Tap Into Queer Rage This Pride With These Scorching LGBTQ+ Books
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about queer rage. It is so necessary right now to build coalitions around anger, to embrace wrath as a political tool and way of moving through a world becoming increasingly hostile for the most vulnerable parts of the queer and trans community. So often, I don’t know what to do with anger. It can be an emotion that freezes me, traps me. But I’m trying not to let it. I’m trying to move with rage, to turn it outward. Perhaps, then, it might seem odd for me to recommend books for channeling rage. Reading is a solitary act on the surface, but it’s also a way to explore complex emotions, to deepen our connections with history and community. The books below all harness Autostraddle’s 2023 Pride Theme, RAGE PARTY, in some way, allowing space for anger and other “ugly” emotions. These books span various genres but all speak to the power of queer anger — in explicit or implicit ways. Read these works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and then let yourself fill with rage and release. This Pride, let’s remember that the path toward liberation doesn’t repress our rage; it requires it.
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
An essential liberation text in general, Sister Outsider contains Audre Lorde’s 1981 keynote speech “The Uses of Anger.” While I maintain that this entire collection is a must-own book in all queer households, you can also visit this particular speech online. Spend some time with it this weekend.
Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns
This hot, thrilling, delicious debut novel is full of anger and other messy emotions. I wrote the following about its protagonist Damani in my review:
Your Driver Is Waiting gives gas to Damani’s rage. Her anger is not only sympathetic in the story but celebrated. She has so much to be angry about. And yet this is no Angry Brown Woman trope. Damani is so aware of how she has to move through the world to survive, how she has to smile for passengers, grind her teeth instead of saying what she feels. When she does act on her anger, it satiates. It’s cathartic.
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 by Sarah Schulman
This book is an undertaking. I will be honest with you and confess I have not finished it. But every time I sink back into it, I’m struck by the balance Schulman brings to her reporting, archival work, and extremely personal and community-based approach to documenting ACT UP New York during its peak years. Don’t let the size of the book scare you; it’s immensely approachable for a historical text.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen Chen
Accompany reading this lush and livid poetry collection with the Electric Literature interview Chen Chen did about embracing queer anger. When asked about some of the tonal differences between this book and his debut, Chen Chen says:
I discovered mainly that I was a lot angrier than I thought I was, when it came to family. It was also something I was really interested in exploring, as a subject of its own, because I think so often, when we see queer narratives, queer characters are often not allowed to be really angry. Or that anger is really one dimensional; it’s an anchor that reduces them to a stereotype or a caricature. I wanted to delve into a much more complicated and layered kind of queer anger because I just think that’s honest.
Burning Butch by R/B Mertz
Anger isn’t always at the surface of this simmering memoir about the author reckoning with their Catholic upbringing as a trans nonbinary butch, but from its striking cover to the ways Mertz injects fire into their quest to figure out who they are on their own terms, Burning Butch brims with queer and trans rage in its own quiet ways.
Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada
A work in translation, Bad Girls is a novel that follows a tight-knit group of trans sex workers in Córdoba, Argentina. The novel brings in elements of humor and of the fantastic, part trans coming-of-age tale, part macabre fairy tale. There are lots of intense emotions at its core, and rage is definitely one of them.
Nature Poem by Tommy Pico
I meeeeean, I truly do believe this is one of the best poetry books published in my lifetime. In the book-length poem, queer NDN speaker Teebs declares:
I can’t write a nature poem
bc it’s fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience.
Slap! A! Tree! Across! The! Face!!!!!! If you haven’t been introduced to the wonders of Tommy Pico’s work, this is a great starting point. It’s sexy, hilarious, smart, and yes, full of fury.
The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter
This memoir uses a combination of personal writing, history, political and cultural analysis, Afrofuturist and Black feminist thought and theory to paint a gorgeous and complex picture of Black queer life. It makes space not only for anger and pain but also joy and hope.
If you really want to lean into this reading list, start a Rage Journal to keep alongside engaging with some of this work. Jot down the things you’re angry about, what that anger feels like, and how you intend to let it out or transform it. And shoutout any books you think engage with queer and trans rage in the comments!
How a Far-Right Moms Group Is Threatening Queer Liberties in Schools
feature image photo by GIORGIO VIERA / Contributor via Getty Images
Two years ago, Florida moms Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich started a group called “Moms for Liberty” with the goal of ‘standing up for parental rights’ in America. Their rallying cry implored parents nationwide to band together to protect their children — an undeniably powerful message — but their idea of “protection” was extremely specific. It started out opposing Covid mask mandates for students and has since expanded into an influential nationwide movement to push anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black laws, strip classrooms of critical thinking, and ban queer and race representation from libraries and curriculum.
Today, Moms for Liberty (or M4L) is one of the most powerful far-right, conservative advocacy groups in America’s public education. A June 6 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the group “extremist” and “one of the most recognized names in the anti-student inclusion movement”, owing to the dramatic power they have amassed in their fight against ‘the woke agenda’ in schools. And they are alarmingly fast-growing.
In its short existence, the group has spread to 250+ county chapters across 42 states. It boasts over 100,000 members — primarily conservative families who are made to feel empowered by “protect your children” messaging and then used as foot soldiers to peddle a far-right agenda. And it’s not just this army of parents that bolsters their growing power; it’s their strong political backing, corporate influence, and ability to sway public opinion.
Let’s take a look at how they wield some of that power.
In their home ground of Florida in 2022, M4L’s inaugural national summit keynote address was delivered by governor and Presidential race runner Ron DeSantis, a vocal supporter of the group’s work. Soon after, he helped the group’s members get appointed to school boards across Florida, and they worked hand-in-hand with lawmakers to push the state’s perilous Don’t Say Gay/Trans bill among other conservative actions.
DeSantis then nominated M4L leader Bridget Ziegler to the board of Disney World, thus enabling them to dig their claws into the children’s entertainment giant and drive content decisions. Last month they even attacked an elementary school teacher for screening a Disney movie with a gay character, nearly ending her career. Ziegler continues to be vocal about getting more anti-LGBTQ legislation outside of just Florida, masquerading it as a parent’s right to be involved in their child’s education.
It’s no surprise that M4L’s state chapters are borrowing similar pressure tactics and political favors to reshape school boards and advocate for conservative legislation across states like South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, New York and Ohio. These efforts are backed by Republican politicians and leaders with great influence. For instance, Presidential race runner Nikki Haley has recently added to their public voice. Former President Donald Trump and DeSantis are both on the list of speakers for this month’s M4L summit — not coincidentally, happening during Pride month. This movement is quickly gaining momentum as the ‘new face of the Republican party’ and their agenda threatens queer liberties in the classroom and beyond.
Another issue this group is zealous about is banning Critical Race Theory materials in schools. Take a look at this North Carolina M4L member who is all for teaching truthful history, but against “labeling people as oppressors and victims solely based on the color of their skin” — a confusing way to teach the “truthful” history of race. Interestingly, in her point about how we mustn’t see color in racial history, she invokes a Martin Luther King quote — an age-old tactic to co-opt historical figures and distort their message. She continues to warn parents of terms like social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, saying that “those inherently good things are being used to disguise a biased political agenda.”
Most recently, the group has been the most influential voice behind the book bans that are catching people’s attention nationwide. Of the nearly 1,500 instances of book bans last year, one-fifth of them were a result of far-right advocacy, and these Moms were at the forefront. A quarter of the titles banned were because of the presence of queer characters or themes (8% contained trans representation). Books have also been banned for mentions of race, abortion, mental and sexual wellbeing, and teen pregnancies, among other things. This saddening suppression of free expression is just another nail in the coffin of public education, being hammered in by M4L as a part of their manifesto against progressive learning.
M4L’s Manifesto: An offensive anti-queer distortion
One of M4L’s main talking points in schools is to tear down Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), an educational framework that centers on inculcating traits like self-awareness, social awareness, good decision making, cognitive skills, growth mindsets, values, empathy, equity, and perspective. Essentially, the key traits and abilities that make young people well-rounded humans. However, M4L’s manifesto frames it a little differently…
‘Don’t be fooled,’ it warns in its Guide for Parents. ‘The goal [of SEL] is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression.’
As an education researcher at NYU’s Metropolitan Center and as a Brown, queer person, this highly offends me. So let me set the record straight real quick: Decades-worth of evidence shows social and emotional skills are essential to learning and life outcomes. When they are integrated into school programs, systems, and teaching strategies, they can improve academic outcomes, physical and mental well-being and future success, and decrease emotional distress.
The attack on SEL is just a new page in the far-right playbook against critical thinking and acceptance. More importantly, it is a dangerously slippery slope that erases the identities and lived experiences of young queer and trans people and racial minorities, creates unhealthy and unsafe familial situations, and stunts the growth of students. The SEL framework of pedagogy is central to the liberties of diverse young people — which is exactly why M4L is distorting and attacking it.
This Pride let’s learn from these Mobs, I mean Moms
‘Our founders are Tiffany and Tina,’ M4L’s website reads, ‘moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.’ In reality though, the only thing they’re stoking is the narrative of fear, and their tactics are extremely effective. They use words like “protection” and “rights” to ironically build cages around gender and trans expression and racial realities. Their accumulation of power is strategic — in messaging, political positioning, corporate partnerships, and grassroot mobilization nationwide.
So this Pride, let’s learn from our opposition so we can beat them at their game.
Let’s put our collective strengths toward organizing, mobilizing and taking seats of power where they matter in public education. Like the coalition Defense for Democracy — frustrated by M4L’s takeover of their school board in the Hudson Valley, they started a counter grassroots movement in New York that has now spread to Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, gaining national traction against far-right crusaders. They work hard as allies of the queer community by rallying at school board meetings, supporting public school librarians facing pressure from M4L, working with elected officials to protect civil rights through Pledges, and wielding social media to expand their state chapters.
Let’s pay attention to distorted narratives and hypocrisies in school politics to act swiftly against them. Like the National Center for Lesbians that filed a lawsuit against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay/Trans bill, or GLAAD and Equality Florida that are dismantling the bill’s legitimacy in public forums, organizing protests with students, and creating trackers to monitor anti-queer rhetoric and misinformation by public officials.
Let’s channel our pride towards making schools safer, more inclusive, and more representative of diverse identities by playing the game that these Mobs are playing, but better.
This Pride, let’s fight fire with our fire.
Try These Exercises for Better Strap-On Sex
feature image photo by Eillen via Getty Images
It’s pride month! Tops and switches are busting out their backpacks, dusting off their strap-ons, and preparing for The Great Pride Pounding. If you’re one of those strap-on wearers limbering up for summer nights, you might be wondering: Are there exercises for better strap-on sex? Yes, my darlings — there are.
