Anna Kendrick recommends drinking on a first date 'if sex is off the table

Actress Anna Kendrick stars in the upcoming comedy "Drinking Buddies," so GQ asked her some questions about drinking in its current issue.

Makes sense.

On what potential drinking side effect not to bring up on a first date...

Two subjects to never bring up on a first date are anything to do with the actual reality of your family, and, you know, liver cancer and how we’ve probably all got it.

On whether or not a guy should pay for the drinks on the first date...

Paying on a first date is a tricky thing because even though it’s meaningless, if a guy doesn’t, or doesn’t offer, it suggests poor judgment more than anything else.

On the potential benefits of drinking...

If sex is off the table, and you’re like “Let’s try to get to know each other,” I would recommend drinking. Highly.

And, on an unrelated note, on being asked for autographs whilst underwear shopping...

There’s something deeply embarrassing about being approached when you’re holding knickers. And it’s happened TWICE!

Same-Sex Couple Marries Outside Philly Despite Ban

A suburban Philadelphia woman who tied the knot with her longtime partner Sunday with a county marriage license despite the commonwealth's ban on same-sex marriage said it was the day "that every committed couple waits for."

Dee Spagnuolo, 39, and Sasha Ballen, 38, were married at their Wynnewood home — with their three young children playing roles in the hastily arranged ceremony — after receiving a license from officials in Montgomery County.

"We're excited — we've been waiting for this day for a very long time," said Spagnuolo by phone as she sat in her kitchen with a friend doing her hair for the ceremony.

The ceremony was the latest to take place in the county where officials began issuing licenses last week — licenses that could be ruled invalid if officially challenged, although so far no such court challenges have been announced — in defiance of a 1996 state law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

"It wasn't planned, it wasn't political — it was purely out of love," she said. "This is a day that every committed couple waits for."

Spagnuolo, who met Ballen 21 years ago during their first days at Bowdoin College said, she was grateful to the local officials who granted the license "for deciding that they wanted and needed to be on the right side of history."

The licenses issued Wednesday in Montgomery County are believed to be the first to same-sex couples in Pennsylvania, the only northeastern state without same-sex marriages or civil unions. State law also says same-sex marriages, even ones entered legally elsewhere, are void in Pennsylvania.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit this month asking a federal judge to overturn the law. But before resolution of the suit, officials in the affluent and increasingly Democratic county signaled that they would grant same-sex licenses.

Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Ferman, a Republican, said Wednesday evening that a same-sex marriage license isn't legally valid in Pennsylvania, but she said it's not her place to intervene. Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane, though, has said that she will not defend the ban, leaving any defense to Republican Gov. Tom Corbett's office. A spokesman for Corbett said county office-holders are required to uphold the law but did not say if the governor would challenge the marriages.

In other states with same-sex marriage bans, licenses issued by defiant local officials have been voided by courts.

Spagnuolo cited polls indicating a steady decline in the percentage of Pennsylvania residents opposing gay marriage, and she believes acceptance has already reached a "tipping point."

"I think we, as a society, will look back at this period of time and sort of ask ourselves 'What was the issue here?' — if we're not already doing that," she said.

Spagnuolo said she believes that more and more couples coming forward to get married has helped reduce opposition as people see how ordinary they are.

"We're a pretty regular family; we live behind a white picket fence. We drive a minivan," she said. "We spend Saturdays at T-ball and gymnastics classes. There's really nothing too exciting going on here."

Another couple, Alicia Terrizzi and Loreen Bloodgood of Pottstown, married immediately after receiving a license from the county last week, exchanging vows in a park before a minister and their two young sons.

 More From ABC News

Lady Gaga Poses Nude for V Magazine

Dying Dad Films Last Dance for Daughter's Wedding

'Partridge Family' Mom Reveals Affair, Career Regrets

Sex and the H.I.V. Morning-After Pill

I RECENTLY had a serious H.I.V. scare after an episode of unprotected sex. The next day, at Whitman-Walker, a clinic in Washington that specializes in treating gay patients, I began a monthlong regimen of the drug Truvada, a form of post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP. It has to be taken within 72 hours after potential contact with the virus that causes AIDS. The price tag would normally be $1,200, but I was able to get a subsidy the manufacturer gives to low-income earners.

