I'll start this entry by saying that I don't know exactly where I am going with it - it hasn't been thought through like my other entries but by the time I finish I hope that I understand a reaction I had a couple of weeks ago and maybe both of us can learn from it? It was my birthday and to celebrate my partner invited four of our friends to dinner at Sampaio - my favorite Brazilian restaurant in Austin. We all know each other, some better than others, so I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing, fun conversation. We are all gay, fairly liberal politically, literate, educated, well-read and skilled conversationalists - what could go wrong? Religion. Maybe that's the biggest source of difference for us and in hindsight perhaps something we should have avoided. It started innocently enough; we were talking about relationships - the six of us constituted two single guys and two couples. One of the single guys, let's call him Jay, said that he made a pact with a singl