Today we’re sharing tips from Daddy — yep, that’s what she asked us to call her — a butch daddy lesbian and Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist with a degree in Health Science. For the past 14 years, Daddy has been providing exercise and fitness services. More recently, those services include gender-affirming fitness programs for trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming folks; and in her “STRXP” playlist on TikTok, she’s been sharing exercises for better strap-on sex.
If you want to build a strapping bod (pun intended) and if strength training is safe for your specific meatsuit, read on. These exercises (ahem, sexercises) will turn you into a strap-on sex champ.
First, let’s start with Daddy’s general fitness tips.
Stay consistent.
Getting into an exercise routine can be intimidating, especially if you’re one of many people who were traumatized by PE, so start slow! You shouldn’t expect yourself to lift a Subaru during your first workout. If you want to get stronger, you just need to be consistent.
“My biggest tip would be to find a space and a routine that you feel really comfortable doing, and then do your best to make that into a new habit,” Daddy says.
You don’t need a gym membership and a bunch of fancy equipment — bodyweight exercises at home can help you build strength in a comfortable environment.
Exercise with a healthy mindset.
If you’re a living, breathing person, you’ve probably encountered gross messaging about why and how you should exercise, and Daddy isn’t here for that rhetoric. But if you want to get stronger for sex — or maybe for something more wholesome, like being able to carry lots of rescue cats — Daddy’s all-in.
“I want to teach people that exercise isn’t a punishment — exercise can be used for so many different things, and it can really bring positive changes into your life,” Daddy says. “If I can inspire someone to go to the gym because they want to be better in bed, I think that’s incredible. I want to build a community focused on that instead of reasons why society tells us we have to exercise.”
Of course, if you know you have a disordered relationship with exercise or don’t adequately fuel your body, then it might not be safe for you to start a new fitness routine right now. Talk to your doctor and/or therapist — they can help you determine if and when it’s safe to get started.
Know your muscle groups.
According to Daddy, if you want to build strength to improve your strap-on game, you should focus on the posterior chain — aka your hamstrings (those run along the backs of your thighs), glutes (those are booty muscles), and lower back — plus your shoulders and core, especially if you like to be on top of your partner in a push-up position.
“You need endurance to stay in that position, plus the strength and endurance for the hip extension,” Daddy says. Hip extension = thrusting, but you pervs probably figured that one out on your own.
Now that we’re on the same page, let’s get jacked for our best sex acts! Here are Daddy’s top four bodyweight exercises for better strap-on sex.
Couch Hip Thrusts
You knew there’d be hip thrusting, didn’t you? For this exercise, sit on a couch. Then slide your body down and walk your feet out, until your butt is off the couch and your back and head are resting on it. Dip your hips down, squeeze your glutes, and raise your hips back up. Repeat for 30 seconds. Then pause. Try to do three to five rounds. This exercise will improve your pounding strength and endurance. Here’s a TikTok of Daddy doing this move on a gym machine:
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Sliding Plank Pikes
Start in a plank position. Then squeeze your core and slowly slide your feet up towards your hands, keeping a flat back. This works best if you’re wearing socks on a hardwood floor, but you can also put a towel under your shoes if you’re working out at a gym. This is tough, so if you have wrist or shoulder pain, you might want to skip this one. Here’s a TikTok where you can watch Daddy slide it out:
@bodybydaddy We in tbe biz call this “functional training” #wlw #lesbiansoftiktok #lgbtq #gayfittok
Sliding plank pikes will improve your core strength and stability so you can keep on thrusting all day, all night, and all throughout pride month. Do these for 30 seconds. Try to do three to five rounds.
Push-Ups
You’re probably familiar with push-ups. If you can already do them, have a trusted fitness friend check on your form so you know that you’re doing push-ups safely and working the right muscles. Your wrists should be in line with your shoulders and your back should be straight.
Variations: Try doing push-ups while on your knees, do push-ups with your hands on an elevated surface (like the bottom step on a set of stairs), or stand and do push-ups against a wall. Another great way that beginners can train push-ups is to practice negative pushups — you start in a plank position, lower your body down to the floor, and then use your knees to assist in the pushing-up part. Here’s a TikTok where Daddy demonstrates this move:
@bodybydaddy A NEGATIVE CAN BE A POSITIVE- YOUR WELCOME FOR THE DAD JOKES- ILL BE HERE ALL WEEK. #pushuptip #lgbtq #wlw #gymbeginner #gymtip #gayfittok
The amount of push-ups or push-up variations you should do will vary based on your experience and your individual needs. Daddy recommends doing trying sets of ten for three to five rounds.
No matter which variation you choose, working these muscles will help you brace yourself over your partner with less fatigue — that means longer, stronger thrusting!
“Hollow Body” Exercises
Hollow body exercises are great for folks with joint pain, because they don’t require you to put pressure on your wrists. There are lots of variations out there. Here’s one that Daddy described for me.
Lie on your back with your arms above your head. Lift your arms and legs about six inches off the ground while tucking your pelvis in, so that your lower back is flat against the ground. “Your low back will fight you and want to arch — fight this!” Daddy says. “Contract your lower abdominal muscles to keep the pelvis still.” Hold this position for ten seconds. Over time, you can work your way up to holding it for 30 or even 60 seconds.
Hollow body exercises work your deep abdominal muscles, which give you overall stability for any strap-on sex position and improve your thrusting endurance.
Here’s a TikTok of Daddy demonstrating a hollow body position:
@bodybydaddy Replying to @Lily 👑for my princesses out there ! #wlw #lesbiantiktok #lesbianworkout #queercouple
Do you ever workout for the purpose of improving your sexual performance? Tell us about it in the comments! Good luck with your fitness, you strap-on champs!
Quiz: What’s Your Pride Vibe?
It’s Pride — ever heard of it? Perhaps you’d like to browse Autostraddle’s ongoing Pride package this year, called RAGE PARTY, because it’s about the multitudes contained by Pride, a nexus of immense joy and immense anger, of recreation and resistance. But today? Today, we’re having just silly, goofy fun with one of my famously “upsetting” quizzes in which I ask you a series of chaotic questions and then probably drag some aspect of your personality.
In The Terrible We, Cameron Awkward-Rich Makes Space for Bad Trans Feelings
Like many queers on the Internet, I found myself perusing the 2023 Target Pride collection when it dropped earlier this month. (Full disclosure: I bought the rainbow buttondown shirt.) Over the past few weeks, I found myself returning again and again to look at the “Cure Transphobia” sweatshirt, created by trans designer Abprallen. [Note: I wrote a draft of this article in mid-May, and by the end of the month, Target had pulled some of its Pride merchandise, including this sweatshirt, after conservative backlash to the collection. I’ll address this at the end of this piece.] The light pink sweatshirt features a design of a blue snake twisting around a winged staff, references to dominant symbols of medicine as well as the colors of the trans pride flag. Wrapped around a staff is a banner that reads, “CURE TRANSPHOBIA, NOT TRANS PEOPLE.” At a cultural moment in which transphobic politicians and right-wing thought leaders propose bills banning healthcare for trans kids and adults, and amid a national legislative assault on trans lives, the shirt affirms that transphobia is the social disease that needs to be eradicated, not trans people. The message of the sweatshirt is clear: Trans people are not sick, but transphobia is.
This sweatshirt is one cultural object through which we might explore the dynamic relationship between disability politics and transgender politics. Historically, trans identity and embodiment have been pathologized in U.S. medicine. As the sweatshirt suggests, generations of medical and psychiatric professionals have strived to “cure” trans people of their non-normative gender identities. Current anti-trans legislation works in this tradition, as it proposes to make providing gender-affirming care a crime in order to deny trans people access to the medical care they need. Scholars working at the intersection of trans and disability studies examine how medical institutions and laws like these regulate gender and sexuality in ways that often reinforce the gender binary and deny trans people (and all of us) bodily autonomy.
I was thinking a lot about the “Cure Transphobia” sweatshirt while reading The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich, an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Awkward-Rich’s book, which is a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards, builds upon the intertwined histories and politics of trans and disability studies to examine the stories we tell about transness and illness.
Taking a close look at transmasculine writing and trans studies itself, Awkward-Rich implores readers and scholars to think with what he calls “trans maladjustment,” what he briefly describes to me as the “durable association between trans identity and particular forms of bad feeling.” Rather than disavow “bad feeling” — “things like depression, social withdrawal, unruly post-traumatic identity/affect, suicidality, dysphoria, feeling haunted, and so on” — he is interested in exploring how these feelings “show up again and again in transphobic and trans-affirmative discourse.”
Put another way, Awkward-Rich is wary of the way trans scholars and activists have been quick to distance themselves from accusations of illness. To be sure, affirming that “we are not sick” can be a politically important rhetorical move in the face of entrenched medical pathologization. However, Awkward-Rich writes that this rhetorical move is “produced only in direct opposition to the word sick.” The Abprallen sweatshirt, for example, declares that trans people are not sick; Awkward-Rich argues that this kind of rhetoric distances trans people from disabled and mentally ill people, re-marginalizing the latter while trying to legitimize the former. If we say “trans ≠ sick,” as Awkward-Rich simplifies it in the book, where does that leave everyone who is sick?
The Abprallen sweatshirt is just one example of this disavowal. We can see it over and over again in our contemporary moment. During our conversation in May, Awkward-Rich and I discuss how we repeatedly see calls for representations of “trans joy” online and from our students. And this impulse to celebrate trans joy is extremely understandable as a response to the political right’s focus on stigmatizing trans lives. “The Terrible We, of course, does not set out to contest the critical value of potentially good trans feelings—euphoria, curiosity, hope, earnestness,” he writes in the Introduction.
However, Awkward-Rich asks, what happens when we deny or ignore “the full range of human experience and emotion and relation to trans life”? Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed has critiqued how the cultural imperative to be happy limits our ways of understanding how oppression and marginalization feel in our everyday lives. Along these lines, Awkward-Rich tells me, “what actually is it that my desire for the absence of suffering or my joy, in this simple [way of] reflecting myself back, like, [how] is that asking me to live? And do I actually like that? Joy is a great way of reproducing normativity.” Perhaps over-emphasizing narratives of joy might put pressures on trans people to perform euphoria and happiness in a way that limits our understanding of the workings of transphobia.
Throughout the book, Awkward-Rich argues for “maladjustment as a resource for doing trans theory.” The Terrible We launches “a version of transgender studies that does not begin with the premise that a commitment to doing justice requires the wholesale disavowal of transgender’s historical association with madness.” He imagines “a version of trans studies that can acknowledge and think with a more expansive we, terrible though it might feel.”
