Brian and Juan, Doug and Tom, and the man whose mother wouldn’t let him give his real name.

It was a weekend house—until I got a letter from the landman, telling me I was living on a huge, untapped source of natural gas. Riches beckoned. How much were my environmental principles really worth?

You may have heard that HIV infection is on the rise, or that the effort to develop a vaccine has dead-ended. But in recent years, with every new setback and breakthrough—including sensational word of a new “morning after” pill—gay men have been changing their behavior, adopting ingenious methods to keep the virus at bay. As a result, the one commandment of the past twenty-five years—always wear a condom—is fast becoming a relic.

As a presence in the world—a body hanging from a subway strap or pressed into an elevator, a figure crossing the street—I am neither markedly masculine nor notably effeminate. Nor am I typically perceived as androgynous, not in my uniform of Diesels and boots, not even when I was younger and favored dangling earrings and bright Jack Purcells. But most people immediately read me (correctly) as gay.

Ali Hili is a gay Iraqi whose government forced him to spy on other homosexuals. Now, after a daring escape from his home country, Hili is doing everything he can to make up for the past

Yusra Abdu's mother and father had no idea what their 17-year-old daughter was planning, or if they suspected something, they're not letting on. In the Palestinian West Bank, surrounded by Israeli soldiers and steeped in a half-century of warfare, it is not always wise to say what you know. To hear them tell it, Yusra is as wonderfully frivolous as teenagers come, a girl obsessed with music and fashion, a girl who "if you bought her a new dress every day, she wouldn't say no, " her grandmother tells me one afternoon in the chilly four-room apartment the family shares.

In order to turn the murdered soldier Barry Winchell into a martyr for gay rights, activists first had to turn his girlfriend, Calpernia Addams, back into a man.