UPDATED: See below.

Yesterday, there was a lot of grandstanding by right-leaning Republicans, most of whom denounced the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of marriage equality. (Video clip posted below.) By and large, they ranted and railed about “unelected judges” who overrode the “will of the people”. I did not hear any of these people complain about the unelected judges who gutted the Voting Rights Act a day earlier, but perhaps I’m just really good at tuning them out.

Some of these asshats and their ancestors made similar arguments in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, which no one on the right seems willing to remember. How many times must we say it, y’all? It’s simply unfair for the majority to determine the rights of the minority, because the minority will always be short-changed.

And keep in mind: these complaints are coming from the same white, well-heeled politicians who were trampled at voting booths last November and who vowed to make better inroads with minority communities. For their parents, African Americans were the target; for them, it’s gays, lesbians, and the transgendered. Apple, meet tree.

But here’s the important thing: despite yesterday’s highly public, blustery, doom-and-gloom breast-beating, I have a hunch that many Republicans are quietly cheering the SCOTUS rulings. As I’ve said before, the decisions give LGBT foes the opportunity to change their opinions while saving face.

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MOE MONAS: Check one-two, check one-two. Can you hear me now?

MISS MICHIGAN: (Entering with other contestants, sees MOE onstage) Well, well, well, what do we have here? What big eyebrows you have, Moe! The better for me to smother with gentle kisses!

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: And what manly stubble you have, Moe! The better to tickle my taut, tan belly button!

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: Ooooh, what a strong chin you have, Moe! The better to grind in my sternum while you’re motorboating my boobicles!

MOE MONAS: Fred, can you bring up monitor two? I’m having trouble hearing myself. There’s some kind of hiss in my earpiece.

MISS MICHIGAN: You’re such a professional, Moe. I love your all-white outfit.

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: It’s not an “outfit”, dummy. Girls wear “outfits”. Boys wear blue jeans and jean jackets.

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: But nothing he’s wearing is blue!

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: Oh my god. For once, the bitch is right. Mind officially blown.

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: I know! By the way, totally not a bitch, but I know!

MISS MICHIGAN: What do we call this, then?

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: How about “white jeans”?

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: Can it, retard.

MISS MICHIGAN: Watch it, stretchmarks. My sister is differently abled. How do you think she’d feel sitting here, with you tossing around the R-word?

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: She’d probably be glad that someone was doing the talking besides you. Do you use that whore-hole for anything besides vomiting up IQ points?

MOE MONAS: Seriously, Fred? What the fuck is all that noise?

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: Oh, my goodness! Did you hear that, you guys? Moe Monas said a swear!

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: Um, yeah, we’re standing right here. How could we not hear?

MISS MICHIGAN: Given the nonstop sound of wind whistling through your ear canal, we’re not taking anything for granted.

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: Moe Monas said a swear, you guys! This is front-page news! Where’s my Samsung?

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: Samsung? What are you, some kind of algebra nerd? Why don’t you have an iPhone like everyone else?

MISS MICHIGAN: For your information, there’s a whole lot of phone diversity around here.

MISS GREATER SCHENECTADY: Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess: you use a Windows phone. (Silence) You totally DO use Windows! Screw this closet-dwelling purity princess and his one lousy curse word. YOU are front-page news! (Digs in purse for iPhone)

MISS MICHIGAN: I swear on my last cube of La Vache Qui Rit, if you tell a soul about that, I will snatch your wig during eveningwear.

MISS MULHOLLAND DRIVE: She wears a wig on her snatch? Now THAT’S news. I’m telling!

(ALL run in opposite directions, screaming for their publicists, leaving MOE and MISS DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA alone onstage)

MISS DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA: I like your tuck. Could you show me how you did it? I’m about to start saddlebagging.

MOE MONAS: I’d be delighted.

(MOE and MISS DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA exit)

FRED: All right people, we’ve got 15 minutes. Who wants Quizno’s?

[pic via]

Next Thursday, May 9, my colleague and friend, John Voelcker, is coordinating a free community forum for those affected by HIV/AIDS — which is, at this point, everyone on the planet. (Registration is limited though, so all seven billion of us won’t be able to get in.)