“The terrible we” is a phrase Awkward-Rich borrows from Carson McCullor’s novella A Member of the Wedding, a story about a twelve-year-old white tomboy named Frankie Addams who feels disconnected from her gender-normative peers and instead feels an affinity for a group of racially and gender-diverse people she at one point calls “the terrible we.” Taking inspiration from this idea of “the terrible we” as a collective of marginalized individuals, Awkward-Rich wonders, “How do we stay with with the ‘we’ that we are of, knowing that it is terrible, but knowing that that terribleness is the conditions of its existence in the first place?” In other words, how do we hold transness and disability together, rather than denying the ways the “bad feelings” like dysphoria and anxiety have historically been a key part of trans thought, art, politics, and media?
In the book, Awkward-Rich’s “terrible we” primarily includes case studies of white transmasculine scholars and historical subjects, including his academic peers as well as people like Jack Bee Garland and Brandon Teena. This focus is very purposeful: He explains to me that, up until very recently, “trans studies was a field where the objects largely were trans women and the people doing the writing were white trans guys. And I thought, in order to do a study…that’s interested in the emotional life of the field, one has to be interested in white transmasculinity because that’s where that’s where the emotional life is emerging from.”
Awkward-Rich elaborates: “Part of the project of the book is to insist that the attempt to disavow maladjustment is always going to be a distancing of transness from other minoritarian forms of life, specifically, disability, and also Black life, also various kinds of racialized life. And I think that the case studies are white transmasculine ones because it’s an attempt to insist to white transmasculine discourse that it need remain attached to all of these other forms of minoritarian life, and that the disavowal of maladjustment is is one of the many mechanisms by which that distancing happens.”
As an academic field, trans studies shares some of its intellectual roots with feminist and queer theory but is less institutionally supported than either of these disciplines. For example, there are fewer academic jobs in transgender studies and no academic departments dedicated to trans studies; therefore, there are fewer institutionally-funded positions for scholars to do this work. In the last 20 years, pioneering trans scholar Susan Stryker has worked hard to create infrastructure to support trans studies, including co-editing a trio of Trans Studies Readers, co-founding the field’s journal of record Transgender Studies Quarterly, and creating the University of Arizona’s Transgender Studies Initiative. Now trans studies is a burgeoning, if institutionally precarious, discipline, and increasing numbers of trans of color and trans femme scholars are working in the field: “It’s possible to have conversations with each other in a way that I think was not exactly possible a decade ago,” Awkward-Rich tells me. His book is part of these conversations.
Awkward-Rich is in conversation with a number of other contemporary trans scholars interested in the politics of bad feelings. Hil Malatino’s 2022 book Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad and Cael Keegan’s recent work on the “bad objects” of trans representation both explore what might be possible when we stop focusing on “good” feelings or “positive” examples of trans representation. When I ask Awkward-Rich why there might be increased interest in “bad feelings” in this moment, he explains:
“I think I can only speculate about this…My tendency as a thinker is always to suppose that intellectual trends are in one way or another related to the kind of institutional conditions of their emergence. It’s actually not surprising to me that there would be a turn to think about bad feeling, or a set of people thinking about bad feeling in trans studies…having lived through or being the test subjects of two things. One, the over and over again insistence on the arrival of trans studies to the university. And two, the insistence over and over again on the arrival of trans people to the ‘official scene’ of American political life. And the simultaneous knowledge that all of us have, which is that our arrival was announced at the same moment as it seemed to become impossible to be here. By which I mean in the university, by which I mean the very tight window between the announcement of trans inclusion and the arrival of a huge backlash politics that I think many of us kind of anticipated would come. And so I think that It makes sense, right? That many of us would be interested in the failures of a kind of politics of inclusion, of a politics of legibility, on the level of the sensorium, right? I think that we all have these intellectual and political critiques of this, but I think that all of us have been feeling it very intensely in a way that is interesting, you know? And it’s interesting especially because, yeah, I think that we’re also living at a time where many of our students and many people are very interested in a discourse of trans joy, or trans non-pathology, but to me, there’s a huge disjuncture between what that orientation seems to promise and what actually materializes.”
Nearly a decade after Time Magazine declared the arrival of the “trans tipping point,” we are living “in optimism’s wake,” as Awkward-Rich writes. This writing suggests we might need to take a closer look at “bad feelings” as we build coalitions between trans, feminist, queer, racialized, and disability politics, activism, and theories to confront this particular trans-antagonistic moment.
For Awkward-Rich, “the terrible we” might be an aspirational vision of these kinds of coalitions. “So much of the project of the book,” he tells me, “and also I think the project of various kinds of feminisms, is the project of learning how to do the work necessary to be with each other in difference. And I think that obviously, trans and lesbian politics have been one of those contentious sites of, how do we figure out how to be together in difference?…Part of the problem with disavowing bad feeling is that to move away from bad feeling, from conflict, from irresolution, what we’re always doing is moving away from each other. And that ‘each other’ being a capacious ‘each other’. …So it’s also for me a way of trying to think about how to stay with the ‘we,’ terrible though it might be.” The chapters of the book explore these dilemmas, engaging with longheld debates and taboo subjects in the field — the TERF wars, sexual violence, suicidality — in order to chart new ways to think with, instead of move away from, these conflicts in trans studies.
Thinking with Awkward-Rich and “the terrible we,” the “Cure Transphobia, Not Trans People” sweatshirt might carry a different meaning. Perhaps we can let go of the need to “cure” trans people not because trans people aren’t sick, but because we can deeply understand all the reasons why trans people might feel bad, feel sick, feel dysphoria, feel anxiety, and feel depression in the contemporary moment. In his book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, trans and disability studies scholar Eli Clare rails against what he calls the “ideology of cure” — the idea that disabled people are “broken” and need to be “fixed” with medical intervention — because the emphasis on “curing” disability functions to uphold limited ideas of which bodies are considered “normal.” Like Clare’s book, perhaps Abprallen’s sweatshirt calls “cure” itself into question.
Target’s decision to pull some of the trans-specific items from its Pride collection, including the Abprallen sweatshirt, certainly inspires bad feelings: frustration, resentment, fury, and indignation, to name a few. As many have suggested, we cannot rely on corporations to support LGBTQ rights and justice when their main concern is for their bottom line. Perhaps the failure of corporate pride calls the focus on “pride” as the central emotional orientation to LGBTQ politics into question. If “pride” is a “positive feeling” that has been assimilable into corporate media, does its failure point to the need for “bad feelings” to re-emerge as different political orientations to the world? If we continue to see corporations walk back their vocal support for LGBTQ issues amidst conservative anti-trans backlash, we might need to invest in alternative strategies for transformative change. Instead of a focus on pride or rainbow capitalism, we can embrace a more radical stance: in order to confront anti-trans oppression, we, the terrible we, need to harness our bad feelings to restructure our gendered social institutions and ideological systems altogether.
Overheating: Leaving My Home State of Florida
A summer day in the Florida panhandle coats your body. Wraps sticky tendrils across your skin and into your crevices and pulls the sweat out of you within moments of stepping outside. The first day this happens after the too brief winter is the worst. But soon you know no difference. It’s the way it’s always been. It’s not comfortable, but it’s familiar. And besides, you’re adaptable. You have air conditioning and iced tea. Being trans in Florida was like one perpetual north Florida summer, until recently. Until the thermometer rose every day, every year, relentlessly. Until the power went out and the air conditioner shuddered off and the ice melted.
Until all I could think about was getting cool.
I drive west on I-10 through pine plantations and cypress swamps. Leaving doesn’t feel real until I cross the slow dark Apalachicola River and enter central time. Hurricane Michael left a path of snapped trees here. Formerly shaded valleys of fern and columbine now burn and die under unrelenting sunshine. The river flows south past Fort Gadsden, briefly a heavily armed refuge of free Black people before enslavers shot a cannonball into the powder magazine and killed hundreds. I leave a city named by people who were driven from the area by disease and violence long before I was born. Most fled to Mexico, Alabama, and Louisiana. Others integrated with escaped former enslaved people and Creeks fleeing south. They found each other and formed a new community. The Seminoles were never conquered by the United States, but they were killed by the thousands, wrung out for their blood to feed the new expanding empire, to “civilize” Florida and turn it into a tourist destination. Paradise requires a lot of blood.
Before I left Florida, I was first born there. Grew up there, went to school there, got married there, started a business there, bought a house there. I’ve tramped through remote hydric hammock, and dipped my toes into clear sandhill steephead streams not on the maps. I’ve been in more small panhandle towns than you can shake a stick at. I know the canal scars that crisscross the state as well as I know the scars on my body. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel a connection to the land like I do in Florida. Leaving wasn’t my first choice.
I walk my cat on a leash at the first rest stop after crossing into Alabama. He refuses to pee for more than 30 minutes, but I’m in no rush to leave the pine trees. When I moved back to my hometown during the so-called trans tipping point in 2014, I didn’t have a pet to worry about. Back then, Florida was a purple state. The big cities that stretch along the flat peninsula possessed moderate trans resources. The situation for trans healthcare outside of these large metropolitan areas was a relic of the 90s and 2000s era of strict gatekeeping. There were no hormones offered through the informed consent framework when I moved back to my hometown and stopped running from my truth. Planned Parenthood, a staple resource for informed consent hormonal care, didn’t start offering trans care in north Florida until late 2020. The health insurance I received through my wife had a blanket exclusion of all trans related care. The state was being sued over that when I started hormones, was being sued when I paid out of pocket and traveled to South Florida for surgery, is still being sued today after I’ve left. For electrolysis, I drove three hours each way to Jacksonville and paid twice the rate I do out west. This was the state of affairs before Florida started banning all trans healthcare for children and adults, before the steady beat of news articles and op-eds with “concerns” and “tricky questions.” Before opinion polls asked if acceptance had gone too far, if trans people had it too easy, if our healthcare was too accessible, if it was too affordable. Before pundits suggested it was unfair to be trans, was actually oppressive to everyone else. Before people called me a groomer online, dissected my pictures looking for proof of my essential maleness, and worked themselves into a slobbering orgiastic fury staring at my body. Before they sent me violent threats. Before a Florida congressperson mocked my fear after a man stormed into a queer friendly restaurant and screamed that we should all die.
