It was just over five&#45;and&#45;a&#45;half years ago that I first brought the idea of the Next Generation Awards to Metro Weekly&#46; Because I happen to be running a business&#44; I fully admit that there were some business considerations behind the idea&#46; But for me the goal of the Next Generation Awards has always been about something more than a marketing and PR strategy &#38;mdash&#59; it&#39;s about repaying debts to an LGBT community that has made not just the magazine a reality&#44; but my own life as a gay man&#46; I arrived in Washington in 1989 armed with a freshly printed journalism degree and an early onset of career crisis&#46; The traditional journalism career track in those days still ran through small&#45;town newspapers before making one&#39;s way to the larger&#44; prestige newspapers like The Washington Post&#46; Young&#44; recently out and already familiar with the joys of a big gay city like D&#46;C&#46;&#44; I was never going to send myself back home to start my career in Paducah&#44; Ky&#46; And there was the small detail that the more I worked as a low&#45;level reporter on Capitol Hill the more I realized that the last thing I wanted to be was a reporter&#46; While D&#46;C&#46; was and is a big gay city&#44; at that time it was still ridiculously closeted and uptight&#46; I no longer fit on the career path that I&#39;d been traveling since before high school&#46; AIDS stopped being a vague fear for a young gay man and became my day&#45;to&#45;day reality as I started to see my friends get infected&#44; to see my friends die&#46; I got angry at a culture that told me not to be angry&#44; a culture that equated gays with fear and disease&#46; ... (more)]]></description>
	<pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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	<title>Accidental Activism: How I found myself on the steps of the Supreme Court</title>
	<link>http://www.metroweekly.com/news/opinion/?ak=8314</link>
	<description><![CDATA[
Opinion: When I met my husband&#44; Kelly Vielmo&#44; almost 11 years ago&#44; neither of us did anything that might be labeled &#39;&#39;activism&#39;&#39; on behalf of gay rights&#46; Our lives had been fairly low key&#46; Not our jobs&#44; our friends&#44; our hobbies&#44; nor our volunteer activities screamed &#39;&#39;activist&#46;&#39;&#39; If we were a flavor&#44; it was vanilla&#46; In a cosmopolitan city like D&#46;C&#46;&#44; we could just blend in&#46; Then we had kids&#46; Ten years into our relationship Kelly and I opted to foster and adopt through D&#46;C&#46;&#39;s Child and Family Services Agency&#46; The act of adopting kids or growing a family in itself is not something that one would chalk up to activist behavior&#46; But now we are conspicuous&#46; We are two white men with three black children&#44; and that stands out&#46; We&#39;re not the invisible couple we once were&#44; instead turning heads on almost every occasion&#46; First glimpses of our family seem to start some questioning process&#44; with many trying to connect the dots&#46; ... (more)]]></description>
	<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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