Love is All Around (Gay/Lesbian Relationship Breakups Division)

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca. – A workshop is being offered here to provide guidance to lesbian and gay couples whose relationships are ending, and not a moment too soon, if organizers are to be believed, and why shouldn't they be? They, after all, are the experts.

  The Bay Area Reporter, a free weekly newspaper (“Serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971”), noted in a May 6 piece that the first session of the two-part course was Friday (May 8). The second will be Saturday, June 5.

 The appealingly named Judy Appel, the executive director of Our Family Coalition, the coordinating organization, told the paper, “Our families, like all families, go through all the same cycles of meeting and getting together and having relationships, and unfortunately, sometimes breaking up.”

  She added, referring to mismatched state laws regarding same-gender marriage and domestic partnerships, “There’s [sic] definitely complicating factors that heterosexual couples don’t have to think about. … We have to work so hard to build recognition of our relationships that sometimes we’re reluctant to talk about the breakups.”

  This is true. Heterosexuals, who allegedly revere the state of holy matrimony, have made it easy on themselves to get out of it. Gays and lesbians eager for the day when same-gender marriage spreads across the land need take note.

  (And if their relationships are crumbling, they can visit www.ourfamily.org, a URL for which we would create a hyperlink if hyperlinks didn’t disappear with dispiriting regularity from this blog, something about which the good folks at Google have some explaining to do.)

Love is All Around (Public Transportation Division)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - It is inarguable that Danish culture is extremely socially progressive.
   In 1969, for example, Denmark was the first country to legalize pornography, a move for which it should be awarded a Nobel prize, as have been some of its authors and physicists (for literature and science, not, alas, for pornography). 
  In that tradition - the socially progressive one, not the pornographic one - a bus company in the capital city of Copenhagen (population 1,181,239) has decided to put what it calls "love seats" in its buses to spur light-hearted conversation and even, perhaps, romance. 
  Two seats on each bus are covered in red cloth and sport a "Love Seat" sign, according to a May 3 post on the Web site of AFP, an international news wire service. 
  "Even love at first sight is possible on the bus," Martin Wex, a spokesman for the Arriva bus company, told the AFP. "You never know what will happen. We cannot guarantee that you will find the person of your dreams. We are just offering the possibility for people to communicate, to smile a bit more, and, possibly, to win someone's heart."
  The experiment, already a success - Mr. Wex said drivers have noticed lightened moods on buses - will last a fortnight, and is secondarily geared to getting drives out of cars and into buses. 
  This is incredibly touching, and is the sort of thing one hopes might catch on worldwide, but with modifications appropriate to the culture that appropriates it.
  For example, here in America the seats would be termed "Hate Seats" and equipped with bullhorns and earplugs. That way, people could scream political slogans at each other without being required to engage in civil dialogue.
  The seats would be outfitted with holsters for the participants' handguns and a selection of hors d'oeuvres from Taco Bell, Burger King, Jack in the Box and McDonald's. 
  Out of deference to the troubling gastronomical habits endemic to the United States, the seats would be the size of small beds, the better to accommodate the ever-expanding American badonkadonk.

  (In an interesting geographical side note, Denmark, one of the three Nordic countries - the others are Sweden and Norway - is possessed of a peninsula named, quite reasonably, Jutland. This is not unlike having a mountain range named Reachpeak, which, come to think of it, would also be an excellent name for an exotic dancer or, indeed, a fitness coach.)