For our last Gay Modern Love essay contest winner (a response to the overwhelmingly straight NYT relationship-essay column), we're going to leave you with something short and sweet, titled "Gay Boy Love Story":
"I hooked up with this guy twice over the course of a year. It was really good and over the course of the year or so we kept in touch. We got together again a couple of months ago and we are now completely and deeply in love with one another. From hook up to boyfriend in a year- that's great progress right? (p.s. knew I loved him from the moment I met him)."

Modern Love, the Sunday column in the New York Times, has occasionally been enlivened by strippers, fatties and leukemia sex. But the fact remains that the weekly dissection of modern relationships is overwhelmingly conventional. As shown by our exhaustive analysis of themes since the series launched in 2004, Modern Love protagonists are preoccupied above all by their parents; and children, prospective or wailing. Same-generation passion: bleh. TABLE »

In response to recent allegations that Modern Love, the popular relationship essay column in the NYT, has always been a bit hetero and bland (babies and divorce, basically!), today we're publishing real-life relationship essays from the Gays. Our next Gay Modern Love essay comes from commenter BettyCrocker, in which he emerges from dating hell to fall in love - with a cop! "Late winter 2002 could pretty much count as an "Annus Horribilus" - I was laid off from my i-banking compliance job, I dumped my BF of 2 years, and my prospects for meeting someone nice seemed well-near impossible. I met an ex-Marine with an extensive doll collection, followed by an amiable bearish type who pounded 6 cocktails and jumped merrily into his car to drive home. Things were looking grim..."

The Gay Modern Love Essay Contest continues, and a last-minute entry might very well double as a performance-art project. We're taking bets on how Rod's Valentine's night will unfold... "All I really know is that Craigslist has a personals section, but I'm not really familiar with it..."

Our Gay Modern Love Essay Contest continues! In this essay, by Gay Matt, our hero finds, and leaves, love on a Newark-to-Los Angeles red-eye: "My twenties were about as romantic as taking steel wool and rubbing it on your balls, then soaking them in grain alcohol. Sure, I had a long-term relationship, but it ended with even more than the usual gay drama..."

It's V-Day! We prefer to think of that as Venereal Day, as well as the day we publish the winners of our very first Gay Modern Love Essay Contest! The first essay is by The Gay Recluse: "Thanks to Stephen, I came out twice. First as gay, then as a recluse..."
"It's late November 1998. I'm 30 years old and a total closet-case: it's past midnight and I'm scrolling through the men-seeking-men listings of Web Personals. During the day, I still like to tell myself that—although I'm not exactly a virgin in the same-sex department—whatever homo tendencies I have are basically a minor health problem; in short, as soon as I meet the right girl, I will be "cured" of the desire to say, head out to Prospect Park at 11:30 on a Tuesday night or—as I have been doing more and more as the days grow shorter—take a walk through the virtual hallways of the internet..."

Don't forget to enter our Gay Modern Love essay contest, detailed here! We've been getting some great entries so far. The deadline is February 13th at midnight, and we'll run the best ones on Valentine's Day! [Gay Modern Love]

"Boys with the boys...girls get with the girls... it's only right and natural," the Frogs once sang. As evidenced, Modern Love isn't going to run your stories of gay l-u-v anytime soon. So we want you to send them to us! Hey, it's almost Valentine's Day, and we'll publish the best ones. You can be all Manhunt-y, or get totally earnest and weepy. Or swoony. We want it all! Try to keep it under a thousand words, though. It's the internets, and our attention spans are pretty much shot. Send your stories to: sheila@gawker.com, by February 13th.

Continuing our obsession with Modern Love, that guilty-pleasure landmark of Relationships Today in the NYT's Sunday Styles section, we present some evidence. The Gay Recluse explains the column's Problem with the Gays: "In what is arguably the 'gayest' section of The Times, more women have written about gay men than gay men have... openly gay writers almost never appear, and even less frequently describe a romantic relationship." And he's done the math! Click for the tally.

If you are fortunate enough to have your overlong, overshared essay of thwarted l-u-v chosen for the NYT's Sunday Modern Love column, you might very well land a book deal. That's what Doree Shafrir finds in the Observer this week—no fewer than nine have been signed so far. (Not everybody finds the column an irresistible recruiting opportunity, however: "I read the Styles section religiously, but my eyes glaze over the Modern Love column," said an editor at Random House. "I assume it's going to be a woman getting over her divorce.") But those make the best books! [NY Observer]

We wondered yesterday who the mystery actor could be in Melora Wolff's recent New York Times Modern Love column. I mentioned I had a theory, one which was confirmed by several of the commenters. That theory, of course, was Rob Lowe (Look toward the end of this article. Same part and time frame as mentioned in Wolff's article.) A charming actor with rosebud lips and little talent. But I like him! I do. So, if that was indeed the star she bedded, a few years after his *steamy* turn in Hotel New Hampshire, then good for her. After all, it could have been him.

