It all started with doodles -- on the back of a page schedule of a major national magazine.

Lisa Ferber -- lowly copyeditor by day, fearless writer by night -- needed a creative outlet while she waited hours and hours, for the final pages of Men's Journal to arrive on...

Though he last entered the U.S. as an Australian citizen only, when Miles Apollo Neumann Auster returns to the States again, he will become the first dual-citizen child of a multinational gay couple.

That is, if the stars align, the money comes through for a plane ticket and the baby...

It's been nearly 15 years, but I still remember the freedom, then simultaneous shame that colored my very first kiss with a woman. I was nearly 22, a senior at Northwestern University and just beginning to come to terms with years of repression -- sexual, social, emotional and psychological. After...

One is 45, a flannel-wearing lesbian, Boston-based local theater luminary and veteran of Chicago's famed Second City. The other is 43, straight, a mother of two and the LA-located former executive producer of such shows as Six Feet Under and the United States of Tara.

Together, Faith and Jill...

In 1964, at the height of her jazz career, Nina Simone threw off the pop constraints of her record label, American Colpix, and decided to record the personal, which for her, was the political.

On her debut album for Dutch Philips, Simone sang "Mississippi Goddam", her response to the...

Between July 1998 and November 1999, two well-regarded archeologists, known for their investigation of mass graves around the world, turned up in a cemetery just south and east of downtown Tulsa's mostly black Greenwood district.

They were there for several reasons, paramount among them, to verify a hunch that the...

Money. Too much of it. Not enough of it. Up and down and all around in the current economy, money buys happiness and beauty; it also causes despair and destruction. Nelson Mandela once said that money would not "create success," but that the "freedom to make it will."

For several...

The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola has the reputation as one of the toughest in the United States -- the "bloodiest prison in the South" as its inmates say. More than 5,000 hardened criminals there are serving an average sentence of 93 years -- 85 percent of them will die...

I'll never forget the day it happened, though I've hardly told a soul of it in 15 years.

About six of us from the 1996 National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) climbing trip into Wyoming's Wind River Range decided, after a hard hike into the backcountry, to slack off camp...

They wait for the tired tourists walking up the long hills of Bethlehem: cabdrivers, some in Mercedes, others in their stepsister Skodas. All ask the same questions in broken English: Church of Nativity? Manger Square? Rachel Tomb?

"Banksy?" said Ibrahim, as he approached my travel companion, Stephen and me....

It's been almost 11 years since I packed up my car, cashed my last paycheck from the Tulsa World and set off to Boston for a new life and a fresh perspective. I had met my very first girlfriend, Barrett, in Tulsa, where I was working as a cub reporter,...

As the situation stands in Albany today, I have untold amounts of people fighting for my right to get married in my home state of New York. In most countries around the rest of the world, this remains a pipe dream.

Early this morning, buses coordinated by the five-coalition...

Okay gays, pull out the rotten tomatoes, aim straight at your computer screen, and fire. Because I am about to defend Tracy Morgan, the most LGBT-hated man in comedy this week, and speak out against another harmful form of humor: the gay parody.

Believe me when I...

On a street corner of midtown Manhattan, in as discreet a location as far away from the eyes of the NYPD as possible, a group of people gathered on March 1, around a large 50-yard-long bunch of yellow cloth, waiting for the signal. The "walk" sign flashed "go", hands clutched...

Seven years ago this winter, I drove down to Washington, D.C. to start my first job out of Columbia Journalism School as a staff writer for the Washington Blade, the oldest LGBT newspaper in the country. I hadn't yet permanently moved from New York,...

Tulsa, Oklahoma, up until June 1921, was a bustling little outpost on the frontier -- head down, blinders on, focused on "black gold" -- and the least likely of places to turn American black history upside down and inside out. Or at least contemplated Walter F. White -- NAACP field...

On July 23, 1946, just before her diagnosis of stomach cancer and the surgery that ended her life, Gertrude Stein wrote her will. She left what little money she had and her priceless collection of paintings to her lover of decades, Alice B. Toklas.

Though acquired for a pittance...

As a reporter who covers LGBT activism, the other morning I received the following question in my oft-overstuffed inbox:

When the GLAAD awards start to resemble The Golden Globes and all other mainstream award shows does this mean?

• a) GLAAD is redundant?
• b) Queers have finally made it?
• c) GLAAD...