Care of The Sword's tireless editors, we bring you this roundup (by no means complete, or even-handed) of stuff going on for those of the homo persuasion this weekend in the two meccas we currently have bandwidth to cover, San Francisco and New York.  Check back soon to see us cover more gay urban centers near you (sorry, Cheyenne, we may never get to you).

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Because we love to amuse you, especially on summery holiday weekends when you're going to be lost without any new stories to read until Monday, we threw together this little selection of upbeat, danceable and gay-ass tunes for you to swill cocktails by and wish America a happy bloody birthday, darlings. Don't get your hands blown off by any fireworks this weekend, and don't get blown by the wrong trick lest you end up at the clinic with a searing pain, or worse, some sores that can't be cured. ...read more

San Francisco's underground drag phenomenon, filmmaker and cult leader Peaches Christ is back again this summer with a new season of Midnight Mass, and the film series premieres this 4th of July weekend with the "most American movie ever screened," Paul Verhoeven's 1995 masterwork, Showgirls. Some call it a camp classic, others call it trash, but we would argue that Showgirls is a truly rare breed among cult films: a high-budget Hollywood tits-and-ass flick written and directed with intentional, intelligent, subversive wit by screenwriter Joe Esterhaz (Flashdance, Basic Instinct) and director Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers). ...read more

For those of you who have the means and the time, the gay world is your oyster this summer (we prefer oysters to clams, anyway).  From a (winter) leather party in Melbourne, to the sugar daddy of all circuit parties on Fire Island, to a beer bust for BUTT Magazine readers in London, there's something for everyone on our July International Events calendar. See it all here.
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Oh, the perils of chasing the gay dollar. While it's hard to deny that homosexuals have limited interest for things don't come in a vial, or with a remix, or with a fat burner, we like to at least PRETEND to think we're more than one-dimensional.  Sure, no one's gonna sell an energy drink with a quote from Gide, but that doesn't mean we deserve the Anna Nicole-esque "Like to party? Like to work out? Like to party while working out?" pandering that recently appeared on Facebook for Eboost with the tagline "So Gay."

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We don't know if the computer that runs Dictionary.com just chose this at random, or if someone over there's just being cheeky. But since we all acknowledge that gays love their drugs, we were pretty amused to see this come up as the Word of the Day during this particularly proud week of all weeks.

Cockaigne \kah-KAYN\, noun:
An imaginary land of ease and luxury.



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For the second year in a row, gay rag Genre has published their "Best Bars in America" article and left San Francisco off the list.*  While we are humble enough to admit that our hometown may not have a host of trendy fag hotspots quite on par with New York or Los Angeles, we are neither blind nor retarded enough to believe that there aren't a handful of venues in SF that beat out, say, Joe's on Juniper in Atlanta or Bill's ("The gay Cheers of Lauderdale") in Fort Lauderdale. San Francisco has the highest percent gay population of any city in the country for fuck's sake, so ignoring the city's gay bars two years in a row would suggest that there's an editor at Genre who doesn't much care for the City by the Bay, or its nightlife, despite it being the spiritual center of the gay universe (we're looking at you Neal Boulton).
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Boy George has licked it. Debbie Harry's posed with it. Michael Lucas may have proposed to it. The pert, glowing buttocks of a certain cocktail waiter at NYC dance den Mr. Black known only as The Ass has returned along with the reopening of the club, and thank fucking god. Hailed as the best thing to happen to NYC nightlife in a decade, Mr. Black was briefly shut down after a police raid last summer that resulted in no charges being pressed, but with the Bleecker location closed and everyone feeling pretty pissed off. The place has moved to the Flatiron (27 W 24th) and had its grand reopening on Friday, when everyone from Justin Bond to the Barbie twins lifted a drink in relief and posed with The Ass. See some gratuitous ass shots, after the jump.
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It's officially Big Gay Pride week, with parades in NY, SF and Chicago all this weekend as well as the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in 1969. With that in mind, we're going to curate a collection of historical homosexual footage this week, including this stellar clip found on YouTube from Chicago Pride—we think, judging from haircuts alone, it's from around 1980 but might have been a year or two before.

We especially love the song at the end, playing as they show scary teenagers throwing things and the dude with the White Power T-shirt...




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Can we be frank for just a minute? We don't always like gay bars. Sure, we like drinking—and gays are champions at that—but the Stoli-soda-splasha-cran crowd wears thin after a decade or two and we find ourselves ever hungry for the new and different. Thankfully, our pals at Gay Bar Culture (based in LA but covering other cities too) are there to cut through the endless pairs of Dior sunglasses and clouds of Tom Ford for Men in search of huggable trannies and bars that would make us be proud to be gay again. It's about time...
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