Last month, hordes of people attended a reception at Montrose Counseling Center honoring Dalton DeHart, Houston’s Number One photographer of all things gay for the past 30 years. That night the center (which serendipitously enough is recognizing its own 30-year anniversary this year) displayed dozens of albums containing literally thousands of Dalton’s images chronicling our illustrious history.
The majority of your focus this year is going to be on finances, securing a sense of fiduciary safety for your future and making better use of your talents and resources. This year you are exploring new paths of investments. If you haven’t done this before, you are doing it now. You are personally interested in getting paid more for the services that you render to others. You may raise your fees or ask for a raise from your boss. You need to watch your spending, because you are less cautious about how you spend your money. This could also be a great year to seek out training to improve your skills so that you can make more money.
Health and work routines are under scrutiny this year. For the majority of you, expect your work to be busier than usual. You could be moving or expanding your office space or getting new equipment. There is extra work for you to perform, but you are happy about this development as long as you express your boundaries and don’t just accept the work without questioning. This could also signal a promotion within your department. You are a bit bored and certainly need a new project of sorts, so that is good news for you. Health routines need to change. This is an excellent year for changing negative eating or exercise patterns, and it is better if you find a more socially interactive exercise program. Doing exercise on your own is not really for you. Exercise has to be somewhat fun and interesting or you never stick with it.
As the year begins, we are in for quite an auspicious time. On January 25, Pluto, planet of ultimate change, transformation, death, and rebirth (and the cosmic enema) moves into the sign of Capricorn, where it will remain until 2024. Outer, slow-moving planets like Pluto affect us individually but have a greater impact on nations and society as a whole.
In the fall of 2007, Merck & Co., one of the large pharmaceutical companies studying potential preventive vaccines for HIV, halted its trial of a genetically engineered vaccine being tested on four continents. The reason? Preliminary results indicated it simply wasn’t working.
In the recent debate over ENDA, it has frequently been said that “the community” solidly opposes the first-ever federal gay civil rights bill unless it includes transgenders.
I just wrote about Hillary and her candidacy last month, and not in a very favorable way. This month, I find myself writing about her again, and not in a very favorable way. Perhaps some in Hillary’s campaign would charge me with “the-politics-of-piling-on” Hillary because she is a woman. That’s what her campaign did after Hillary’s poor outing in the last Democratic presidential debate when the other candidates went after her: It implied that the other candidates, all male, had “piled on” Hillary because she is a female. Methinks Lady Hillary doth protest too much.
I will have been in elected public office 10 years this month and have been writing for OutSmart for six of those years. I like to write, so having a column can be fun. And, as I do a lot of public speaking, I am sometimes able to re-craft speeches into my monthly article. But I must confess that too often it is a real grind to churn something out as that deadline approaches.
At the end of the year in the month of December,
I like to take stock, take some time and remember
That even though much is oppressive and hateful,
The world’s full of reasons that I should be grateful.
Anna Nicole’s surreal Funeral du Soleil. A diapered-yet-determined astronette. The birth of Dick and Lynn Cheney’s grandson, whose parents are two mommies. There are no homosexuals in Iran.
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