This is an odd side story in Torah. The plot doesn't require Joseph to go astray. But there's something here that adds both suspense and a sense of destiny. But for running into the stranger, the day would have unfolded differently, and so might our history.

Like all queers of my age, I lost countless friends back in the 80s and early 90s. The best minds of my generation, as Ginsberg might have said. But then the reprieve set in and lulled some of us into a blessed and well-deserved forgetfulness. And now, it seems, is the time for waking up. Because I've now reached the age where the normal bell curve is beginning - the first of my peers dying at disappointing but not quite tragic ages, victims of long Latin names that translate loosely to "natural causes."

As I write this, it is May 26 and I am, it seems, still married in the State of California, a member of one of 18,000 clever, or lucky, or merely bewildered same-sex couples. This is a fascinating turn of events, in which an important civil right (marriage), once inconceivable, became conceivable, then statutorily withheld, then constitutionally interpreted into reality, then snuffed out again by vote of a simple majority.