Saturday  from 7 p.m. to about 11 p.m. EST, we will be live tweeting from the Obama speech at the HRC Equality Dinner and from the 365gay meetup near the Capitol.

Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. check in to our home page for a live group tweet – with photos and video – on the March and Rally.

Who will be tweeting?

Your favorite 365ers, including Ali Davis, James Withers and Jennifer Vanasco; Logo’s John Polly, Jon Mallow and Ray Hunt; and – wait for it – Gavin Creel, from the cast of Hair, and New York City Council Speaker and out lesbian Christine Quinn.

You will be able to comment in real time in the Twitter stream (we’ll be using CoverItLive – you won’t need a Twitter account, just a computer), answer poll questions and feel like you are there.

Buses leave from Williamsburg, Chelsea (where you can ride with NYC Countil Speaker Christine Quinn), the Upper West Side/Columbia, the West Village and Washington Square/NYU Most tickets are $34. Broadway Impact’s free buses are sold out)

Buy a ticket here.

Jenny and I will be driving. Ali Davis will be flying from California. James Withers – OK, I don’t know how James is getting there, but he’ll be there. We all hope you’ll be there, too.

It was looking pretty good.

Last summer, at the Democratic National Convention, a few NY state leaders assured me that if Democrats won control of the state legislature, marriage would come up and pass.

We all know how that turned out.

Still, Jenny and I were holding out hope that Gov. David Paterson, despite his waning clout and flagging poll numbers, might be able to ram a bill through before he was voted out of office.

But Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor and one of its most powerful politicians (and a friend of equal marriage) now says that is a pipe dream.

Says Gay City News:

“I don’t know how to get it to come up,” [Bloomberg]  said, explaining his view that having the issue move to the Senate floor may prove more difficult than rounding up the votes. “If you want my honest opinion,” Bloomberg continued, the Senate leadership is unlikely to move a gay marriage bill “when I don’t see these guys willing to stand up for less controversial issues.”

Despite the fact that the number of states with legal gay marriage quickly shot up to six this past spring, the mayor said, “I ‘m scared to death that the country is going in the wrong direction… I think on other LGBT issues they are clearly moving in the direction that I think they should go and you probably do too. It’s the marriage thing that I don’t see.”

Even in New York, where Paterson and his predecessor Eliot Spitzer have been outspoken in supporting gay marriage, Bloomberg argued, “Whether anybody who runs for governor next year will stand up for gay marriage, I’ll bet you 25 cents no.”

Read Gay City News for detailed info on the depressing political maneuvering.

Jenny and I both want to get married – and celebrate our marriage – in a state where it’s actually legal (New York recognizes marriages performed out of state, but we want the whole, “By power invested in me by the state of New York thing. And yes, we know that state marriage in ANY state doesn’t mean any federal rights.)

It is depressing that after the excitement of last year, when it seemed like states were steadily lining up to bring equality to gay couples, we now might lose marriage in Maine in November, Washington State domestic partnerships are threatened, and New York, which looked so promising, now looks so unlikely.

Here’s hoping that Bloomberg is wrong – or just half right – and that gay and lesbian couples like us  won’t have to schelp to Connecticut (admittedly just over the border) or Massachusetts.  We want to get married in New York. And we should be able to.

Since then, we have made an art of the protest. We carried Silence = Death signs during the AIDS crisis. We ate fire with the Lesbian Avengers. We stormed the country because we were furious about the passage of Prop 8. And we kissed our partners in Salt Lake City and around the country to protest the Mormon handling of gay PDA.

Today, the Freakonomics blog at the NY Times has a circle of experts pontificating on whether protests work.

Their answer?

It depends.

Chester Crocker, professor at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service says that protests matter, but they might wind up having a negative affect. They can undermine governments, apply pressure on policymakers, and get media attention.

Crocker says that some of the most effective protests happen in democracies that already recognize civil rights and political liberties and when they’re “led by skillful political activists and organizers who understand how to manipulate public opinion and targeted at concrete rather than abstract ideological goals.”

On the other hand, street power, he says, can get out of hand and subvert the democratic process.