“You can only get this deal once,” my doctor warned.

“Jeez, I hope so,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like there are PEP regulars, right?”

She sighed. “Oh, there are.”

More than 30 years since AIDS emerged, and two decades since antiretroviral drugs transformed that epidemic into a chronic but manageable disease, conversations about H.I.V. remain awkward, especially for gay men.

When were you last tested? Did you test only for antibodies, or was it a full polymerase chain reaction test? What have you done sexually since you last tested negative?

It can be tough to rekindle any bedroom passion after such questions come up.

Two recent developments could make these conversations less awkward, or even render them moot. But they also raise troubling questions about promiscuity and responsibility that are reminiscent of debates from the 1980s.

The first development was the approval, last summer, by the Food and Drug Administration of an over-the-counter rapid-response at-home H.I.V. test kit. The test, called OraQuick and available nationwide since October, gives results 20 minutes after a cheek swab. The second is the increasing availability of PEP and of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.

PEP — the medication I am taking — has been called the H.I.V. morning-after pill, and PrEP, to follow the analogy, is akin to birth control. A study in the British medical journal The Lancet this month found that drug-injecting addicts who took PrEP were half as likely to become infected with H.I.V. as those who did not; other studies have shown that the drug reduces transmission of the virus from mother to child, and transmission among both gay men and heterosexuals.

The at-home OraQuick tests, at $20 a pop, are a bigger phenomenon than drugs like Truvada, which can be used as either a pre-exposure or a post-exposure prophylaxis, and can cost more than $10,000 a year.

A study by Columbia University researchers, published last year in the journal AIDS and Behavior, found that the at-home tests could be effective if widely used. It gave at-home testing kits to 27 gay men who reported having routine unprotected sex. Over three months, the 27 men had a collective total of 140 sexual partners; 124 of them were asked to submit to testing before sex, and 101 agreed. Of the 101, 10 tested positive (six learned of their H.I.V. status that way). None of the men had sex with a partner after learning that the partner tested positive.

The at-home test, OraQuick, also is not a sure thing. It tests only for antibodies, which sometimes don’t emerge for months after infection. So the newly infected, who are 8 to 10 times more likely to be infectious, can still test as negative.

As for the pre- and post-exposure pills, cost is not the only barrier. Of 403 H.I.V.-negative gay men surveyed in a different study by Columbia researchers, only half said they would take PrEP on a regular basis. A 22-year-old art director on the Lower East Side told me of a recent scare he had after he took home a handsome but sometimes homeless man he met at a bar. Very drunk, they had unprotected sex. The next morning the art director panicked, but eschewed the post-exposure pills, he told me, because “I’m pretty health-conscious and careful about what I put in my body, especially medicine.” (Weeks later, he did a regular H.I.V. test, which came up negative.)

Dan Savage, the nationally syndicated sex columnist who coined the concept of “monogamish” relationships, expressed similar worry, fearing that clinicians do not understand the psychology of the population they’re trying to help. “The guys these sensible health care folks are trying to reach are not sensible,” he told me. “They are self-identified idiots who can only be saved by a vaccine.” Right now, in the final weekend of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, it is a good moment to reflect on these issues. In the nearly two decades since “Rent” and “Angels in America,” a generation has grown up in a world where AIDS did not equal death. That has led to a complacency that helps explain a troubling increase in new H.I.V. infections among young men who have sex with men.

I fear that, for all their potential benefits, at-home tests and the new pre- and post-exposure H.I.V. medications might give some gay men an exaggerated sense of safety, and encourage the promiscuity that Larry Kramer, the playwright and activist, has spent so many years railing against.

When a gay crowd gathered Wednesday on Christopher Street, where the modern gay liberation movement was born in 1969, to celebrate the Supreme Court’s rulings on same-sex marriage, there was much cheering and talk about progress. But I wondered what the crowd did with the rest of their night.