Hey, Gay Placers! Welcome to our new, clearer, hopefully more reader-friendly format. Beginning this week, we dispense with the box of segregated listings and integrate all of our hot gay picks for this week and beyond into the full calendar of listings. Hey, why should we keep all this big gay love to ourselves?

Kate Getty and I will continue to pen the dang things and try to bring you the best. Just look for the crown icon in each of the Calendar days as well as in the Now & Later section.

This box? Check here each week: It will serve more as a true column, offering excerpts from our Gay Place blog and highlights from the week’s listings. To wit:

This week we exclaim! Mamma Mia!, quite simply the gayest portrayal of heterosexuality, ev-arrr. Check our blog for full rave and fiercely earnest defense of the much maligned moneymaking mess … and be sure not to miss Softball Austin‘s fundraiser this week at the Alamo South. It’s an ABBA Sing-along. Nuff sed. See Monday, Aug. 4.

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