Political Science professor David S. Meyer adds:

“A protest is a signal about who you are, what you want, and what else you might do. . . . Demonstrators can stiffen the spine of would-be allies in government, suggesting there might be advantages in pressing for new positions on climate change, abortion, or gay marriage. No savvy politician will admit to changing direction in response to demonstrations in the street, but of course, it happens all the time.

When activists make progress, it’s always less than what they want.  . . . People don’t generally take to the streets looking for smaller reforms, but often it’s only by asking for more that they get anything.”

What none of the experts say is what we implicitly know: protests help make a movement out of outrage; they get people involved in the political process; they show people that their voice, their anger, can make a difference. They are outlets for creativity. They educate. They help make a community out of a group of people who may have nothing but their race, gender or sexual orientation in common.

Protests help change policy and change minds, yes; but they also teach the protesters how to organize, how to lobby, how to get media attention. In short, they help create a class of people to lift the whole group up.

So whether or not protests seem to work right away; whether or not the protest itself seems misguided; we need to keep protesting until all our rights are won.

“You must not desist from protesting because you don’t see an immediate result,” said Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University. “What immediately looks like a failure may turn out to be a success.”

I would love to meet you – whether you comment regularly or not – and it would give you a chance to meet each other, give me in-person feedback, etc. 

What do you think? And, if you live in/near DC, where would you suggest we meet?

“I hated what happened,” Clinton said about DADT. “This policy should be changed.” But he said that gays and lesbians didn’t deliver the Congressional support his administration needed to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve. The compromise as first proposed, he said, would have allowed gays and lesbians to attend Pride Parades and political events without consequence.

As for DOMA, Clinton said it was necessary to head off the possibility of Congress passing a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage.

The video is at Good As You.

At HuffPo, Lane Hudson explains in his own words.

Here’s the transcript, via Pam’s House Blend (who got it from Rex Wockner):

Lane Hudson (screaming from the audience): Mr. President, will you call for a repeal of DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell right now? Please.

Bill Clinton: … You want to talk about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. You couldn’t deliver me any support in the Congress and they voted by a veto-proof majority in both houses against my attempt to let gays serve in the military, and the media supported them. They raised all kinds of devilment. And all most of you did was to attack me instead of getting me some support in the Congress. Now that’s the truth.

Secondly — it’s true! You know, you may have noticed that presidents aren’t dictators. They voted — they were about to vote for the old policy by margins exceeding 80 percent in the House and exceeding 70 percent in the Senate. The gave test votes out there to send me a message that they were going to reverse any attempt I made by executive order to force them to accept gays in the military. And let me remind you that the public opinion now is more strongly in our favor than it was 16 years ago, and I have continued supporting it. That John Shalikashvili, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under me, was against Don’t Ask — was against letting gays serve — is now in favor of it. This is a different world. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

Let me also say something that never got sufficient publicity at the time: When General Colin Powell came up with this Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, it was defined while he was chairman much differently than it was implemented. He said: ‘If you will accept this, here’s what we’ll do. We will not pursue anyone. Any military members out of uniform will be free to march in gay rights parades, go to gay bars, go to political meetings. Whatever mailings they get, whatever they do in their private lives, none of this will be a basis for dismissal.’ It all turned out to be a fraud because of the enormous reaction against it among the middle-level officers and down after it was promulgated and Colin was gone. So nobody regrets how this was implemented any more than I do. But the Congress also put that into law by a veto-proof majority, and many of your friends voted for that, believing the explanation about how it would be eliminated. So, I hated what happened. I regret it. But I didn’t have, I didn’t think at the time, any choice if I wanted any progress to be made at all. Look, I think it’s ridiculous. Can you believe they spent — whatever they spent — $150,000 to get rid of a valued Arabic speaker recently?

And, you know, the thing that changed me forever on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was when I learned that 130 gay service people were allowed to serve and risk their lives in the first Gulf War, and all their commanders knew they were gay; they let them go out there and risk their lives because they needed them, and then as soon as the first Gulf War was over, they kicked them out. That’s all I needed to know, that’s all anybody needs to know, to know that this policy should be changed.