As I leave Alabama, I’m stuck behind a truck with a large bumper sticker that reads AMERICA FIRST, that ubiquitous regressive phrase originating from antisemitic opposition to US involvement in World War II. The past claws at us, desperately desiring to bring us back, to roll back progress. I felt this sense of regression, moving home. Old habits and behaviors long thought lost slipped over my shoulders like a familiar coat. All transitions are in tension with regression. I lived with my parents for several months while I found work and housing. I couldn’t find silence. Even when I was left alone, overlapping anxieties and desires drifted into and crowded my mind. The build up to a declaration of transness is paved with unanswerable riddles meant to drive you mad: what if I’m wrong, what if I’m not pretty, what if I can’t trust myself, what if I stop liking women, what if I lose everyone and everything, what if I can’t afford it, what if they tell me no, what if they’re right about me and I am a delusional pervert, what if, what if, what if. Only later would I think to ask: what if I was never the problem? What if I deserve much more than this state has allowed me?
The month I moved home, the middle school I had attended banned a trans kid from using the bathroom and the local newspaper called her a man. When I was a trans kid, I thought I was the only one. I’ve since connected with another trans woman my age who went to another high school nearby. We were camouflaged by necessity, but we were there. After that incident the school board put in place protections to create basic respect for trans kids, including respecting names and pronouns and not outing a kid to a parent against their will. Something simple that would have improved my life had it existed when I attended those schools, would have let me know I wasn’t alone. This lasted a few years, until a local conservative lobbyist made her child’s transition into a national news story and the impetus for the states’ Don’t Say Gay bill. The protections were replaced with restrictions. The last of the coolant dripped out of the condenser and now only hot air blew over us.
I spend the night in Jonesboro, Arkansas with my parents-in-law. It is a typical American college town, which means it is unremarkable, like other places I’ve called home. Less than a year from now it will be illegal for me to use the bathroom here. A month after that, Florida will make it illegal too. A decade before the North Carolina bathroom bill made national headlines, Gainesville, Florida tried to pass a transphobic bathroom ordinance to overturn city non-discrimination protections while I was at the University of Florida. The political ad I saw back then as a closeted woman featured a man wearing sunglasses, black ball cap pulled low, following a young girl into a public bathroom. The entire scene was shot in a manner that can only be described as “imminent rape.” It could have been released today. The month before I saw that ad, I had thrown away the clothes and hormones I’d ordered from the internet. I’d vowed to stop trying. Concluded that my desires were disastrous and dangerous and doomed to fail. When I saw that man, I knew I was right to suppress myself. I did not want to be a monster. We are stuck in that dark moment from my youth. Even as I have moved on and blossomed, Florida has willfully not. Florida is stuck there at one of my lowest moments. Leaving, I hope, will let me move forward for good. I am tired of being forced to relive the worst moments of my past. I so desperately wish to worry about something else.
The towns are smaller now, scattered sparingly across Missouri. I stop for coffee in West Plains and chat with the purple-haired and septum-pierced barista. Thirty five anti-LGBT bills will soon be filed there, but we talk about our tattoos instead. Coffee shops: if you build them we will come. I kicked over enough rocks to find community. We are everywhere, afterall. We wriggle and crawl into protective shelters amid the turbulent flow of life and we find each other. There was no gender clinic, but there was a friend who knew someone else who knew a doctor who was nice, who would prescribe hormones without attempting to change your mind, and wouldn’t make you wear a dress to the appointment. There wasn’t a gay bar but there was weekly trivia that was not officially queer, but functionally was. I learned how to set my makeup with sprays and powders, to reinforce that fragile armor against the oppressive heat. Against the sweat that leaked from my temple and off my nose and dripped from my chin as I walked into familiar buildings to drop off forms and ran into classmates and family friends as someone else. I met a trans guy at trivia and went to his house parties and impromptu birthday orgies. I met a trans woman through Reddit and played board games and drank beer with her until she left for the West Coast a few months later. One by one, others left. As I grew into myself, the only constant was a sense of temporality. A sense of suspension. No sense of future stability. That’s only accelerated. Less than a year after I left, I now have more trans friends who have fled than remain. Trans people are dwindling like the Florida panther, like unbleached coral in the Keys, like undeveloped wetlands and coastline. New Florida is invasive pythons and golf course neighborhoods and sprawling retirement cities larger than my hometown. They drive golf carts over a ditched, drained, and dried husk and kill the alligators that trespass their manicured lawns. But the cottonmouth that swims by me as I hold my breath in knee deep hardwood swamp is my Florida.
In Kansas I discover that some places are flatter than Florida. At a rest stop, I sit on a plastic bench atop an artificial hill overlooking hundreds of windmills that fade into the horizon. From this distance, I can’t see the dead birds scattered around their bases. The ground is littered with bodies which never got a say in the decisions that brought about their destruction. Florida might be focused on my destruction now, but it nurtured me too. There I first stared down into perfectly still ink black tannic water reflecting the towering cypress around me, reflecting the face of a woman to me for the first time. There I followed a secret path of footholds and handholds to the rooftop alley where my first girlfriend took me to makeout and draw graffiti. There I layed on a beach at night during sea turtle season between two lovers, became lost in the stars that emerge without light pollution. There I sent little oval green-blue pills to a newly out girl and answered her questions, assured her as best I could that it would be okay. Did anything I could to make her laugh, to give her relief from anxiety, to fulfill her trust in me and in herself. Don’t look at the news, sweetie. Let’s go to a party.
In Russell, Kansas, I take a picture of the Dream Theater, an art deco single screen venue built in 1949. I send it to my dad, who shares a name with the town and a love of art deco with me. I remember the first birthday with my parents and wife as myself where they gave me rainbow socks and shirts and buttons and I laughed because it was so cliche and cried because it was so sweet. I will miss our traditional Sunday walk through oak-shaded neighborhoods followed by biscuits and gravy at the vegan restaurant that is superior to every single place I’ve been to on the West Coast. No place here can make a decent biscuit, I’ll discover. When people ask me what I miss about Florida I will lie and say biscuits.
When I leave, I will miss thunderstorms. The slowness of an afternoon thunderstorm unfurling, the anticipation as I watch from my porch, observing how the storm glides towards me with familiar anger, releases large drops that percolate into the ground underneath the yellow wildflowers that spill over into the pebbled path next to my garden. I too unleash. Hot salty droplets and crackling screams. Perhaps if I could be so powerful, I could stay in Florida. But I am not a storm. I know my limits. The future I know is one I do not want.
After hours of driving through rural middle America, Denver is shocking. I go out to a lesbian bar and makeout with a bass guitarist who invites me to visit her cabin. I feel in my element. Later she’ll post a transphobic screed on Instagram, and I’ll shower until the water runs cold. The evil in Florida is not confined to its borders. The next day I drive through mountainsides spilling over with golden aspen groves and decide that there is a lot I won’t miss in Florida. I won’t miss the new suburban development with a private gate that fills in a wetland. That springs up next to the previous development that filled in another wetland protected by another gate which is also next to another sprawling development that filled in another wetland. The confederate flags on trucks and houses and next to highways and the man with the rifle sneaking up behind me in the woods while I work who demands to know what I am doing. Who remarks, his eyes tracing over my emerging curves, that the woods are dangerous. There are bloodthirsty snakes, don’t I know? The snakes are scared of me, I reply. I won’t miss that the woman who sells me the sweetest and juiciest mango in Homestead has to take the bus two hours south to Key West to work a minimum wage job serving snowbirds. I won’t miss the sheriff who buzzes me with his SUV, leaving my arm scraped from his rear view mirror. The other sheriff who tells me he will cover up my death when his friend runs me over for the crime of cycling on a public road when I’m 16. Everytime I see rotting roadkill, I remember his words. I remember those words later, when yet another sheriff with a rifle stares at me with a scowl from the rooftop as I protest in the street when I’m twice that age. Nor will I miss the thumping drone of the new police helicopter circling the city constantly as it beats the air into submission, peering into my backyard and shining a spotlight through my windows and into my soul. Florida has a seemingly unlimited supply of angry men with guns. Who arrest women like me and put us in men’s prisons. Who kill us and record our deaths under the wrong name and gender. Who shoot strangers who make them uncomfortable. I won’t miss the government that thinks this is too kind a way to treat me. That enacts bills to kidnap our children, to cancel Pride, to make it a crime for me to pee. That eliminates access to hormones and replaces it with protected discrimination by healthcare employees. That bans the simple joy of participating in a sport. I won’t miss my existence being made illegal and unspeakable, that my future child will grow up with a more trans hostile government than I did.
I pose in front of a covered wagon in Glenns Ferry, Idaho, where soon providing gender affirming care for minors will result in ten years of jail. The testimony and language used to justify the extreme bill is the same I heard in Florida. The witnesses flown in by conservative organizations to testify in favor of it are the same people too. Florida reaches for me even out here, but I’ve shed the weight of past shame, and it cannot grasp ahold of me anymore. In Florida I leave that shame, accumulated while seeking belonging in an unaccepting society. They want us closeted, afraid, exploitable, and despairing — like I used to be. In Florida, I leave the woman who invited me over with the promise of doing my makeup, who instead pressured me to go down on her boyfriend while she watched. I leave my regret of turning her down because who else could ever understand me, could give me the permission I sought, could look at me as my true self and get aroused instead of disgusted. I leave sneaking into a construction site and climbing the tallest crane on a balmy fall evening. My flip flop slipping from my foot, watching it fall away from me towards the dark pavement far below and wondering how it would feel to follow it. How it would feel to not feel anymore. I leave watching the years pass by and the businesses rotate through the corner lot of the strip mall where I first worked up the courage to wear a dress I later threw away during an episode of self revulsion. Returning to that corner six years later as a woman and hoping for what, closure? A revelation? I could stand in that parking lot baking in the late summer heat and never be done, never fully thawed.
People move all the time, I remind myself. Stop thinking you’re a victim, I say to myself. I am weak. I am pathetic. I am too emotional and melodramatic. I suppose these toxic thoughts affirm my womanhood in a misogynistic way, and I do live for affirmation. If anything, I conclude, I am a coward. I am a white tailed deer that outruns my friends and family, leaves them to be torn open, to let their blood sink into the sand and down deep into the aquifer that supports the tens of millions of people in that state. Do you think they know it will run dry? That the state is already building pipelines to transfer water to lakes that are drying up? That the salt water is intruding higher and higher through the porous limestone and no wall will keep it out. Florida will flood while the government polices bathrooms. But no, do not be absurd. I am a vital resource to be extracted relentlessly and fed to the people with blood soaked teeth who invade school board meetings and public workshops. Who sit on boards of medicine and of universities, who sit atop the phallic Capitol that looms over my former home. Who loudly declare that I am a threat, a corruption of nature, a mutilation, a devil, a demon, a disease in need of a cure. Who proclaim that the younger version of me is a degenerate creation of a vast conspiracy, a confused object without free will, a precancerous tumor. Who declare that we are both something in need of purification, cleansing, and removal by any means necessary.
