Winging my way home from a solid week in the South… the longest I’ve been away from San Francisco since coming home from my round-the-world trip in April 2009.

Work was the impetus for this journey — in my day job as a user-interface software engineer I work at a startup in San Francisco with an office in the Atlanta suburbs. For a company of barely a hundred employees we’re remarkably dispersed: in addition to the SF and Atlanta facilities, we have people in Austin, TX; Minneapolis, MN, Washington, DC, and Toronto, Canada. The magic of high-speed connectivity stitches us together some, but occasionally it’s worthwhile to garner some good old-fashioned facetime.

Business travel may seem humdrum, but the opportunity for observation nevertheless abounds. To kick things off I headed to Washington, DC over the weekend, where I now have four different friends from three completely different stages of life (L.A., Chicago, and way back from high school in Montreal) living in the city and surrounds. A couple of them I hadn’t seen in almost (or over) a decade. In a sense, this was a mini re-enactment of the connections I made in my travels — that global spider-web of connections I wrote about in Wander the Rainbow. It’s a commonplace scenario for most professionals in the United States: our circle of friends expands even as many avail themselves of the opportunities and mobility of this continent-sized country. The result: friends scattered all over. It’s sometimes an effort to try and stay in touch with them all, but it’s an effort eminently worthwhile. All those social networking sites help!

Even in Atlanta the party continued: Amid co-workers plying me with Southern cuisine (including barbecue and colorfully-named sodas of dubious health benefit), I managed to sneak away and visit yet another high school chum who’d relocated to the Peachtree city (yes, they have way too many roads named “Peachtree,” some of which intersect each other!) We spent a Tuesday evening catching up and reminiscing, as well as keeping two adorable, gregarious kids entertained with the Lightsaber app on my iPhone.

The South often gets a bad rap in the rest of the country, but my experiences in both DC and Atlanta belied that: a friend of mine once remarked that Washington is a big northeastern city cross-pollinated with a small southern town. It’s got the intimacy and charm of the latter while retaining the bustle and international flavor of the former (tip: a terrific “pan-Mediterranean” eatery in Dupont Circle made for a fabulous dinner one night). Atlanta, meanwhile, offered up congeniality enough to confirm all those cliches about Southern hospitality. And the weather, sultry and hot the entire time (though it had cooled off some in DC following an epic electrical storm right before my arrival — felled tree limbs everywhere) was actually a nice change from the chill of San Francisco.

Well, not entirely: chill weather is easy to find in the South… just go into any building, where the turbocharged A/C is cranked so high I found myself donning layers. It’s Northern California inside-out!

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As promised, here’s my review of Eat Pray Love on gay.com.

Whatever your feelings about the movie or book (no shortage of opinions pro and anti, it seems), I will say it boasts jaw-droppingly gorgeous locations and a few equally hunky guys. And Julia, of course!

Also a big thanks to all of you who showed up at Books Inc. last night; it was another very successful event and it led to some engaging discussions about travel and life changes. A special shout-out to a couple of guys who post on FlyerTalk, the frequent flyer discussion site… my trip wouldn’t have been the same without a pile of frequent flyer miles, and these folks wanted to hear all about it!

If you’re in San Francisco and want to pick up the book, Books Inc. still has a couple of autographed copies left. Get ’em before they’re gone!

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In between  all the news about California’s gay marriage stay of execution, there also appeared this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Wander the Rainbow and the event tonight at Books Inc.

It’s our first appearance in print media (and online of course as well)… for all the changes going on in that industry, it still holds relevance and sway… to say nothing of the feeling of seeing one’s name in print!

Meanwhile, the Books Inc. counter (on their website) is ticking… we’re looking forward to making this a breakout event.

See you tonight!

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The Wander the Rainbow road show continues — this time back in San Francisco!

Tomorrow night (Thursday, August 12) we’ll be at Books Inc, 2275 Market Street at 7:30 p.m.

As the West’s oldest independent bookseller, Books Inc. operates 10 stores in and around San Francisco — an example of an indie retailer more than holding their own during these transitional times in the bookselling business. We’re thrilled to be holding an event at one of their stores.

More information about the event can be found here.

Looking forward to seeing any and all Bay Area folk tomorrow night!

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The folks at gay.com have deputized me once again — this time to go to the movies.

I’ll be at a special advance screening of Eat Pray Love, the new Julia Roberts film based on the bestselling travel memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I didn’t catch the book on its initial release in 2006, and only happened upon it midway through my own world journey. Gilbert’s adventure differed greatly from mine — she did longer stays in a handful of countries, and her book is filled with the sort of spiritual discoveries that leave secularists like me shaking our heads. Nevertheless, there are commonalities — as there are between many works of travel literature where a personal story is involved.

I’m looking forward to seeing how they translated this breezy, rambling (and somewhat divisive — people either loved it or hated it) book to the big screen… and who knows, maybe someday in Wander the Rainbow’s future a movie adaptation awaits…

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It seems a bit strange to be turning this book blog into “the gay marriage channel,” but it seems that’s the way current events are trending.

Barely a week after my own father married two men back in Canada, a court here in California ruled that the voter-backed ban on gay marriage in California, the notorious Proposition 8, is unconstitutional.

