If you have grown bored of holiday tales of geeky kids pining for BB guns or sickly green home invaders, here are three classic Christmas episodes from my favourite television series to modernize your viewing experience over the break.

Absolutely Fabulous, “Cold Turkey”

Alcohol and the holidays go manicured hand in manicured hand. This Ab Fab special from 2003 has plenty of boozy exploits and pill-induced pratfalls and contains a surprisingly warm and fuzzy resolution.

The X-Files, “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas”

This Season 6 episode of The X-Files is not only filled with spooky Christmas cheer, but also features ferociously funny lesbian Lily Tomlin. Ed Asner and Tomlin portray ghosts intent on getting Mulder and Scully to off each other on Christmas Eve. That plot summary may not read like a happy, Yuletide story, but the episode is actually a comedy.

American Dad, “The Best Christmas Story Never”

The Simpsons’ holiday episodes may get more attention and airplay, but American Dad has also started the tradition of annual Christmas tales. This episode from Season 2 features time travel and Lisa Kudrow as the ghost of Christmas past. One of the best lines comes from Kudrow when she explains why she can’t go back to her job in the tooth fairy guild: “I can’t go back, not after I left a going-away present on my supervisor’s desk. Did you know DNA was in pooh? I sure didn’t.”

Ottawa’s snow-covered streets are not the place for queers to kick off their holidays.

Luckily, the Capital Kings are staging a Christmas show tonight at The Lookout.

Hosted by the ridiculously raunchy Frank N Beans, the show will feature plenty of Christmas cheer, DJ Isabelle and an ugliest sweater contest.

Frank says he has a sack full of new routines and assures that naughty boys and girls who don’t attend will get lumps of coal shoved up their stockings.

 A Capital Kings Christmas

Fri, Dec 21, 9 pm

The Lookout

41 York St

In an interview with fellow high-profile gay Anderson Cooper, Ian McKellen, 73, star of The Hobbit, discusses coming out and the oppression he faced as a young queer living in the UK. 

"I've never met a gay person who regrets coming out," McKellen said.  

Cooper's talk show will cease production soon, but don't despair: set your PVR to record his annual New Year's Eve coverage on CNN with Kathy Griffin. 

If you're like me, Christmas music makes you mad rather than merry. If listening to "The Little Drummer Boy" for the 10th time pounds the holiday cheer right out of you, here are five modern Christmas songs to cuddle up with.

The Knife, "Christmas Reindeer"

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "All I Want for Christmas" 

No Doubt, "Oi to the World"

Raveonettes, "Come On Santa"

The Kinks, "Father Christmas"

Divergence Movie Night founder Caitlyn Pascal will hang up her projectionist hat Thurs, Dec 13. Her final event is a marathon of seven short films screening at Raw Sugar.

Pascal says two of her favourite films from the swan-song night are Put This on the Map and No Regret.

“Put This on the Map . . . gives a very current voice to queer high-school students,” she says.

No Regret (Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien) is a film by Marlon T Riggs that documents the struggles of five black HIV-positive men as they battle the stigma surrounding their infection and homosexuality.

Put This on the Map trailer 

Divergence Movie Night presents an evening of short films

Thurs, Dec 13, 6-11pm

Raw Sugar Café, 692 Somerset St W

Free (suggested donation $5-10)

The Grammy nominations were announced last week. There were some highlights (queer hip-hop artist Frank Ocean’s plethora of nominations) and some lowlights ("Call Me Maybe" as song of the year!?).

Additionally, I'm very happy Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel is nominated, although I wouldn't call it an alternative album.  

The golden gramophone for best comedy album may go to one of two favourite fag hags: Margaret Cho or Kathy Griffin.

Only two women, Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg, have won in the history of this category. This is Griffin’s fifth nomination and Cho’s second, but these two funny females face some stiff competition, form of Jimmy Fallon, Tenacious D, Jim Gaffigan and Lewis Black.

I’ll be rooting for either Cho or Griffin on awards night. Check out videos of their nominated works below. 

Margaret Cho, "Hey Big Dog," featuring Fiona Apple

Kathy Griffin, Seaman 1st Class

Queer singer/songwriter Lisa Bozikovic's sophomore album, This Is How We Swim, further explores the theme of loss she examined on her 2010 debut. Yet, This Is How We Swim is also about love. Written mostly during an artist's residency on the Toronto Islands, the album is raw with honesty and contains inspired imagery. Bozikovic took time before her show tonight, Dec 6, at Raw Sugar to answer a few questions.

