Hello Towleroadies. Just wanted to write a short note and let you know that I'll be taking a break from daily blog duties through the upcoming July 4th holiday. All systems are still go here, however, with the help of Mr. Belonsky, Goff, Rogers, Thorp, Waldman, and the boys from Occupy the Disco. I hope that everyone has a fantastic and peaceful Independence Day next week. My sincerest thanks to you all for your support and participation — Andy.
Hey! A huge thank-you to GLAAD on behalf of myself, Andy Towle, Michael Goff, Ari Ezra Waldman, Nathaniel Rogers, Andrew Belonsky, and our other contributors for decorating Towleroad at the 23rd Annual GLAAD Media Awards, which were presented tonight in New York City. We won the award for "Outstanding Blog," which we split with the estimable Mombian, the blog for lesbian moms. (Personal note: The documentary series my partner Penn Bullock and I co-produced for Anderson Cooper, "The Sissy Boy Experiments," also won in the category "Outstanding TV Journalism: Newsmagazine." Thank you, GLAAD!)
Congrats, too, to the other nominated blogs, all of which are very worth reading: Bilerico Project, The New Civil Rights Movement, and Rod 2.0.
Good evening Towleroad readers. Hope everyone is having a great October.
You may have noticed that we've had a new writer on the weekends. Penn Bullock, who has done a fantastic job the past few months, has had some scheduling conflicts and can't continue. I want to publicly thank Penn for the amazing work he did here. I'm also happy to say that Penn's partner Brandon K. Thorp has joined us, and those of you who have tuned in for the past two weekends have seen his byline here.
Brandon is a 28-year-old essayist and journalist working in Brooklyn. He worked for five years as a drama critic and investigative reporter with Village Voice Media, for whom he won two Green Eyeshade Awards. In 2010, a story Brandon co-wrote with his partner, Penn Bullock, exposed anti-gay activist George Alan Rekers's international affair with a male prostitute. As a result, the writing team won a 1st place award for Feature Writing with the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and went on to produce a 4-part Rekers-related documentary for Anderson Cooper. Before moving to New York, Brandon worked for three years as a drama critic with Miami's NPR affiliate, WLRN, and currently serves as a guest anchor on Sirius XM's OutQ radio channel and writes occasionally for Gawker.
Just wanted to welcome Brandon officially. Welcome, Brandon!
A few more things...
TRAVEL
We'd love for you to take 5-10 minutes of your time and FILL OUT THIS COMMUNITY SURVEY about how you travel and what you are looking forward to travel-wise. Not only will it help us with future coverage, but it will help us attract advertisers to keep this site running.
THEATRE
Also, if you're in LA, there is a Towleroad exclusive ticket discount for Next Fall at the Geffen Playhouse. It's $40 flat for the best seat available for shows from October 25 to November 13. it's a great deal because there are no fees. Use the code TLRD40 either online or by phone to the box office.
SHARING
You might have noticed we recently put new SHARING buttons at the bottom of each post. Please feel free to use them liberally! When you like or share something it is meaningful and appreciated by us and does in fact make a difference in terms of our content being found on Google or on Facebook.
You should check out Reddit and Stumbleupon which are among the SHARE buttons on the far right side that might be unfamiliar to you. They are great sites, and we love having our content shared there as well.
FOLLOW us on TWITTER @TLRD and visit us on FACEBOOK HERE.
Finally, I wanted to thank everyone for reading and give a thanks to our advertisers for your support. I want to give a special shout-out to Becks Beer, Rdio (follow us on Rdio HERE), and the Ace Hotel which have been big sponsors of the site over the past few months. Join us for Gay Pride in Palm Springs where we're proud to be a co-sponsor of the Ace Hotel's alternative programming efforts all week.
Towleroad turns 8 YEARS OLD this week. We've published more than 26,000 posts since we started and logged more than 30 million pageviews. This has been our best year yet and we can't thank you enough for reading and coming back.
ANDY TOWLE and MICHAEL GOFF
Hey all. A couple of notes on this Friday evening as we head into 'Irene' weekend.
First of all, I wanted to say that I hope everyone reading living in coastal areas of the East Coast has taken precautions for the hurricane, and I wish you the best in getting through it. Hopefully damages will be minimal and Irene will be less of a threat than they have predicted.
I also have a brief note about the blog.
Our weekend writer Andrew Belonsky, who has done a great job over the past few months, not only on Saturdays and Sundays but filling in for me when I've taken breaks, is a busy man and won't be able to do weekends for us anymore, given the demands of his job during the week. You can find him writing at Death + Taxes Mag, and he'll hopefully be contributing here occasionally as well! I can't thank Andrew enough for the great work he has done here.
I would also like to introduce our new weekend writer, who will be bringing his voice here on Saturdays and Sundays, and some of you may be familiar with his work already — in fact I know many of you are.
Penn Bullock is a freelance writer and college student here in New York. You're probably familiar with him because he exposed Dr. George Rekers last year with his partner Brandon K. Thorp. Rekers, as you may recall, is the "ex-gay", former NARTH board member who was exposed by Bullock and Thorp at the Miami airport after bringing a rent boy back from his vacation. Penn also helped produced The Sissy Boy Experiment for CNN.
Penn, whose journalistic work has mostly been investigative with a focus on military contracting, has written for the Washington Post, and Gawker. I'm looking forward to having him here on the weekends.
A lot of people have been writing to ask us where they can get a Towleroad T-shirt.
We offered them some time ago, and we're excited to offer them again as the inaugural 2 for 1 offer in a new site we're launching called Big Gay Deal, where you'll be able to get great deals on shopping, food, entertainment, books, travel, events, and more.
To get in on our first deal, which is $25 for two t-shirts, you must do so by February 8!
Check it out, and sign up for alerts on upcoming deals at BigGayDeal.com!
Also, if you are a merchant, representative, or have a product that you think Towleroad readers would love and would like to see it offered on BigGayDeal.com, please contact us here.
Some of you probably guessed right away what you were looking at in the last banner for the site. Given some of the emails I received about it, however, some of you had no clue. I agree, it does look like something photographed under an electron microscope, but it's really much more simple than that.
Find out, AFTER THE JUMP...
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