But each of us only holds so much blood, can be squeezed only so much. We are not a renewable resource and I do not want to be squeezed anymore. They will always need more blood, and when our bodies are bled dry they will replace what they’ve extracted with embalming fluid.
I arrive in a Seattle smothering under wildfire smoke. A yellow-orange tinge drapes the city, and I wear my N95 mask outdoors. I meet a new friend for a beer, and we watch the Mariners lose on TV. I’m in an unreal state, still ready to wake up and drive eight hours the next day into yet another state, but knowing I finally don’t need to.
That evening I call my parents and cry for the first time since leaving. We understand, they say. I hope they do. This is for the best, they say. I hope so too. The first mail home I send is a package of blue-green ovoid pills for a friend who stayed. Build up your supply, I tell her. The parties aren’t as fun now, she says. She leaves a few months later as my social media feeds fill with gofundmes to escape the state. Pride flags are seemingly in every window here, and it takes me a month to stop nudging my wife in excitement when I notice one. In six months, I’ll be strategizing safety and exit plans with those trans friends who remain in Florida after the latest restrictions are enacted. Do you think I should take my pride flag down, one will ask. When I check my former local paper, I’ll see violent rhetoric on road signs and worse in the replies under any social media about us. It was never about protecting children. It was never about women’s sports. It’s always been about our existence, and it was never going to stop with trans people. Trans and gay and lesbian and bisexual and any other out group. The anti immigrant laws, the anti abortion laws, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in Florida are part of the same project. Their hatred has an ever expanding need for fresh fuel. Left unchecked and without organized resistance, it will consume us all in an indiscriminate inferno.
But right now, I walk up steep hills and my hot blood pulses, rich and thick and mine. There is still hope, still occasionally good news. Perhaps there will come a day when I feel welcome back in my home state. I have not given up on Florida, even if for now it is best we spend time apart. In a week, a gray cloudy drizzle will replace the smoke and block out the hot sun and I won’t drip with sweat even once. The heat will come for me here eventually, and wildfires will choke the sky with smoke. But summer here, for now, is downright pleasant. I have air conditioning and iced tea. At least for a while, I’ll stop overheating.
LGBTQ+ Documentaries To Watch This Pride Month That Aren’t the Most Obvious Ones
Our Pride theme this year is RAGE PARTY, an explicit acknowledgement of the complexity and expansiveness of Pride as a site of simultaneous recreation and revolution. It’s a time to hold each other close as we fight our oppressors. Rage on! In that spirit, I’ve rounded up some LGBTQ+ documentaries on queer resistance, history, and activism for a simmering Pride night in.
There are a lot of watch lists and documentary recommendations geared toward Pride floating around mainstream media right now, so I’m trying to focus on entries I didn’t see come up as often on those (kinda basic tbh!) lists. As a result, you might have to deviate from some of the more popular streamers like Netflix and Hulu to seek them out, but they’re worth the hunt. Time to sign up for Kanopy! I’ve put the docs in order of year released, and we’ve got films from 1989 to today! Check out over three decades of queer and trans real life stories! The list is, of course, far from exhaustive. So please feel free to shout out your favorites in the comments, even if they’re hard to find!
Tongues Untied (1989)
An experimental documentary that centers Black gay men, Tongues Untied uses poetry, performance, music, spoken word, art, and narrative to unspool Black gay life and challenge homophobia and racism. It’s an excellent starting point for this list and is available on Kanopy.
Last Call at Maud’s (1993)
Later in this list, you’ll find a shoutout to the more recent docuseries, The Lesbian Bar Project. But if you want to deep dive dyke bar documentaries, start here with 1993’s Last Call at Maud‘s, which touches on lesbian culture and spaces from the 1940s to 1990s, centered on the iconic defunct lesbian bar Maud’s in San Francisco. It’s available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.
Bloodsisters (1995)
Yes kink at Pride, and yes to this 1995 leatherdyke documentary that plunges into the lesbian BDSM scene in San Francisco in the 90s. For Autostraddle, Daemonum X wrote of the documentary, which is available to stream on Kanopy:
“Leatherdyke is a sexuality, and those of us who identify with it are automatically associated with perversion. When you’re turned on by filth, blood, and pain, no matter how hard you try you simply cannot bring it back from the margins. You cannot make dyke SM sexuality respectable in the eyes of society, and for many of us that’s even part of the appeal. The risks and the stigmatization of waving your freak flag have only moderately improved in the last twenty-five years. The watered down, mainstream ideas of kink have only moved the needle so far. Leatherdyke sexuality carries an inherent politic of anti-respectability and for that it has always been ahead of its time.”
Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2003)
This documentary would make an excellent companion to the primer on queer labor activism: Gay at Work: Queer People and the Labor Movement, written by Daven McQueen for Rage Party. It’s available on Kanopy and additional apps.
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (2005)
Three years before Stonewall, trans folks and drag queens fought back against police violence at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It’s considered one of the first documented instances of large scale queer resistance to police harassment in U.S. history. It’s available on Kanopy.
T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness: Queer Blues Divas of the 1920s (2011)
The iconic queer author Jewelle Gomez narrates this exploration of Black queerness in the 1920s blues boom, exploring the lived experiences of icons like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters. It’s available on Kanopy.
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012)
“United in Anger isn’t just a film, it’s a teaching tool for future activists,” Gabby wrote for Autostraddle in a review of the Sarah Schulman-produced documentary about ACT UP that utilizes footage compiled by the ACT UP Oral History Project. Pair it with a copy of Let the Record Show. It’s available on Kanopy.
Call Me Kuchu (2012)
This documentary focuses on queer life in Uganda, including the effects of violent church-backed homophobic legislation in the country. It covers the 2011 murder of activist David Kato and its aftermath. It’s available on Kanopy.
Kiki (2016)
Regarded as an unofficial “sequel” to Paris Is Burning by critics, Kiki similarly follows ballroom and drag culture in NYC, focusing on LGBTQ youth of color. It shows the various intersecting conflicts trans youth of color face as well as immense trans joy and community, making it a perfect fit for Rage Party. It’s available to stream on Kanopy.
Check It (2016)
This documentary follows the Check-It, a street gang formed by ninth graders in Washington D.C. in 2009 that consists of trans and queer Black teens who have been rejected by their families, subjected to homophobia, transphobia, racism, and pushed into extreme poverty and homelessness. It’s available to stream on several different apps.
Dykes, Camera, Action (2018)
For my queer cinephiles! This documentary explores lesbian cinema, featuring filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, Vicky Du, Cheryl Dunye, Desiree Akhavan, and many more! Queer resistance and queer art go hand in hand, so dive on into this exploration of queerness on screen. It’s available on Peacock.
I Hate New York (2018)
This documentary follows the lives and work of activists and artists Amanda Lepore, Sophia Lamar, Chloe Dzubilo and T De Long, and it’s title is a tongue-in-cheek critique of the ways the powers at be have sought to erase trans life and spaces from New York City, including efforts like the shutting down of Cats II and Sally’s Hideaway in Times Square in the 90s. It’s available to stream on Tubi.
Changing the Game (2019)
Following three trans teen athletes as they compete in their respective sports and confront transphobia and other obstacles, Changing the Game feels like an urgent documentary as youth athletics continue to be a staging ground for rampantly transphobic legislation throughout the country. It’s available on Hulu.
Sylvia Rivera: She Was More Than Stonewall (2019)
This full documentary is available on YouTube via CT Trans History and Archives.
Always Amber (2020)
This coming-of-age documentary follows genderqueer teen Amber and a group of trans teens in a way that gives them a lot of agency and room for exploration of their own identities. Drew Burnett Gregory wrote of it: “This documentary is about a person and it’s about a generation and it’s about a future that is yet to exist. It’s a political declaration that all people regardless of age should get to determine how they present and how they’re addressed and who they are.” It’s available to rent or purchase on Prime Video in the UK and Apple TV.
Your Mother’s Comfort (2020)
Trans activist, politician, and leader Indianara Siqueira fights to save the LGBTQ+ homeless shelter for trans sex workers she started in this international documentary set against the backdrop of the election of a far right president in Brazil. The film is available to stream on the apps Hoopla and Revry.
My Name Is Pauli Murray (2021)
This documentary about an important Black queer and trans elder who has so often been erased by dominant history narratives is a necessary deep dive on their many contributions to Black liberation and civil rights. It’s also not without its problems, explored with nuance by Autostraddle Editor-in-Chief Carmen Phillips in her review, which notes Pauli is misgendered throughout parts of the film, something that’s grappled with and pushed back against by some of the trans folks interviewed in it. If you’re going to watch, I highly recommend reading Carmen’s review as a companion piece to understand some of these flaws. It’s available on Prime Video.
Rebel Dykes (2021)
Set in 1980s London, Rebel Dykes is immersed in a specific punk lesbian scene and explores the intersections of politics, sex and the erotic, activism, art, and music. It’s available to watch in the UK through the BFI’s website.
The Lesbian Bar Project (2022)
The Lesbian Bar Project is an ongoing campaign to champion the few surviving lesbian bars throughout the U.S., and part of that campaign included a short documentary as well as a three-part docuseries. The three-part docuseries is available to stream for free on the Roku channel and is worth checking out if you too are invested in the decline of the dyke bar, a topic we cover here at Autostraddle in myriad ways.
The Stroll (2023)
Made by trans directors Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, The Stroll centers Black trans sex workers in NYC’s Meatpacking District, exploring the neighborhood’s history of violent policing, gentrification, community care, and queer and trans resilience. It’s available to stream on Max, starting June 21.
Gay at Work: Queer People and the Labor Movement
feature image photo by Xavier Lorenzo via Getty Images
June, obviously, is Pride. But this year, it’s also the start of what’s gearing up to be a Hot Labor Summer. Yes, as Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls declared in late May 2022, last summer was also a Hot Labor Summer, but there’s more than enough union power to go around. As a former labor organizer, I’ve been filled with a lot of hope seeing workers stand up to their bosses and better in their workplaces – especially queer and trans workers, without whom the current surge in the labor movement simply would not be possible.
When I started a union campaign at a previous job with some of my coworkers, it was, in some ways, a shot in the dark to express our frustration with a difficult (and often toxic) workplace. Over the months, it became a way to take back my sense of self as a queer Black person in a job that prioritized straight, cis, white identities to the detriment of everyone else — to fight for a workplace where I and my coworkers would be treated with respect and dignity. Later, working as a staff organizer on a different union drive, I watched other oppressed workers come into their power in the same way as they realized that they deserved better than their bosses would ever let them believe. And now, all of us are lucky enough to witness that on a national scale and maybe even join the fight ourselves.