“Is This My Beautiful Life?: Perspectives From Survivors Of The AIDS Generation” is presented by the Medius Working Group, which is the current iteration of the Medius Institute for Gay Men’s Health that John co-founded with his late friend, the activist Spencer Cox. Medius is meant to address a problem that many in the 1980s and 1990s never could’ve envisioned: the problem of surviving HIV/AIDS. From John’s moving obituary for Spencer, published in the Huffington Post:

[The Medius Institute for Gay Men’s Health] was dedicated to improving the health, well-being and longevity of gay men in mid-life (generously defined as 35 to 65). The goal was to look in a cross-disciplinary way at all the factors affecting the physical, mental and emotional health of a set of men who had lived through the AIDS epidemic, come out the other side and were too often doing startling, illogical and very dangerous things.

Unfortunately, John and Spencer’s initial vision for Medius didn’t pan out. Funders were too interested in other things — distributing HIV drugs to underserved populations, researching cures, or addressing entirely different viruses and diseases — to care about what is, in essence, post-traumatic stress disorder. They weren’t concerned about those that HIV/AIDS had left behind: the ill, the healthy, the positive, the negative, the patients, the caretakers who lived through the worst years of the epidemic but lost so many, many friends along the way.

Ironically, Thursday’s forum might never have taken place if Spencer hadn’t succumbed to the very issues that Medius aims to address.

Who should attend? The host website has a checklist:

Are you …
• a gay man in midlife, whether HIV-positive or HIV-negative?
• a former or current AIDS activist, caregiver or service provider?
• someone who lost friends, lovers and/or colleagues to the epidemic?

This is an opportunity to weigh in on the issues facing all of us as we continue to grapple with what it means to have fought an epidemic that the rest of the world mostly ignored.

Ask yourself …
• How do I connect to those who don’t recognize what I went through?
• How do we pass along our stories and lessons to a younger generation?
• Who are the people who best understand our experiences?
• What places serve as “our Veterans Administration” to help us manage?
• Is anyone caring for the “wounded AIDS warriors” who never really recovered?
• What would help me cope better than I do now with what we went through?
• Is this the life I thought I would lead?
• How do we envision our futures?

Thursday’s list of speakers is impressive, including Jesus Aguais, Dr. L. Jeannine Bookhardt-Murray, Dr. Mark Brennan-Ing, Jim Eigo, Joe Jervis, and Peter Staley. The event’s host is actor Stephen Spinella, who starred in the original Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. (P.S. He was amazing.)

If you’re in New York next Thursday, go. Just go. Register here.

If the theory of the multiverse is correct, our universe is not alone: it’s just one in a sea of universes. If you could escape them all and look back at where you’d come from, you’d see an endless array of bubbles (or boxes or maybe doughnuts) stretching out in all directions, expanding and contracting, evolving and failing.

This is slightly different from the “many-worlds” theory of quantum physics, which believes that every decision we make shapes the universe we’re in. According to that hypothesis, every time we pull one book from the shelf instead of another, or select this brand of cereal instead of that one, we create a new universe. We live in an an overlapping network of parallel universes, universes that are constantly branching off in new directions, existing side-by-side but never touching. Timespace is like a hall of mirrors, only none of us can see our reflections.

If either of those theories is correct, then there are an infinite number of universes. And if both are correct, well, it’s hard to wrap my head around that.

But here’s the interesting part: if there are an infinite number of universes, then any scenario we can imagine is not only probable, but certain:

• In one universe, things are exactly as they are now, except I’m wearing a swimsuit instead of khakis.
• In another, my skin is green.
• In another, my dogs can talk.
• In another, I am straight, and Jonno is a leggy blond woman.
• In another, I am straight, and Jonno is a leggy redhead.
• In another, I never met Jonno at all.
• In another, I am very much alone.
• In another, I am already dead.

Religious leaders often talk about how precious life is, how lucky we are to be here. Physicists make the same point, but they do so much, much better.