Who is Melora Wolff talking about in yesterday's Modern Love? She talks about a summer production of Three Sisters many years ago, in which the role of Tuzenbach was played by a young movie star. A young movie star with whom she had a sensual affair. Now she sits at home, watching DVDs of his "popular TV drama" and remembers his young, taut body. Honestly, I couldn't really tell if this was lurid or lovely or both. Either way, I really wanted to know the identity of this famous former flame. After some light research, I have a theory. Someone big in the 80's. Who do you think? [NYT]

In the yet-to-be written history of women and lesbians who've done important things during what they used to call the AIDS crisis—Rebecca Brown, who wrote the best book to date about AIDS, Terry McGovern, who founded the HIV Law Project, basically the whole staff of the staff of the Center for HIV Law and Policy—has there been any greater hero than this week's Modern Love columnist, Virginia A. Smith?

Poor Times deputy metro editor for regional news Jodi Rudoren is on the Talk to the Newsroom hot seat this week, in which readers query New York Times editors. But alas, no one has any questions for her! She is reduced to answering non-questions along the lines of "I saw your photograph today on www.nytimes.com and just thought I would say hello—I was in the Class of 1992 with you—I don't have a question to ask." What is this, Facebook? But we imagine Jodi's lowest moment came when she was forced to address this query: "Why no Modern Love this week? It's my favorite column." "This has nothing to do with me," Jodi admits, and then elaborates—along the way telling us that sex is the most searched for topic on NYT.com.

Dear Paula DuPre,

This week's New York Times Modern Love column is by Thomas Anthony Donahoe, who donated to a Boston-area sperm bank "30 to 40 times over a couple of years." Now, surprise, he's got kids appearing left and right. It's full of circuitous locutions and meaningless extraneous details like "A young waitress with a soft-spoken accent (Portuguese, I think) briskly delivered us cups of coffee." He also talks about how he doesn't want his college-age sperm-donee kid to know that he made a living, basically, from donating sperm. Guess what? Now he does, because you wrote about it in the New York Times! "The nurse at the donation center said my recipients showed positive inseminations," Thomas discloses toward the end of the article. Awesome! If indeed Thomas "made" this first kid "what he is"—and we're sure that bit of biological b.s. got the kid's lesbian moms all riled—then we're gonna pass on the kid's inevitable, terrible memoir.

A few months ago in the City section, Sari Botton talked about how tough it was for her traditional Jewish daddums —a cantor!—to accept that not only was she marrying a Catholic, she was eschewing a traditional Big Fat Jew Wedding. Thing is, though, ever since the nups, Sari has been throwing herself a sort of an ongoing reception in the pages of the New York Times.

Lisa K. Friedman totally ruined her husband's vacation by breaking her foot, that bitch. But we'd rather have every bone in our body snapped than be married to this asshole for one single second. Witness: "It is not relevant to the complaint that neither the Plaintiff nor the Defendant immediately knew that the foot was broken, despite the Plaintiff's report that she heard a "snapping sound" when she stumbled and fell. The Defendant dismissed this evidence of a broken bone, contending, ridiculously, that it must have been the strap on her sandal snapping. The Plaintiff did not feel the bone snap because she was consumed at the time by a white light of pain, so intense that it blotted out all other physical sensation." Is anyone else already convinced that this complaint should be an actual divorce filing, not a supposedly humorous Modern Love column? It gets so. much. worse.

"I was sure I could hear mean giggles coming from inside the box of tampons as I opened it." [Modern Love, NYT]

This week's Sunday Styles contained the most embarrassing, wince-inducing Modern Love yet in that column's history of personal betrayals and rampant oversharing. It's the story of Kevin, an impecunious freelancer, his wife Julie, and Frank, Julie's ex-husband. Kevin is incredibly insecure that Frank, who left Julie at the age of twenty-four because he was tired of being a full-time husband and father, wants his wife back, even though they are all old people now. Kevin compares himself to Frank in many regards and finds himself on the short end of every comparison. But how did Frank feel about the whole thing?