Now, while we’re at it, let me just say one thing about DOMA, since you — the reason I signed DOMA was — and I said when I signed it — that I thought the question of whether gays should marry should be left up to states and to religious organizations, and if any church or other religious body wanted to recognize gay marriage, they ought to. We were attempting at the time, in a very reactionary Congress, to head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states. And if you look at the 11 referenda much later — in 2004, in the election — which the Republicans put on the ballot to try to get the base vote for President Bush up, I think it’s obvious that something had to be done to try to keep the Republican Congress from presenting that. The President doesn’t even get to veto that. The Congress can refer constitutional amendments to the states. I didn’t like signing DOMA and I certainly didn’t like the constraints that were put on benefits, and I’ve done everything I could — and I am proud to say that the State Department was the first federal department to restore benefits to gay partners in the Obama administration, and I think we are going forward in the right direction now for federal employees. …

But, actually, all these things illustrate the point I’m trying to make. America has rapidly moved to a different place on a lot of these issues, and so what we have to decide is what we are going to do about it. Right now, the Republicans are sitting around rooting for the president to fail, as nearly as I can see.

Prop 8 is upheld – there will be no new gay marriage in California. But the 18,000 couples in California who were married last summer will stay married.

More to come after we read the decision. Read the gay marriage decision for yourself.

In the meantime – want to protest? Check out DayofDecision.com to find an event tonight near you.

A great recap of how we came to this point is at the LA Times.

Prop 8 press conferences are live here until 2:30 EST.

One of them is Wyoming.

Wyoming, where 10 years ago, Matthew Shepard was robbed, pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fence and left to die.

Wyoming.

Though it’s not like the other 45 states WITH hate crime laws are perfect. Only 32 of them cover sexual orientation. Only 11 cover gender identity.

Last month, the House passed a hate crimes bill by a wide margin – a bill which would protect gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders in all states, including ones like Wyoming that have no hate crime bills of their own. But the Senate is more complicated.

Currently, the sponsors of the bill are looking to attach it to a bill that is likely to sail through the Senate, because it is not strong enough to survive on its own. Hopefully, the President’s support – he said it would “enhance civil rights protections, while also protecting our freedom of speech and association”  – will help facilitate this process.

But even if it does pass, it’s not enough.

Last night, at a discussion hosted by Turner’s employee affinity group, Matthew’s mother Judy Shepard expressed dismay and frustration that 10 years after his son’s death, little progress had been made.

“I never thought I’d still be doing this 10 years later,” she said, her voice quiet but firm.

She said that prosecution is only one piece of the puzzle –  we also need to focus on prevention.

Prevention of violence means education. It means school anti-bullying laws. It means explaining to kids that saying “that’s so gay” is not a neutral term but a loaded one inspiring anxiety in gay and lesbian classmates. It means trying to eliminate the culture of hate where it grows – in families, in churches, in schools.

It is exactly this education piece that our opponents are worried about.

Anti-gay legislators – people like Rep. Virginia Foxx, who called Matthew Shepard’s death a “hoax” in front of his mother, before apologizing – are worried that we will educate people into understanding that gay, lesbian and transgender people are perfectly normal. They worry that their children and grandchildren will grow up in a world where no one shudders at the sight of two men holding hands, or two women pledging commitment to each other in white gowns.

They worry that it will be SO normal, that perhaps one of their daughters will kiss another girl and think nothing of it; perhaps one of their sons will fall in love with another man.

They worry that their values will no longer be the country’s values.

And they are right to worry, of course. The acceptance of gay rights IS generational. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be growing up with the idea that gay is A-OK.

Even so, we are far from a world – or a country- which practices non-violence toward our community. In the past week, here in Manhattan, four different people were attacked in what seem to be anti-gay crimes. Attacked in Chelsea, the center of the gay community, in one of the most liberal cities in the world.

We are not yet safe, no matter where we live.

Sharon Staple, executive director of New York’s Gay & Lesbian Anti Violence Project, says we will know we have our full civil rights when we can walk down any street in this country, in any city, holding our partner’s hand and not being afraid.

In New York or in Wyoming, that day still seems very far away.

Welcome to our new section, 365gay’s Ask the Expert. Each week, a different expert will answer your questions on law, health, relationships, news and personal finance.

