We write blog posts at Bent Alaska about many upcoming events, but Alaska’s LGBTQ community is so busy that we can’t possibly blog about all of them. And it’s hard to keep track of all our events to begin with! Bent Alaska knows just how hard, especially since the Alaska GLBT News email list has been on hiatus this month.

We’ve been working hard to fix things. Well, we’ve finally figured out how to synchronize our Facebook events with the Google calendar embedded on our Alaska LGBTQ events page, and so we feel ready to announce:

We have a really good events calendar now!

Check it out.  We’ll embed it in this post, too, so you can easily see what’s coming up, and also just how easy this calendar is to use.

To get more details about any of the events, simply click on it, and the entry expands to give you that detail: description, date and time, costs of admission (if any), links to Facebook events pages or other websites where you can get more information about the events.  You can easily switch back & forth between Agenda, Week, and Month views simply by clicking on the tags. We begin each entry with the locality, so you can easily find events in your local area.  We’re also doing our best to include recurring events (tagged with an >> icon) — for example, the weekly recurring SEAGLA Friday Social in Juneau, or the month LGBT discussion group at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks.

Is your event not on our calendar? That’s easily remedied: simply write to us at bentalaska@gmail.com or, better yet, set up your event on Facebook and invite Bent Alaska. Since we also post events we learn about on Bent’s Facebook wall, this will also serve to advertise your event to our many Facebook friends!  (You can also invite Mel Green, who does a lot of the calendar work.)

Please include date, time, location (including street address), cost of admission (if any), link(s) to where further information can be found (including web pages, Facebook events pages, etc.), and any other information about your event.  Caveat: we only include events that are relevant to the Alaska gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer/questioning community.

Don’t think you can remember to visit our events page every week? Here’s some ways to make things easier:

• Subscribe to our Google Calendar through Google Calendars. It’s also easy to import individual events to your own Google Calendar. (Depending on how geeky you are, you can also sync to Outlook or iCalendar or whatever other calendars you use.)
• Embed our calendar on your own web page. Here’s the code you need:

<iframe src=”https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?mode=AGENDA&amp;height=500&amp;wkst=1&amp;bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&amp;src=bentalaska2%40gmail.com&amp;color=%235B123B&amp;ctz=America%2FAnchorage” style=” border-width:0 ” width=”640″ height=”500″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>

• Follow @bentalaska on Twitter and/or “like” Bent Alaska’s Page on Facebook (not the same as our profile). We’re going to be doing our best to tweet/post there about upcoming events as they come up (as well as continuing to highlight our blog post about all the stuff we write about here).

We hope you’re as happy about these improvements as we are. If you have comments or suggestions about how we could do even better, please let us know.

Meanwhile, this weekend…

…don’t forget these great events. Further details by clicking on them in our calendar.

Anchorage area

• Bridgman/Packer Dance performs Friday and Saturday nights at the PAC. This is the show’s only weekend.
• The Who’s Tommy at Mad Myrna’s this weekend and every weekend through May 14.
• Mad Myrna’s Friday Night Diva Variety Show follows Tommy, with karaoke to follow.
• Illusions of Delusion kicks off a new & ongoing drag show at the Crazy Horse Saloon.
• The band Ever Ready plays Friday at the VFW in Eagle River.
• The NE2.0 Crew is hosting a potato feed Saturday (& they’ll also deliver!).
• Kodiak Bar & Grill’s regular Saturday night performance of the Lip Gloss Review will not take place this week, but will resume May 7.
• On Sunday, the 2011 Bike for Women will be held in Chugiak.
• Also on Sunday, the ICOAA Imperial Crown Prince and Princess Ball XIX will be held at Mad Myrna’s.

Fairbanks

• LGBT discussion group at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fairbanks.

Juneau

• SEAGLA Friday Social.
• Juneau Pride Chorus annual concert at the JACC on Saturday evening.