In the past few weeks, we’ve seen queer writers take center stage in the ongoing WGA strike, bringing Pride to the picket lines as they demand a more sustainable future for marginalized writers in Hollywood. After showing solidarity with WGA strikers over the past months, members of SAG-AFTRA, including its many queer actors, voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers doesn’t accept a satisfactory agreement in their current contract negotiations by June 30. The potential for a nationwide UPS strike in August is also heating up, which would be the biggest work stoppage in U.S. history.
Okay, so maybe it’s more of a Hot Strike Summer, but in any case, the labor movement in the U.S. is popping off, and queer people are part and parcel of the fight. We’re no stranger to a righteous struggle, after all — I know I don’t have to remind you that Stonewall was a riot. A Pride rage party would not be complete without diving into the history of queer labor leaders whose dedication to the working class, even when their identities put them at risk, led to many of the rights and protections we have as queer workers today. Let’s get into it.
Early Struggles
To kick off our tour of queer labor leaders, we have to go back almost 120 years to 1905, when 12-year-old Pauline Newman, a Lithuanian immigrant to New York City, was hired at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Newman, who had a “blunt aggressiveness and fondness for masculine dress,” was an outspoken union advocate even as a young teen, eventually becoming the first woman organizer hired by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. She organized up to and in the wake of the devastating Triangle Fire, having known many of the girls who died in the disaster. She was a fierce organizer for the rest of her life, working for both the ILGWU and the Women’s Trade Union League. Through her work in the latter, she met Frieda S. Miller, who would become her partner for the next 50 years as both women dedicated their lives to improving the lives of working people.
Pushing forward into the 50s and 60s, the gay and Black liberation movements began in earnest, with leaders of both coming to the forefront through their work in the labor movement. One icon in all three arenas was Bayard Rustin, an often overlooked leader who worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and was a key organizer in the March on Washington. He directed the AFL-CIO’s A. Phillip Randolph Institute to integrate historically all-white unions and unionize Black workers.
Both Newman and Rustin, who were not particularly diligent about hiding their queerness, were often relegated to behind-the-scenes roles in the labor movement. It wasn’t until the 80s that Rustin began openly advocating for gay rights at the suggestion of his partner at the time, a commitment he continued until his death in 1987.
Trans Worker Power
Joni Christian was a General Motors assembly worker when, at 26, she received gender affirming surgery and came out to her coworkers. This was in the 60s, so it might not surprise you to learn their reactions were not positive. In a move reminiscent of recent attacks on trans rights, a petition was circulated at the plant attempting to bar Christian from the women’s restrooms.
As a member of UAW, Christian went to her union local and used her legal services to sue GM for invasion of privacy. She got the support of local president Gary Briner, won a settlement with GM, and improved her working conditions enough that she stayed at the company for another 30 years.
In the present moment of both relentless attacks on trans rights and a surge in union participation, Joni Christian shows us trans resistance is everywhere — from the streets to the workplace.
A New Generation
A lot has happened in both the queer liberation and labor movements since Newman, Rustin, and Christian, among other queer labor leaders like Harry Hay, Harvey Milk, and Leslie Feinberg, fought for their rights in the workplace. Queer and trans people have made historic wins, like marriage equality, and yet continued to see attacks against our rights, especially in the past few years. On the labor front, union membership declined steadily from the 80s onward; it’s only been since the pandemic that we’ve seen a major resurgence in interest in the labor movement.
From Amazon workers’ historic election last year to the growth of graduate student unions across the country, workers have been busy fighting and winning. One of the most prominent examples has been Starbucks Workers United, the union of the coffee shop chain’s young, determined, and very queer workers. Many of the baristas leading the charge of Starbucks unionization are queer and trans, and with over 300 stores unionized so far, they’re making history in improving the working conditions of marginalized people across the country.
I live in Boston, and last year was able to attend a live reveal of the union election results of two local Starbucks locations. They both won easily, and seeing the workers, many of whom were my age or younger, many of whom were queer, celebrating their victory literally made me cry a little bit. Not just because of the unions they’d won — and what that power would mean for the future of their jobs — but because these are the same people I’d seen and have continued to see in the streets fighting for the rights of working and oppressed people in every other context. All these movements, whether for Black liberation, queer liberation, abortion rights, affordable housing, or labor, are intimately connected, and the struggle of queer labor organizers makes that abundantly clear.
‘Be the Change’ Creates Network of Care in Tennessee Prisons
Editor’s note: The author of this piece is a member leader in the Nashville chapter of Southerners on New Ground, which partners with Be The Change.
Tavaria Merritt is a community organizer, a pastor, a dreamer, and someone who loves her people deeply. Tavaria, who also goes by Varia and T, has lived that truth all her life, even in the most unstable of circumstances.
When Varia was incarcerated at South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tenn., she saw the ways that she and other LGBT+ people in the prison were treated both by staff and other inmates, and she became passionate about organizing within the prison to help folks find supportive community, build power, and fight for better treatment inside.
“I was born to bring people together and show them what real love is about,” reflected Varia. “I had a desire to create something, and that is a community for the LGBT inmates here. If nobody was bold enough to do that, I was willing to stand against the odds. On June 8th, 2014, I started something that had never been heard of within Tennessee prisons.”
She began by distributing a letter to everyone in her unit who she knew was LGBT. They came together to share their concerns and identify changes they desired to see within the prison. Together, the group became known as Be the Change LGBTQ Community. They began working to shift the culture at South Central to one where inmates and staff were more respectful of LGBT folks.
Today, Be the Change offers programs inside like support groups for trans women, addiction and recovery support, and those facing lengthy or lifetime sentences. They work to prepare folks for release by connecting them with outside resources and supporters. They host weekly services in affiliation with the Unitarian Universalist Church where all are welcome to connect with their spirituality — it’s the first and only affirming religious service at the prison. Varia uses her experience as a pastor and preacher to motivate the community.
“It’s my faith that has kept me strong,” she said. “I still believe in my faith and my Pentecostal movement, and they can’t tell me that I’m wrong, I know what’s right in my soul. I was called to lead people who have been let down, put down, people who were talked about when they were kids, people who were told they would never amount to anything, those who are outside the box and told they were not normal.”
Varia also works with administrators and staff to create a safer environment for Be the Change members, such as collaborating with the medical staff to ensure trans inmates receive appropriate care. Be the Change also advocated for a “cell with care” policy at the prison to ensure LGBT inmates would not be placed in cells with individuals not known to be accepting, as well as a policy to allow trans women to shower safely.
The organization has a safety team dedicated to protecting members from violence, and they share food resources among one another, in part with the help of outside donations. They also have members who are able to be informal counselors and confidants for folks experiencing anxiety and depression while inside.
To guide Be the Change, across all their activities the group uplifts five core principles: Believing in the worthiness of every person, accepting others for who they are, growing through a personal search for truth, working for justice, and understanding that everything is interconnected.
“Whatever your lifestyle, whatever your baggage, wherever you came from, you are welcome,” Varia said. “We can do this thing together as a team.”
Part of what has allowed Varia and Be the Change to be successful at getting policies in place to keep the community safer is their deep knowledge of the prison’s existing policies and procedures.
“I know this prison like the back of my hand,” Varia said. “I’ve worked the grievance board, I’ve worked laundry, I’ve worked the yard, I’ve worked the education department. They can’t get one over on me. If you come to me you better know the policy or I’m gonna tell it to you.”
Be the Change is also networked outside of South Central. They send mail to other prisons and partner with outsider organizations like Southerners on New Ground and No Exceptions Prison Collective. Varia and her team work to keep up with inmates who get transferred to other prisons as well as those who are released. By sharing pamphlets, art, and messages of hope, they are building a network of mutual support, encouragement, and resource sharing.
An image from one of Be The Change’s informational pamphlets.
Varia doesn’t just help others — her community helps and supports her too. Having a strong community of support with members who share diverse experiences helped her come into her identity as a transgender woman in 2019.
“I’ve always been outspoken and did me and didn’t care what people thought, but I still need support to grow,” she said. “Being part of a community made transition so much easier. More than they realize or know, they helped me! When I came in, I didn’t know I was a girl. Now I walk around with my eyeliner on, my hairbands on, I don’t worry about no say so. Words don’t hurt me, I overcome the words.”
As Varia blossomed into the fullness of herself, she became even more passionate about educating prison staff and protecting and uplifting her community. Now, Be The Change members call her Mama T because “they’re my kids, I cover them. I will always stand with them, I might correct them, but most of all I’m going to show them love.”
As an organizer, Varia has worked to create a safer environment for her community. As a pastor, friend, and mentor, she has remained committed to helping others.
“A broken person brought together a lot of broken people over the years. I’ve been let down many times. I’ve been discouraged. I’ve been at the place that most of my people have been in, it’s why I can understand,” she reflected. “Every day I wake up and look forward to doing what I do best. We as a body and as a family are coming together stronger than ever. One of the things I often say is ‘we don’t die, we multiply.’ We are the chosen people, we are special, unique people. I don’t care how many people tell us that we’re not, we are.”
To support Be the Change or to learn more, visit their website btclgbtq.com.
Kemi Adeyemi’s Feels Right Explores the Politics of Black Queer Nightlife
“Have you talked to Kemi Adeyemi yet?” Since I began writing about new books in LGBTQ studies for Autostraddle, other folks I’ve interviewed have encouraged me to reach out to Adeyemi, Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Adeyemi’s new book Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago explores the experiences of Black queer party promoters and party goers in the segregated city. In the last few years, a number of new academic books have been published in lesbian studies and on nightlife; Adeyemi’s is the only one to explicitly focus on the lives of Black queer women. Feels Right takes seriously the way Black queer women come together on the dance floor as a political act in pursuit of community.
Adeyemi’s book is as much about nightlife studies as a field as it is about Black queer women’s experiences with Chicago’s nightlife. Adeyemi told me when we talked in May that she has long been “frustrated with writing about queer nightlife that really presents it as this utopian escape from everyday life.” “That’s a story, it’s not reality,” she argues.
Adeyemi adds, “so much of being out at night and partying is so intimately entangled with everything that happens outside of the party. And it didn’t feel fair to my ethnographic research or to my interviews to rescript this content into this beautiful story.” Feels Right asks, “what is queer nightlife, if that’s not the endpoint?” Adeyemi’s book explores what it actually feels like both to party and to plan parties for Black queer women in Chicago, which “is not always an entirely pleasurable affair.”
