SPACES ARE LIMTED. EARLY REGISTRATION IS RECOMMENDED.

What is a brotherhood retreat?

This 5-day retreat is an international gathering of HIV-positive gay and bi-sexual men who seek to enrich their lives through deeper insights, awareness and connections to both the community and oneself. We will be learning about medical, psychological and spiritual tools to help create healthier and more fulfilling lives while forging bonds and friendships with other HIV-positive gay men from different parts of the world. The program will include informational and instructional sessions as well as exercises and participation by all the attendees with attention given to the full body-mind-spirit connection. We will also have plenty of time for social activities with movie screenings, nature hikes, and some parties.

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With the exception of Tom Ford’s A Serious Man (nominated for Best Picture), today’s Oscar nominations have us focused almost entirely on gay director Lee Daniels’ moving picture Precious, which is up for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Best Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique), Best Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher), and Best Film Editing (Joe Klotz). That’s six nominations. And come March 7, the film could very well win them all.

Best Picture. It’s up against The Hurt Locker and Up In The Air, sure, but we expect Academy voters to shun the blockbuster fare of Avatar in favor of 2009’s most buzzworthy film. A vote for Precious is a vote against domestic violence, or so its producers are hoping everyone believes. The film stars blockbuster names (Mariah Carey, Mo’Nique), but not blockbuster attitudes. It didn’t just move theatergoers to discuss the film, it created a dialogue. And because of its commercial success, a vote for Precious doesn’t just reward a picture that moved people, but rewards a picture that did so while propping up the industry.

Best Director. Besides an endorsement from Oprah, director Lee Daniels is not on an uphill battle. He’s the odds-on favorite. His competition is not Inglourious Basterds’ Quentin Tarantino, but The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow. Daniels’ telling of a sexually abused and forgotten teenage girl, who achieves small triumphs along the way, is a story more human than other of the other contenders. That doesn’t make it Oscar bait, but Daniels’ so-far humble acceptance of the industry’s lauding will go a long way.

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“Don’t ask, don’t tell” is up before a congressional hearing today. And Mark Silk, at Spiritual Politics, thinks President Obama ought to take his pledge to dump the policy which has shoved thousands of gay military people out of uniform, a step further: He should pray on it.

Obama will again attend the National Prayer Breakfast sponsored by The Family, or The Fellowship, or whichever name you prefer for the Christian prayer group that’s sponsored the event for years. The breakfast comes up Thursday and the question is what moral issues Obama will bring up when he goes to break bread with believers.

attended Fellowship events in the past and had to be firmly, publicly uninvited from the breakfast this year, is still pushing a bill that would imprison, even kill, homosexuals and jail people who fail to report their gay friends.

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Drag queens sashay down the runway, lip-syncing to RuPaul’s “Main Event,” escorted by their drag mothers. The mother-daughter fashion show has begun, and immediately we realize: we’ve never seen anything like this on TV. The mamas are only mommies for a day — older gay men plucked out of their quiet lives to be transformed into drag queens as part of a reality show challenge. They’ve never worn heels, makeup or dresses.

And a test it is. Heels prove a giant obstacle for a couple of “mothers” who have trouble walking in their own shoes because of disabilities. But there they were in a Culver City studio last July, filming an episode of the second season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which premieres at 9 p.m. Monday on Logo.

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It takes a certain amount of nerve for a former Mormon to make a film that takes on the Mormon Church for alleged political meddling in one of the biggest gay-rights battles in recent history.

It takes even more nerve to then unveil that movie in Utah, the home of Mormon Church headquarters and the epicenter of the Latter-day Saints faith.

Clearly Steven Greenstreet — a Silver Spring resident, onetime adherent to the Mormon faith and co-director of “8: The Mormon Proposition,” one of the buzzier documentaries to debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — isn’t lacking in the audacity department.

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Washington (CNN) — President Obama will ask Congress Wednesday night to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bars gays and lesbians from openly serving in, White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod told CNN.

The request will be included in the president’s State of the Union address, Axelrod said.
The issue has been a source of contention for heavy hitters on both sides of the issue, who are lining up for a fight.

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Ted Haggard’s wife says counseling has cured him of his compulsions. It has been more than three years since charismatic pastor Ted Haggard left his megachurch in disgrace, mired in a scandal involving drug use and a male prostitute. But the woman who stood by him says now that the experience has brought them closer together than ever.

“Our relationship is better than it’s ever been. Going over this mountain together has given me the marriage that I’ve always longed for,” Gayle Haggard told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Wednesday in New York. Gayle Haggard had come to discuss her new book, “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.” Although the dilemma was painful, the answer, she writes, was simple: She loved her husband.

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Richard Socarides, the former LGBT advisor to President Bill Clinton, leans in to President Obama’s failing on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell pretty good in a concise Wall Street Journal op-ed that, we’d argue, could have been even harsher. And by could, we mean should.
Socarides is no fool.

He knows what happened to his former boss in the early 1990s, when the DADT “compromise” was made, to let gays serve in the military, but without being able to do so openly. And he understands Obama’s strategy is to avoid past mistakes.
Except, he writes: “What is especially troubling, however, is Mr. Obama’s oversensitivity to a dwindling minority of bigots on this issue. Hundreds of military careers have been destroyed on his watch for no valid reason.

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