The play-by-play has been done to death so I won’t get into it here, but suffice it to say that in spite of an election year that saw a Democratic sweep of Congress and the election of America’s first black President, this retrograde bit of referendum-style balloting still managed to win — partly thanks to a firehose of money and effort by the Mormon Church, a subject capably covered in a documentary recently released on DVD.

What always amazes me, though, is in spite of all the millions spent and ideological certainty put forth by gay marriage opponents… well, not one of them has ever come out and actually explained why gay marriage in any way “weakens” families or the traditional institution of marriage. We get the usual silly platitudes about “the Bible says so” (it really doesn’t) or “soon people will be asking to marry their dogs” (the notion that consenting adults in love is what’s at issue seems to have escaped them). But analysis? I’ve looked everywhere for it, and aside from a passing mention in some Wall Street Journal piece some years back about fluctuating divorce rates in the Netherlands, have found not a single shred of evidence, anywhere that allowing gay people to marry will in any way weaken existing marriages, harm children, or other jeremiads that issue forth from the religious right.

I move that, just like Germany has banned public expressions of Nazism from the post-World War II German state, that any bans on gay marriage be require to call themselves just that — “gay marriage bans.” No obfuscating language about focusing on families or protecting sacred institutions or other misleading nomenclature that probably helped Prop 8 win passage (and even with that, narrow passage at best). It’s time that bigotry and narrow-mindedness be forced to call itself what it is.

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A few weeks back, on a summertime visit to my family in Montreal, I wrote about two of my parents’ closest friends, a couple for 25 years, planning to finally tie the knot now that gay marriage is official and legally enshrined in Canada at a federal level — one of only a handful of countries where this right exists. More surprising to me was that my father, an attorney, was to officiate at the ceremony. Most surprising of all, however, was the overall blasé-ness of all parties involved, who’d make so little hay of it I only found out about the whole affair as a passing conversational remark.

Well, last weekend they did the deed! It’s still surreal to me, living in a country where this is now hotly contested, to see a marriage certificate with the names of two men on it — no different than such certificates for straight couples:

Both parties and family members were thrilled and deeply moved… and my seven-year-old niece, upon hearing that the two men (whom she’s known all her life) had gotten married, responded with a joyous “cool!” on hearing the news. It’s good to see that the next generation is taking these changes in stride… and far’s we can all tell, the institution of marriage in Canada seems to be doing just fine.

Congratulations guys… you’re a beacon to the rest of us!

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The folks at gay.com are having a giveaway!

It’s easy: answer a few fun trivia questions from events and places mentioned in the book, send in your answers to the site, and win!

As you’d expect, the questions are funny, juicy, sexy… and not too hard.

Good luck!

Click here to go to the contest page

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For those of you who’ve read (or are reading) Wander the Rainbow, you’ve probably picked up on a motif running throughout the book: my continued fascination with movies, and how they partly inspired my choice of locations worldwide.

I was reminded of this last night when attending a showing of (yes, really) E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the now-classic Steven Spielberg movie I’m just old enough to remember seeing for the first time in theatres.

But not a theatre like this! Oakland’s Paramount Theatre is a movie palace from Hollywood’s Golden Age, in its day the largest on the West Coast. A band of dedicated locals have kept the place alive and in top Art Deco glory — right down to uniformed ushers and pre-show newsreels and cartoons. Heading to the East Bay for this event with some friends felt like a mini-re-enactment of parts of my grand world journey.

I was equally impressed with this classic kids’ movie’s power to entrance: In attendence were scads of little ones, all a generation younger than the film. In spite of living in a CGI-saturated era, however, the audience was just as enthralled with this film as I remember them being back in the early 1980s: applause in all the right places (including those magical bicycle lift-offs devoutly yearned for by every cyclist kid with an imagination), laughter throughout… and more than a bit of nostalgia for those days of Asteroids, Dungeons & Dragons, and kids able to safely navigate Halloween trick-or-treating after dark.

For my part, I was reminded how those sci-fi films of the 1970s and early 1980s inspired my imagination and will to take flight: like Elliot, I yearned for something more than my familial existence and school-day life — though growing up in snowy Eastern Canada in a somewhat old-school community at-times hostile to Hollywood flights of fancy, the California suburbs depicted in the film seemed to me impossibly exotic.

Perhaps, then, that’s the role of imaginative films like E.T.: Not only to entertain, but to inspire the imaginative among us to look beyond their immediate surroundings and off to the horizon… where incredible places, amazing experiences, and (though it hasn’t happened to me yet) the odd extra-terrestrial may come calling.

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With the book successfully launched, many of you are wondering “what’s next? “Will there be a book tour?” “What else are you planning?”

Answers: Yes — lots coming up!

We have another event scheduled here in San Francisco — a reading and signing at Books Inc. in the Castro. For those of you who missed the previous event — or who simply want more Wander the Rainbow in their lives — mark your calendars for August 12 at 7:30 p.m. More details (including a mass invite) are coming soon.

We’ll also be announcing more dates and more locations; most of these will be in the Bay Area and Southern California to start with, but we are planning some forays elsewhere.

We’re also planning a book giveaway and contest with gay.com, featuring some clever trivia questions about the book and destinations mentioned within it.

In the meantime, our reviewers have been busy! Check out the reviews page for the latest on what people have been saying.

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