As Adeyemi writes in the Introduction, “good feeling is only ever temporary, if it arrives at all, amid the myriad of buzzkills that shape the queer party, whether they be bad music, whiteness, arguments between attendees and organizers, corporate greed, neoliberal capitalism, or just bad vibes.” Instead of a utopian story about the communities formed by Black queer parties in Chicago, Adeyemi is interested in tracing the actual experiences of party promoters and attendees. She wants to explore “the entire scope of the sensorium,” she tells me, which includes exhaustion, frustration, disappointment, and burn out.
Instead of feeling good, Adeyemi is interested in what it means and what it takes to “feel right,” which she describes as “those hard-to-pin-down sensoria signaling that everything has clicked together.” As she writes, “Issa vibe.” Feeling good and feeling right can happen at the same time, but aren’t necessarily overlapping. “The framework of feeling right offers a closer, kinesthetic look at the interlocking systems that situate us in our bodies, among other people, and within the built environments that structure our movements and our energies,” she explains.
The built environment is key here, particularly in Chicago. As she writes in the book, “The search for feeling right on the queer dance floor always overlaps with efforts to feel emplaced in Chicago, where access to feeling right and access to legal rights are entangled and circumscribed by neoliberal spatial politics that overdetermine where black queer people go and how they feel.” Adeyemi’s understanding and analysis of Black queer nightlife in Chicago is intimately entwined with the segregation and development of its neighborhoods, and the way that Black queer people express how it feels to live in the city. As she notes, “the queer dance floor is not an apolitical site in these conditions.” Adeyemi writes that most of the Black queer women she interviewed didn’t feel right partying in Boystown, for example, Chicago’s most well-known gayborhood, which is full of bars that primarily cater to white cis gay men and where Black queer people often feel like outsiders at best and violently excluded at worst. In a city marked by “racialized territorialization,” queer nightlife spaces are “highly contested zones where black queer women directly implicate their bodies as they assert their physical rights within and over the neoliberal city.”
Adeyemi’s chapters explore three parties in Chicago created by and for Black queer people: Slo Mo, Party Noire, and E N E R G Y. Each chapter examines a particular way of feeling right that Black queer women seek or embody at these parties. Adeyemi writes, “The right to feel good is a veritable political project that drives many black queer women to return to their nightlife scenes time and again, even as their pleasure is seemingly endlessly deferred on the dance floor and in the city.” She looks at particular moments at these parties — conversations, gestures, dance moves, conflicts — that illuminate these feelings. She summarizes for me, “the first chapter is about slowness and people’s capacity to just be easy in the bar, to dance slowly, to sing, to talk. The second chapter is about the feeling of Black joy and everything that’s fraught with that. And then the third chapter is about feeling ordinary.” As she examines these feelings with her interlocutors, she intertwines her analysis with a discussion of gentrification in Chicago’s South and West sides and how it impacts these parties, and in particular how it interferes with partygoers’ attempts to feel good and feel right.
The conclusion of the book focuses on how it feels for party organizers to plan and attend regular events week after week, month after month, and year after year. These organizers balance their desires to create space for Black queer community with the amount of organizational labor this entails and with their own emotional wellbeing. All of this can be exhausting in and of itself, particularly in the summer during Pride season, and can lead to burnout if and when the balance isn’t achieved. Adeyemi puts her interlocutors in conversation with each other, centering the voices and wisdom of Black queer party planners as they envision a more sustainable and communal future for their parties.
Since we’re chatting on the eve of Pride month, I ask more about what she thinks of Pride as both a space of rebellion and recreation, where people go to party. “I do think Pride is like, literally like the perfect example of the frustrations that my book is talking about. Everybody feels like they have to come out for Pride and it’s just like the worst time ever. The worst parades, the worst parties, the worst forms of intoxication,” she laughs. “But you go, and you either go because you think you’re gonna have a good time, or you go to feel righteous rage.” When we imagine Pride as a utopian space for queer joy, it disregards all of these realities that Adeyemi points to: how disappointing Pride can feel amidst the imperative to feel good during it.
Thinking about what Pride means in our contemporary anti-LGBTQ moment, she adds, “As far as securing legal protections over our bodies and our siblings’ bodies, the stakes do feel different. They feel heightened, they feel more dangerous, they feel more urgent. They feel more violent. And then the chasm between those stakes and Pride™, that is so vast. My best case scenario, my most rageful Pride season, would be just taking to the streets. No floats. But also: pay artists and pay party promoters!”
Adeyemi started this project as a graduate student living and partying in Chicago in the 2010s. She tells me that she wanted to explore Black nightlife and gentrification, and it eventually made sense to do so in the community spaces she was already inhabiting. As she signals in the Preface, the sheer amount of work it takes to research nightlife is often underestimated: “People who don’t work on nightlife love to comment that my research must be so fun, a comment that often doubles as a suggestion that nightlife research isn’t really research at all.” On the contrary, she tells me that this work is both incredibly rewarding and draining:
“I like to go out and dance, and I like to party. But when you have to do it with your brain on in a certain kind of way, when you’re having to pay attention to different kinds of things and not just paying attention to what your body needs or feels or how to be with the beat, or how to be moving in the crowd, when you have to be doing that and also watching for interactions or being attuned to the overall dynamic for the purposes of writing about it, that is also really intellectually and emotionally draining.”
As Adeyemi has gotten older (she is now in her mid-late 30s), going out at night for the purpose of research has gotten more difficult. But she affirms, “The process of being in conversation with people about when, where, why, and how they party was so enriching and fulfilling.”
Centering the experiences of Black queer women was important for Adeyemi in an academic field that rarely does. Adeyemi’s work, particularly her third chapter on E N E R G Y and ordinariness, provide commentary on how “Black queer women are largely absent and illegible within existing queer nightlife scholarship that is overwhelmingly centered on people who identify as men and where the very phrase ‘queer nightlife’ has become a kind of metonym for the scenes and spaces that they have historically attached to, such as gay bars and drag scenes.” In a series of powerful and bolded questions posed throughout the chapter, Adeyemi asks readers to interrogate their own relationships to Black queer women in their research:
“How Do I Need Black Queer Women to Do My Work? Do I Avoid Black Queer Women in Order to Do My Work? How Do I Need Them to Help Me Think? How Do I Need Them to Be Absent to Help Me Think? What Are the Keywords I Use to Describe Black Queer Women? Where, on the Spectrum from Ordinary to Extraordinary, Do My Keywords Position Black Queer Women? Is My Writing about Black Queer Women or Is It about My Ego? Am I Just Hoping that My Research Is about Badass Shit or Is It Really? Is My Research Radical or Am I Just Citing Black Queer Women? Are Black Queer Women Actually Doing This or Am I Just Assuming They Are?
What Do I Need from Black Queer Women? What Do I Expect from Black Queer Women? What Do Black Queer Women Expect from Me? How Am I Listening to Black Queer Women? How Do I Know? How Do They Know? Do I Think about Myself More Than I Think about Black Queer Women? Be Honest.”
In our conversation, I ask Adeyemi more about what it has been like to research and write in a field dominated by gay cis men. Adeyemi comments thoughtfully, “Those are precisely the people who trained me. Those are the people whose books allowed me to see and think about what my book might be like. Those are the people whose gay and queer party lives have literally spawned industries. Do you know what I mean? So I move with a lot of gratitude. And with a lot of frustration. That third chapter [on E N E R G Y] is for me really about the frustration of academic discipline. The frustration of graduate training, the frustration of how we assign what we assign, how we cherry pick chapters of particular books. You know, you’re familiar. Any of us who have gone through an institution understand the challenges of instruction, learning how to be in that conversation, or learning how to be in that space, or learning how to be in your body in that particular space.”
I do know, in no small part because Adeyemi and I both graduated from the School of Communication at Northwestern University in Illinois. Adeyemi got her PhD in Performance Studies, a competitive and prestigious program with a majority QTPOC faculty. I was enrolled in Screen Cultures, a (straighter, whiter) film and media studies program across campus. While I took classes with students in Performance Studies, Adeyemi was finishing her degree right as I entered grad school, so we never met during that time.
But I certainly experienced what Adeyemi described to me. In PhD programs, the classes we take — and which departments we take them in — shape the way we are taught to think, research, write, and teach. Each field has its canon, its major debates, its research methods, its conferences, its intellectual history, its celebrity faculty members, its taboo subjects. Graduate students are disciplined (literally and figuratively) into learning the norms of their academic field to become successful scholars who can continue on the legacy of their faculty mentors. It can be both an intellectually thrilling and a grueling experience. To focus your research on an underrepresented community — particularly one that you belong to — can add layers of marginalization to this experience. To do so in a program or department that purports to value queer, feminist, and trans of color theory but still upholds disciplinary norms and hierarchies that make academia a violent space for queer people of color — that is a fraught experience, to say the least. To then push back against one’s own disciplinary training and to carve out space for yourself in an exclusionary field — this a bold move, and one Adeyemi does gracefully.
“I’m much more complex than I have been thought about, written about, and depicted in academia and in popular culture,” Adeyemi writes. In her future research projects, she tells me, she continues to be interested in the position of Black queer women in scholarly work and in academia itself. She wants to ask, “What can Black queer and feminist studies do to think about Black genders and sexualities as more than theories and concepts?” Her book provides one example of what it looks like to do that work. Building on conversations with dozens of Black queer people, Adeyemi’s writing practices how scholars can “forge connections with one another in critical thought,” as she puts it, to practice thinking with Black women rather than just about them. The result is a book that pushes the boundaries of studies of queer nightlife to interrogate and reimagine the field itself, with Black queer women at the center.
How Is Your Zodiac Sign Celebrating Pride This Year?
It’s Pride, and I’m starting this gay astrology post with a warning. Should you have found your way here from the broader internet, first, welcome. We’re hospitable. Second, yes, everything is gay. Every zodiac sign is gay. This is a Pride Horoscope. It’s going to be queer. Last time I whipped up some extremely wise and totally even-keeled astrology here, I got comments asking why it was gay! To that, I say “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” in a tone that maybe makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up because it is, in fact, a little threatening. Happy Pride.
Gemini
If queer astrology isn’t real, then explain how this photo screams GEMINI.
