TODAY: SiriusXM At 2:30pm

Today around 2:30pm I'll be on Michelangelo Signorile's SiriusXM show to talk about some of the latest LGBT-related news items. The gays are on channel 108 and you can listen live online if you sign up for a freebie account. What would be your top five gay news stories this week?

On Fashion Week

Obviously the publicists that send me invites to Fashion Week have never seen me in person. Thanks anyway, but I'll wait until Old Navy's Ringer-T Spring Collection hits the catwalk.

The Dowager Blogger

Nominations for the 2012 Weblog Awards are out and this here website thingy is up against Andrew Sullivan (among others) in the Lifetime Achievement category. The list of previous winners is somewhat daunting, so let's not hold our breath. But if you'd like to discover some new-to-you but well-regarded blogs, definitely click over and scan this year's categories. You have to submit your email address to vote, but they swear you'll never hear from them again.

Change For Overseas JMG Readers

Google has made a change in the way Blogger-hosted sites resolve their URLs in some foreign countries. Instead of ending in dot-com, some of you now see URLs that end in your country code. This change is playing havoc with the comment system for some folks. While we figure out a solution that works everywhere, you might try using an IP-blocking browser add-on. That seems to work for the short term. (I do own JoeMyGod.com, but that address will just redirect you to Blogger.)

RELATED: As I've mentioned here in the past, JMG remains on Blogger (for now) due to persistent hacking attempts by our enemies. Such attacks have brought down other well-known gay/progressive sites, but I'm told that to get to JMG on Blogger, the entire service would have to come down.

TODAY: SiriusXM At 4:30pm

Today around 4:30pm I'll be on Michelangelo Signorile's SiriusXM show to talk about some of the latest LGBT-related news items. The gays are on channel 108 and you can listen live online if you sign up for a freebie account. What would be your top five gay news stories this week?

Soul Train Was My First Gay Bar

My family moved to Orlando in 1971 when I was eleven years old and that presented me with a horrifying dilemma. You see, American Bandstand and Soul Train played in that market at the same time. It was only a thirty-minute overlap, but oh how that 1:00pm to 1:30pm period tortured me. There were no VCRs (much less YouTube), so any television moment you missed was often gone forever. So I'd kneel before our mammoth 25" Admiral floor set and jerk the dial compulsively between channels 2 and 9, usually prompting my mother to scream from another room, "If you break that thing, you'll answer to your father!"

American Bandstand was the "safer" of the two shows, of course, what with Dick Clark's bland interviewing style and the safe-for-school moves of the dancers. But very early on I began to realize that there was something about many of the male dancers on Soul Train. There was an undefinable otherness to their look, their moves, their carriage. I became fascinated with a handful of them, watching for them each week, tracking what they wore, their ever-changing dance partners. Dance partners who, not incidentally, were often introduced as sisters or cousins on the occasions that Don Cornelius asked for names.

I was in my late twenties when it finally dawned on me that during those early years of my Soul Train viewing I'd been hearing the very first and faint pings of a gaydar that would rarely fail me once I recognized it for what it was. Today, of course, the fact that the Soul Train dance floor was heavily populated by gay men is almost hilariously obvious. Just keep your antenna up while clicking through those muddy YouTube video transfers or when tuning into the reruns on cable. So thanks for that, Don Cornelius. As always in parting, I wish you love, peace, and soul.

RELATED: Until my voice changed, I could totally imitate that opening scream of "Soooooul Traaaaaaaaain." True story.