Here’s an article about a gay fraternity at my alma mater, the University of Virginia. You know, nothing like this would have happened at UVa 12 years ago, back when I was a first-year student. UVa has come a long way from its southern good-ol’-boy roots, and I’m glad.

And here’s an article about how my old college a cappella group, the Academical Village People, built its own recording studio. Check out the photos. Those guy are hot, aren’t they? (Sorry — they’re virtually all straight.)
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Friendster is fun, but it has a disappointing side effect.

Human beings like to explore. The reason I love American history so much is because of the idea of the frontier. People could cross the Atlantic, leave Old Europe behind for the New World and start their lives over. And then they could leave behind the original thirteen colonies and light out for the territory. If things failed, there was always a safety valve — you could hitch a wagon train, shove off, and be someone new. A whole world of unexplored adventure. You could see some wide expanse of mountains and fields and canyons and think that nobody had laid eyes on it in a thousand years.

But by the 1890s, most of the frontier was gone, as Frederick Jackson Turner famously said. It had been explored, occupied. And today it’s all strip malls, McDonald’s and multiplexes.

Not to be the Frederick Jackson Turner of the gay social scene, but there’s not quite the social frontier out there that there used to be. Friendster is great, because it can easily lead you to new people, but it also takes away the unknowns. Everyone comes with connections now. You can no longer use the excuse that you didn’t know that you and your friend were dating the same guy. Or, you might meet someone and find out that you know six of his friends, or you’re chatting with a friend and you realize you’ve both slept with four of the same guys, all of whom have also slept with each other, or you see someone with whom you want to sleep and you realize your friends have already slept with him, and you find out how good he is before you’ve actually had the chance to find out for yourself, and whatnot. (Some of these are embellishments of things that have happened to me. The rest of them actually happened.)

It’s true even in New York. People come here to escape, to start their lives over. New York is somewhat of a frontier today — you can hide in its anonymity. Or can you? In this city of 8 million people, it turns out that all the gay men are in the same big social circle.

I wonder if there’s life on Jupiter’s moons.

I wonder if they’re gay there.

It’s Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, so I’m at my parents’ house for the weekend. I’m not particularly religious; I don’t think I really believe there’s an intelligent Creator out there. My philosophy is that life was probably an accident, that human beings are pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and that the only meaning in life is the meaning we create for ourselves. The best thing to do with your life is to be as happy as possible while harming other people as little as possible; and the best way to be happy is to recognize every happy moment in your life that you can, no matter how small — even if it’s eating a really tasty peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

For me, Judaism is important not as a system of religious beliefs, but as a connection to my family and to my heritage through a set of rituals. For that reason, sometimes synagogue services on the High Holidays are fulfilling for me, and sometimes they’re not. This year, I haven’t really felt connected to it.

But one theme I heard at services this morning was the idea of forgiveness. It made me think about recent events again. I want to forgive D — I truly do. Yet it would be easier to forgive him if I knew why he did what he did.

What I like about my family’s synagogue is that it’s Reconstructionist. Reconstructionism is one of the newest and smallest denominations of Judaism. It’s also one of the most liberal, with emphasis placed on equality for women as well as for gays and lesbians (the significance of which my parents couldn’t have realized when we joined this congregation almost 25 years ago). One of the tenets of Reconstructionism is that “the past has a vote, not a veto.” We take from the past what is relevant to modern life, and we toss out what is not. Reconstructionism has more respect for the rituals of the past than Reform Judaism does, but socially it’s more liberal than Conservative Judaism.

(And all of this makes me think of D again, because when I was a kid, my congregation had a beloved female rabbi, and it turned out that she later went to D’s synagogue. I learned this the first time I hung out with him.)

Anyway — here’s to a sweet new year. As someone e-mailed me yesterday, “May your best day of last year be the worst of your next.”

I like that.