Camper Van Beethoven. Carrboro. An hour ago.
The website currently known as Otherstream.com is eighteen tears old today. What this means is:
- Children born the day I uploaded the first version of the site are now of legal age in the United States. Unless they want to drink. Or run for president.
- I have been doing this for a good deal more than a third of my life and more than half of my adult life.
- The site has survived several homes, cars, and jobs, and has now lasted almost twice as long as my stab at marital bliss.
- I’m old.
Moving into year nineteen, I continue not to be certain what the whole site is about anymore but I also keep on not pulling the plug. So go figure…
Also, after tolerating it for work for quite a while, I’ve also just jumped onto Twitter because (a) the person who had staked out @otherstream for quite some time has apparently relinquished it and (b) I figured I’d better associate the site with it for at least a few months before it becomes the next dead technology. Twitter annoys me more than a little so I’m not sure how active I’ll be, but feel free to stop in.
Anyhow, thanks a lot to the seven of you who still frequent the site. I really appreciate it!
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R.E.M.
Driver 8 (1984)
From my colleague the metadata cataloger…
Yes, I realize that it’s not funny that a man died on the toilet at this place that is (ahem) “not a sex club” but “a social club for men.” That said, what a great headline…
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And this is hysterical.
I have something of a milestone birthday this year (I’ve not yet decided which one it will be) and I desperately want to celebrate it somewhere other than here. Since it’s in August, a cooler climate might be nice. Any ideas?
Ten years ago this weekend, four thousand same-sex couples in San Francisco engaged in what could best be termed as mass civil disobedience. We realized we were making history on some level, but we may have underestimated the impact. I think we all pretty much knew that our weddings would not stand up to the inevitable court challenge but we may not have recognized that we were on the lading edge of what would become a national trend. Ten years later, same-sex marriage is legal in more than one third of the fifty states and is recognized in various ways in several other states. The United States has seen a dramatic shift in public opinion on the issue, and in many ways the conversation began in earnest on Valentine’s Day Weekend, 2004.
Now (as then) I do not see same-sex marriage as the top issue facing homosexuals in America. The fact that employment and housing discrimination are still legal in most of the county remains a far more pressing problem. But marriage is an issue that has facilitated the discussion and has helped to mold public opinion on the issue of equality in all areas. The same-sex marriage debate has made us re-think our own opinions on marriage in general–and made many of us wonder if it is an appropriate option at all. My own take has pretty much always been that I would prefer that government not be involved in marriage at all and that individuals be permitted to enter into whatever sort of consensual familial arrangements and contracts they wish. But I feel strongly that if marriage is an option with benefits for heterosexual couples, it must also be available to homosexual couples.
What a difference ten years can make…