This month, Gwyneth Paltrow pulled one hell of a pop culture hat trick. In addition to breaking international box office records with her newest film, a little movie called Iron Man 3, People named her as the world's "Most Beautiful Person." The world, however, proved itself not so fond of...

In their work, Chicago's Goodman Theatre doesn't aim small. Recent productions like Teddy Ferrara and The Happiest Song Plays Last have tackled issues of LGBT suicide, poverty, racism, immigration and intergenerational debts, as we work to cleanse the sins of both the past and the present. Happiest Song, currently showing...

When most people come out, they roll out their big news slowly. First you tell a few people, dip your toes into the water of public opinion and use loved ones as an emotional litmus test. But when Brad Allen came out, he went big. He was already out to...

I wasn't initially planning on going to Roger Ebert's funeral. Like many Chicagoans, I mourned his death and memorialized him in private, sharing my sorrows about his loss amongst friends who counted themselves fellow "Ebert superfans." My colleague, Leah Pickett, broke the news to me and at first, I was...

Trigger warning: Transphobia. A lot of transphobia.

A month ago my friend Todd Clayton came out as a recovering transphobe in an incisive Huffington Post blog post, "The Queer Community Has to Stop Being Transphobic." In the piece Clayton details his personal journey toward transgender acceptance, explaining how...

Last summer's What's the T? was an event. It's rare in the Chicago queer community that everyone is talking about one thing (if so, it's often in a bad way), but the play was that kind of phenomenon. It brought us together, for a brief yet beatific moment. It was...

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that intelligence is the "ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

I thought of Fitzgerald last week as the U.S. Supreme Court deliberated on Prop 8 and God was flooded with prayers...

Trigger Warning: This blog post and the article linked in it will contain graphic details of the Steubenville rape case and may be triggering to victims of sexual assault.

Six years ago, I was raped.

I've never been able to call it that or say the word out loud, not...

Five years from now, Illinois' campaign for marriage equality is going to make for a great docudrama on HBO -- or a soap opera.

Last week, queer and allied Illinoisans flocked to Springfield, awaiting a full House vote on equality legislation. As of March 15, the Windy City Times stated...

When you're a kid, you don't see difference. You're trained to see difference by a society that tells you that other people are not like you. You are told to hate that.

My parents taught me what gay people were. Before he divorced my mother, I remember watching a Richard...

Last year, hundreds of attendees gathered together at Pilsen's Union Park for the first-ever T.G.I.F. rally, battling a surprise summer rain to be there. Standing for "Transgender, Gender Non-Conforming, Intersex Freedom," the event sought to bring together these three groups for their own pride event. The event often got the...

Forbes recently listed Chicago as their fourth most miserable city, behind Detroit, Flint and Rockford -- meaning that the states of Illinois and Michigan were having bad days overall. In part of their clearly objective calculus, they listed our high crime rate and weather as signs of our happiness deficit...

A prolific visual artist and transqueer poet, H.Melt is a crucial voice in Chicago's queer poetry scene. Represented also by slam poets, writers and activists like Mar Curran, ellie june navidson and Jakob VanLammeren, Chicago's queer poets are rethinking the divides between the public and the private, the visual and...

A few weeks ago, I braved the Chicago cold to meet Jen Richards for an early afternoon brunch at Kopi, the eclectic cafe in Andersonville that bills itself a spot for "travelers." Richards is a regular there, and I treked up from Pilsen to grab coffee and a breakfast burrito,...

Tuesday, January 22 marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark court decision on abortion and women's sexual health, but at DePaul University, that day will be remembered very differently.

In the university's quad, the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom erected a pro-life...

I don't understand what Ryan Murphy's deal is. When his latest creation, The New Normal, premiered last September, the program landed in hot water (from moi and from TV critics like Maureen Ryan) for being "gaycist." The term was coined by Lauren...

An earlier version of this post appeared in WBEZ. You can find the original here.

A few months ago, College Humor released a video entitled "Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends" that satirically pushed for marriage equality by threatening to deprive men of...

This post was originally published on WBEZ. You can find the original here.

Are you a gay Mormon who is single and looking for love?

Then a forthcoming website is here to answer your prayers. Created by Andrew Markle, "Origins" seeks to give gay Mormons...

Last week, Thought Catalog's Jayne Ricco wrote an article asking if it was "okay to judge Rihanna for getting back together with her abuser," as Instagram recently confirmed what everyone I know feared: RiRi and Breezy are back on -- and canoodling in our hipsta-filters. Although Ricco states...

After being in a relationship for two years (with another one right before that), I thought that being single would be easy and that having my relationship removed would be a relatively painless procedure. It would be like getting your spleen taken out. "What does that thing even do, anyway?"...