Happy Birthday, GCL!

GCL turns 3 today! Feel free to roll your eyes but I'm gonna celebrate. For the past 36 months I've been tapping away at this laptop trying to make sense of my life, politics, and pop culture. I've made some enemies, I've caused trouble, I've said some incendiary things - in short, I've had an amazing time.

When I started this blog I was just getting smart to this whole "digital revolution" and what it meant for a PR underling like myself who was trying to get ahead in the world. The goal was, and still is, to share a screen with Larry King or Anderson Cooper - but in the meantime, being a relentlessly gay conservative liberal has brought me tremendous satisfaction and even professional gain. I never articulated this thought until now, but I'm proud of this blog.

Over the past three years I've been able to write about some pretty exciting stories, most notably the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of our country. That was without a doubt the most exciting time for me as a blogger. I know I ticked off a lot of people with my skepticism about his candidacy(yep, I called him the Antichrist), but I stand by what I said then - we were on the cusp of a monumental election, it wasn't the time for blind allegiance, it was a time to ask questions, it was a time to make demands from democrats who had lost two elections to the worst President in our nation's history. I was also glad to write about the situation in Colombia, my mom's homeland, both from a political and personal perspective - the release of the U.S. hostages along with Ingrid Betancourt, whose story was one of the first I ever followed on this blog, was a thrilling moment for me. It was equally thrilling, though in a different way, to make the trip to see my grandma in Colombia, in spite of our differences about my "lifestyle," and enjoy the city and home that had been such an important part of my childhood. Speaking of my lifestyle, I've delved into my own issues with gay life through this blog; it's been an exploration that has found me expanding on my faith and the place it occupies in my life. Some people have found this insightful, others have found it preachy, self-hating and backwards. Quite simply, it's an on-going dialogue that will likely never be resolved for this Jehovah's Witness kid from Brooklyn.

So what's ahead? Let me tell you, it's been hard for me to keep up with this blog these days. And it's not for lack of material - what with Prop 8, DOMA, Iran and my crazy family, I could spend all day writing. This anniversary is the kick in the pants I needed to rev up my posts - there's a lot going on in the world and I firmly believe that someone, a gay conservative liberal perhaps, should be out there talking and getting people to think, or at the very least, get them pissed off.