Xtrapolate: Your first release dealt with death, and your new release further explores loss framed against bodies of water. What is it about this subject matter that drew you to tackle it artistically?

Lisa Bozikovic: My first record was made over the course of a very difficult two years, during which I lost my mother to sudden death. I wasn't so much inspired to write consciously about that loss, but rather some of the songs simply came to me as I was working through moments of grief. It was therefore less a choice to write about grief and more of a cathartic need. My new record, This Is How We Swim, is a much more cohesive record than my first, and it's a bit more intentional in its whole undertaking. I wanted to create a sort of watery dream world where love was constantly transforming into loss and vice-versa and to write about the overwhelming change I was feeling at the time. I was very interested in exploring the potential for growth that can come out of loss -- or rather the insight, strength and joyful urgency that can come out of living through painful experiences. I dialogue with this idea of transformation throughout, using the metaphor of water and its changing states -- whether it is a song about love, death or my own relationship to control and loss generally.

X: This Is How We Swim contains great imagery. What is it about the element of water that inspired you?

LB: I wrote the majority of this record during a focused, two-month stay at Gibraltar Point artist residency centre on Toronto island. I was surrounded by water, and it felt as if my whole being was somehow being reset by the constant sense of movement in the wind and waves. I had always wanted to live beside a lake but had never experienced it for such a long period of time before. Not surprisingly, I found water imagery and symbolism started to flood into my songwriting, and water, in its constant flux, became a very good metaphor for the feeling of transformation that was at the time already happening inside of me. I spent more time alone than I usually do, which was sometimes not at all enjoyable. But it really helped me face some things about my own relationship to control and also heal from some of the deep shock and grief I had been living in.

X: You are adept with many instruments. Do you have a personal favourite, and is there one instrument that was challenging to master?

LB: I've played classical piano since I was five, so that's where I feel most at home and confident. I'm a terrible guitar player, and I'm very limited by basic fingerpicking and bar chords. However, I find some of my strongest songs are songs that begin on guitar. Maybe the restrictions of not being able to "do" a lot makes me focus on the melodies and lyrics and the physicality of the singing itself. Whereas when I write songs on piano I can get carried away with thinking of the whole arrangement before I have a solid melody in place to anchor it. I also generally write the best songs when I'm not thinking and the process is a little bit more organic and subconscious. My piano training sometimes keeps me in my head a bit too much. I want to focus more on learning about synths and electronic music so that I can begin to write songs from the starting point of texture and sonic environments rather than concepts, arrangements or theory. I think amazing things could come out of that and I would lose myself for hours.

X: How do your debut, Lost August, and This Is How We Swim differ as collections?

LB: I worked closer in collaboration with both producers, Sandro Perri and Heather Kirby, on this record, and the instrumentation is much more consistent throughout. With the exception of the solo song "Fever Dream," the whole record was recorded in an intensive two-week period in one space. I think it really encapsulates a particular vision at a particular time. It is the kind of record you can put on and feel a sonic continuity from start to finish; it sort of takes you on a journey.

X: Would you say your sexuality has influenced your art?

LB: When I started playing shows in Toronto six years ago, they were almost exclusively within the queer community, and I found a lot of support and encouragement there. I still love performing at queer events. I was actually supposed to play Ottawa Pride but had to cancel on account of my mom's passing, but I am also part of a broad range of communities, and not all of them are necessarily queer. I like spending time in different, sometimes opposing, sorts of social spaces. I don't feel fully satisfied or actualized when I'm only living within a particular or small subculture. That being said, I would not be who I am without my queer community and I feel that being queer is ultimately about thinking critically and questioning oppressive and normative spaces, so it's sort of indistinguishable from how I live my daily life and also how I create.

Lisa Bozikovic with Kite Hill and Her Harbour

Thurs, Dec 6, 8pm 

Raw Sugar Café

692 Somerset St W

$8

Listen to This Is How We Swim on Bozikovic's official site.  

The board chair of the Centre for Inquiry (CFI) says the Ugandan "Kill the Gays" bill is a modern form of genocide.

Kevin Smith organized a protest outside the Ugandan High Commission in Ottawa on Monday, Dec 3, the day Uganda's parliament is expected to pass the bill. He says the bill's passage is like "Nazi Germany in 2012."

"Some have called it the homosexual holocaust," he says.

Although some media report the bill no longer contains capital punishment, Smith says his contacts at SMUG Uganda, a sexual minority advocacy group, inform him that is not the case. 