Our expert schedule:

The first week of the month: Vincent Smith/ health and Jennifer Vanasco/news and politics
Second week: Yetta Kurland/law and Daniel Leary/gay etiquette
Third week: Joe Kort/Relationships and 365gay News/news and politics
Fourth: Marc Delphine/personal finance

You can ask your question here.

Launched today: Questions and answers on health, relationships and news – read them here.

Who are our experts?

Law expert – Yetta Kurland

Yetta Kurland is a civil rights attorney and tenant rights activist.

As a civil rights attorney, Yetta has worked to provide legal services to underrepresented communities. As a tenant rights activist, Yetta has worked on creating sustainable and affordable housing solutions for New Yorkers, and has defended tenants in eviction proceedings to protect their rent stabilized and rent controlled homes throughout the City.

Yetta lives in Chelsea with her partner Elizabeth and their two Italian Greyhounds, Sal and Luca. She is currently running for New York City Council. Her website is YettaKurland.com.

Yetta will answer questions about law and legal issues the second week of every month.

Personal finance expert – Marc Delphine

Marc Delphine is a financial adviser who has been practicing financial planning for over seven years. He is currently working on developing Pride Funds, a division of Equality Funds, which is a mutual fund that invests in gay-friendly companies to advocate for progressive management practices. Marc lives in Oregon.

Marc will answer questions about personal finance the fourth week of every month.

Relationships expert – Joe Kort

Since 1985, Joe Kort, MA, MSW has been specializing in Gay Affirmative Psychotherapy, Marital Affairs, Mixed Orientation Marriages, Sexual Addiction, Sexual Abuse, and Imago Relationship Therapy.  He trains straight clinicians about Gay Affirmative Therapy around the country.

Joe is the author of 10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do To Improve Their Lives and 10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do To Find Real Love on gay male identity and relationships. His latest book is Gay Affirmative Therapy for the Straight Clinician: The Essential Guide.

An adjunct professor teaching Gay and Lesbian Studies at Wayne State University’s School of Social Work, Joe’s website is www.joekort.com.

Joe will be answering questions about relationships the third week of every month.

Health expert – Dr. Vincent Smith

Dr. Vincent Smith earned his MD from Stanford University and his masters in public health from Harvard. He is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.

Vincent will be answering questions about health and medicine the first week of every month.

Etiquette expert – Daniel Leary

Daniel Leary is an actor and a comedian. His video blog “Mores for Gays” started on AfterElton.com and is now a show on Logo. His website is DanielLeary.net.

News & politics expert – Jennifer Vanasco

Jennifer Vanasco is editor in chief of 365gay.com and an award-winning, syndicated columnist in the gay press. She writes about politics and social trends; her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Chicago Reader, Washington Blade, Chicago Free Press, Newsday, and the Independent Gay Forum. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Headline Club has three times awarded her the Peter Lisagor Award for opinion writing. She has worked as a writer for Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the University of Chicago Law School, where, yes, she met Barack Obama. Briefly.

She lives in Manhattan with her partner Jenny and their dog Max.

Jennifer will answer your questions about news and politics every first week of the month.

The makeup of the Supreme Court affects every corner of American lives, because the decisions the court makes affect us all – from whether we can be arrested while having private consensual sex to what actions we can and can’t take against our government.

David Souter was nominated in 1990 by President George Bush Sr. – but as the Court has swung to the right (Alito, Roberts, Thomas) he has become a reliable, moderate voice.

Souter voted with the majority in the 1996 Romer v. Evans, which held that a Colorado amendment forbidding any municipality from protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination was unconstitutional. He also voted with the majority on the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated sodomy laws. In the 2000 Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the Court held that the Scouts couln’t be compelled to accept a gay Scoutmaster. But Souter voted with the dissent, which said that “The law broadly protects the opportunity of all persons to obtain the advantages and privileges of any place of public accommodation.”

In short, on the main gay rights cases that were before the U.S. Supreme Court during his tenure, Souter was on our side.

Obama is likely to replace this moderate judge with another moderate judge. Odds are that the new judge will be a woman, since there’s currently only one, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on the court.

NEXT PAGE: A lesbian on the Court?