EDGE Philadelphia

A Nevada senator came out during a senate debate on a measure that would repeal the state’s gay marriage ban.

Although Barney Frank has only been out of Congress for a single day, he said he told Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick that he wants to be interim senator when Sen. John Kerry leaves to become secretary of state.

Mike Fleck, a Pennsylvania Republican state representative, came out of the closet last weekend, which makes him the Keystone State’s first openly gay lawmaker from either party.

Thomas Duane, New York’s State Senator from Chelsea & Hell’s Kitchen, the country’s first openly HIV-positive politician & a longtime gay activist, announced on Monday that he would retire.

A number of magazine covers turned heads this week including Newsweek’s, which called President Obama the country’s first gay president. But James Buchanan may beg to differ.

This election will be the first since the 1990s without a measure to ban gay marriage on any state ballot, yet the divisive issue is roiling races across the country during a time of tumult for the gay rights movement.

Laure Rondeau, an 82-year-old Catholic, supports Providence Mayor David Cicilline for Congress because he wants to get the troops out of Afghanistan and says Washington is losing sight of what’s happening to regular people.

Organizers are planning Serbia’s first gay pride march in nearly a decade next month - after the one last year was canceled amid threats of violence by extremists.

Questioned at a town hall last year about the "Nazi policy" of health care reform, Frank told the speaker who made the comment that talking to her was "like arguing with a dining room table." Fast forward to this year, the questioner, Rachel Brown, is challenging the 15-term Democrat’s re-election bid.

A gay-friendly Utah state senator who stepped in to finish the term of a fellow Democrat who left office early now faces an openly gay Republican opponent for his seat in the state’s legislative body. In a further twist, the Democrat who left office early was also gay.