Smith says he witnessed officials fleeing the high commission before the protest started and took notice when he saw one Ugandan official with a car seat in his vehicle.

"I thought to myself, what if that baby grows up to be gay or lesbian?" he says. "Would you kill your kid?"

CFI's national director, Michael Payton, says the bill is largely inspired by rightwing American evangelicals who have travelled to Africa to influence emerging nations' policies.

"Many pastors in that part of the country, and likely those who helped draft the bill, were trained in the United States by Pentecostal and Baptist ministries," Payton says. "Unfortunately, it's an American phenomenon where collection plates come in to fund bills like these and influence other parts of the world."

Barbara Freeman, a member of the First Unitarian Congregation of Ottawa and Capital Rainbow Refuge, an organization that helps queer refugees escape persecution and come to Canada, calls the bill "heartbreaking."

"I'm disappointed that there are not more faith groups here [at the protest] from the conservative religious traditions," Freeman says. "Surely they don't believe it's okay to kill gay people. Jesus, in their eyes, preached love, foregiveness and understanding, universal love for all. He also said thou shalt not kill, so I don't understand why the Ugandan government thinks this is okay."

Freeman says she doesn't like to reference the Holocaust but likens the bill to a form of ethnic cleansing.  

Through her work with Capital Rainbow Refuge, she has found that many queer Ugandan refugees flee to neighbouring Nairobi, where they face waits of up to four years before their claims are processed.

"Although in this country we think the gay rights or LGBTQ struggle is over, it's not in other countries," she says.

Freeman, Smith and Payton urge Canadians to contact Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird's office in addition to their MP and let them know Canadians would like to see aid to Uganda blocked if the bill is passed. Baird's office did not respond to CFI's request for a dialogue on this issue, Smith says. 

Payton says the situation in Uganda may be too far advanced to rectify from overseas.

"Imagine an atmosphere where this type of bill can even get grounding and be passed," Payton says. "There has to be a deeply homophobic culture in order for that to thrive. That's not something that can be changed with a protest or contacting an MP. That's decades of work."  

Ugandan parliamentary speaker Rebecca Kadaga said she would pass the bill as a "Christmas present" to the population. 

The Centre for Inquiry is an educational charity that promotes reason, science, secularism and freedom of inquiry.

Contact SMUG Uganda and read more about the "Kill the Gays" bill. 

CFI board chair Kevin Smith (left) and CFI national director Michael Payton outside the Ugandan High Commission, Dec 3.

Writers Ophelia Benson, Ania Boula and Vyckie Garrison are opposed to the bill.  

Ania Boula flies her flag of freedom.

Several studies claim that, while the pre-holiday season is lush with holly and hopeful children, late-November through mid-December is the time of year most of us will ditch or be ditched by our significant other.

One 2010 study by David McCandless gathered data from more than 10,000 Facebook status updates, searching for the use of the words "break up" and "broken up." McCandless's study found that the month before Chrismas is the likeliest time for breakups, alongside spring break, while Christmas Day itself is the least likely (see a graph of breakup highs and lows at the end of this post).

If your partner has given you an aversion to mistletoe this year, here are 10 breakup songs you can sooth yourself with. The list features many queer artists, including Peaches, Gossip, Woodpigeon and Tegan and Sara. This opener from Swedish imp Lykke Li is an obvious choice and a great song if you can overcome the off-key chorus. For more breakup tracks, pick up Li's 2008 debut, Youth Novels, which is essentially a breakup album (also see "Little Bit," "I'm Good, I'm Gone" and "Let It Fall").

"Breaking It Up," Lykke Li

"Darling we're here but my true love is not." 

"How does it happen all of a sudden? Finger to button, push it and nothing."   

"Love Long Distance," Gossip

"I heard it through the bass line. Not much longer would you be my baby." 

"And if your baby's gone back. He's gone for good." 

"Back in Your Head," Tegan and Sara 

"Build a wall of books between us in our bed." 

"Knives Out," Radiohead

"Look into my eyes. I'm not coming back."

"Cupid don't you know that, that it's over?" 

"Not in Love," Crystal Castles, featuring Robert Smith

"And we were lovers. Now we can't be friends. Fascination ends." 

"You were not there for me. I just moved on. I've been moving on for so long." 

"And the licence said you had to stick around 'til I was dead. But if you're tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am."

A graph of breakups throughout the year, according to British writer David McCandless's 2010 Facebook study. Breakups peak before Christmas and during spring break. Additionally, while Monday is widely considered the worst day of the week, it is the least likely day for a breakup to occur.