Having your zodiac sign’s season usher us into Pride has always made you feel like you’re born anew just in time for the season. Your annual Gay Pride Party, in that way, also doubles as a second birthday celebration — but you don’t tell anyone that. You spend weeks constructing a menu, testing gay cocktails and rainbow-colored mocktails, and experimenting with allergy-friendly ways to create colorful hors d’oeuvres. I have a friend who says that if you’re shy or a little unlucky, all you need to do is find a Gemini and follow them. The guests at this soiree are people you’ve met on all your travels, from all your social groups, from all these different eras of your life. This Pride, I hope you can look up from your duties as the commensurate host, and realize that your truest talent lies in the way you connect so many queer people, like a second, other, gayer kind of gravity. People are just drawn into your orbit, but it’s not a bad thing, because you’ve always taken care of your fellow travelers. Happy Pride, Gemini. This Gay Pride Horoscope-er says is raising their glass and saying cheers to you!
Cancer
You’ve got one source and one source only for your Pride celebration inspiration — and that’s the music video for Janelle Monaé’s Lipstick Lover. You’re choosing pools over a hot sticky parade. You’re choosing pleasure over worry (okay your zodiac sign is Cancer so you’re probably still concerned at times but you are WORKING on letting go. But if we’re being real, you are a little worried about your Sagittarius friend who hasn’t texted back in a few days, until you reassure yourself that this is normal for them — and then there are bills and…) SHHHH You are choosing PLEASURE OVER WORRY.
This Pride you’re locating a pool, your friends, any and all crushes, the outfits and music and beverages that make you feel the hottest. Then you, Cancer, are washing your troubles away in the crisp splash of chlorinated liquid crystal, the smack of flip flops on rough pool-side concrete and the laughter of chosen family. You deserve.
Leo
My dear Leo, performer of the queer zodiac, you are somehow ON STAGE this Pride. And, if for one second, you are thinking that this queer Pride horoscope might be in the wrong about that, consider whether you at any point have been “on stage” during Pride — center of a dance circle, or the one cracking everyone else up with their gay-ass jokes, you get it. Whether you’ve spent hours perfecting your Drag King look or your five-minute standup routine for a fundraiser at the local Gay Bar — or you pretended your friends were pushing you to sing YOUR song at queer karaoke but actually, secretly, you were never more ready for this moment — your heart and soul long for the spotlight. You don’t need it all the time, just like we only need 10 minutes of sunlight a day to get adequate vitamin D, but when you get the chance, Leo, you are going to soak up that sunlight, those stage lights, that attention. Don’t ever be ashamed of who you are this Pride. Your boldness lifts all our hearts.
Virgo
How did this happen, Virgo? One moment, you were sweating your first Pride, and now, at least according to this particular gay horoscope-er, you’re a source of stability, support and mentorship for someone else. Whether you’re the queer auntie, a teacher, the 30 or 40 or 50-something friend to a much younger gay, or involved in your local queer community in a way that puts in you in a position where you can offer your wisdom and support, you’re a pillar of strength, now. Of course, all that inter-generational queer responsibility doesn’t mean you’re not going to let loose. Of course not. You’re an absolute freak in the spreadsheets and the streets after all. And if our overall culture weren’t so repressed, it wouldn’t seem like there were any contradictions at all between being a mentor to the younger queer(s) in your life and loving a raucous party now and then. You might be ushering a kid to their first Pride, taking a friend to their first gay bar, or just having some deep heart to hearts this June. Whatever form your contributions take, thank you for everything you’ve done and that you’re doing for our fellow queers, Virgo. Hats off to you! Also, no, thank you, I do not need to be spanked right now, but thank you for modeling good consent practices.
Libra
Libra, you’re going to the kind of Pride Party that either a) requires an invite and the location isn’t published, or b) feels like that’s the case even if it isn’t — and yes, I’m a little bit jealous. There will be actually good dance music, celebrities, local or otherwise, and a good smattering of your friends because you also know everyone in your town. Your outfit will be on point, except for the fact that your shoes might make your feet bleed a little. It’s okay, though! Because you’re having fun dancing and blisters are a Tomorrow Problem, much like what you’re going to eat for breakfast because your fridge is empty. Here’s to letting go for a night and living in the now, Libra, because goddess knows you’re always living in the future despite what a pleasure it is to be around you in the present. Breathe. Breathe again. Dance. And don’t forget that the rest of us would very much enjoy living vicariously through your Instagram stories.
Scorpio
Scorpio, you are either literally doing magic this Pride season or, you know, you’re metaphorically stirring the cauldron. Your zodiac sign is known for its mystery, and also its proclivity for revenge. You could be doing a spell with your besties to attract love, or you could be pissing into a jar because your ex won’t return your vintage lesbian pulp fiction collection. Whether you’re going to roll up your black lace sleeves and dig into actual spellwork, or you’re simply leaning into your bewitching side, you’re here to remind us all that we can wear black any time of the year. Thank you for reminding us that the season’s not always about the rainbows and the shouting, and that sometimes queer life’s about leaning in a doorway mysteriously in good lighting.
Sagittarius
Sure, you’re queer all year, but as I consult my room-scaled mental model of the cosmos for this queer Pride horoscope, I can see that nothing fills your heart with the urge to go absolutely rogue like the sound of Pride flags snapping in the wind on a climate-change-turbo-charged-record-temperatures-hot June day. Pride is a celebration, but you’re not going to forget its riot roots. That’s why you’ve enlisted several of your craftiest friends to construct an effigy of Ron DeSantis and several protest signs to go with. You cover your faces and tattoos, leave your phone at home and keep the plan locked down — no one but your small group knows about it. When all is said and done, the image of your Ron DeSantis effigy, latched to the outside of a pedestrian bridge over a highway, burning against the starless sky will be one of your most treasured Pride memories. You go to sleep that hot June night wrapped in a wet sheet, next to your window A/C unit, still hearing the echo of banner drops flapping over the sound of traffic and car horns below.
Capricorn
Your Pride look is impeccable. You’re ironed and lint-rolled and you’re, in fact, not going to Pride. You’re attending a tasteful hang with some of your older friends where the host is a Gemini. You know she’ll have a tasteful array of cocktails and mocktails in an array of rainbow colors, but you’re also bringing what you remember is her favorite wine. You arrive an hour late, but are still one of the first ones there so you help set up, and once things kick off, you’ll enjoy moving, with poise and ease, from conversation to conversation, because this is about being among your people, and these are the people you’re proud to call your friends.
But what you’re really excited for is the fact that you meticulously cleaned and laid out each of your sex toys because you’ve got some personal Pride plans for your partner / sweetheart / date / yourself tonight. Enjoy, you multi-faceted horned and horny babe.
Aquarius
Oh Aquarius, the visionary of the queer zodiac, this gay pride horoscope finds you completely forgetting that it’s Pride. Sometime during the weekend, you’ll wrap up whatever project you’re working on and hear the call — like the graze of a feather made of seabreeze in within the folds of your ear — of the magic mushrooms that you’ve had stashed just for a lazy afternoon such as this. It’s possible, that as the day starts to balance on the glimmering, pulsating, rainbow-outlined edge of the evening that you might get that old familiar “get-up-and-go” call to action. You’ll pull on some sneakers and remember to pack water and your keys and head out for a walk. The walk might take you downtown, where, through no intention you’re aware of, you stumble upon your city’s Pride festivities. You accept the universe’s invitation and make your way inside, walking around slowly, smiling, complimenting others’ looks and basking in the love and joy and beauty of humanity in the way that only someone who’s a little bit of an extraterrestrial — and a little bit of an outsider — can.
Pisces
Oops, you’re enjoying nature again! This gay Pride horoscope finds that you, Pisces, in that particularly effervescent and watery way of your zodiac sign, have decided that you’re overwhelmed by the fast pace of parties, the noise of parades and the pressure to have a memorable Pride. Instead, you and a select close friends are electing to spend time outside of the city and paying attention to your own mental health. You’re focusing on listening to the birds, smelling the June flowers and tending to your food over a fire. This might be a low-key backyard barbecue, it could be a multi-day camping venture, or it could be a day-trip to a hiking trail you’ve wanted to try for a while. Pisces, your zodiac sign’s lesson for the rest of the queer community is that it’s okay to need to escape sometimes, okay to prioritize healing and that it’s okay to be present in our bodies in ways that are, well, objectively quite healthy. You’re the oldest sign of the zodiac, and though your wisdom is often quiet, it’s so, so meaningful.
Aries
SOMEONE had to actually go to the Pride Parade, and according to this gay pride horoscope, it’s you, Aries, the baby of the zodiac! The youngest of the signs! The cycle starts anew with you and there is no one better to carry on old traditions with fresh energy than you! Get out there and do what you’re good at, shout and party and play and show us all what the intersection of riot and revelry really means! Whether you’re going in your best leather or draping a trans flag across your shoulders, your very presence is going to make the Pride festivities this year feel that much fuller. We love to hear you over the megaphone, shouting Pride slogans! Lez march.
Taurus
Taurus, Taurus, my comfort-loving, boundary-setting, snack-munching, gay and proud Taurus. According to all the power vested in my grasp of gay astrology, I am seeing that you’ll be in bed, on your couch or firmly ensconced in some outdoor furniture with queer movies flickering in the warm, firefly-lit evening air. Now, listen, the writer of this gay pride horoscope knows that this isn’t a last-minute-canceling-plans kind of decision. No, this is the event. You’ve been planning this adventure for yourself, you and a partner, or you and a close friend or two — FOR LITERAL WEEKS. You have the list of movies, you have them downloaded. You have a cooler full of drinks. You have snacks. Snacks that you pre-prepped. You’re showered and pampered and in your comfiest loungewear. This is an at-home chill hang, but you are doing it to a T. (The T is for Taurus.)
Making An Independent Documentary About Queer Women Is Like Jumping Without A Net
When I met my partner Beth in February 2020, she was working on a documentary. I had never known someone who was working on a documentary before — they seem like so much more work than a narrative story. The documentary, called Feeling Seen, focuses on the representation of queer women on television. It was a topic I found really interesting; when I was younger, TV had been a big part of my life, and some of the earliest confirmation of my queerness came from there. We started dating right before the pandemic, which shut down any progress she had made with filming. The more we talked about the project, the more intrigued I was by it. Eventually, I became part of the team.
Beth started conducting interviews for Feeling Seen in 2017, but there were still things she was trying to work out. Since I’m a writer and write narratives, we decided my best use would be to come on as a co-writer, helping her flesh out the story of the documentary by creating a narrative structure. The thing I loved the most was that TV fans are a huge part of the story of the doc. She had interviewed actors, showrunners, and writers from several television shows, but she had also connected with people who watch television about how the depictions of queer women on television had informed their own queerness or perceptions of what queer life could look like. There have been several documentaries on LGBTQ+ representation on TV, but none of them talk to the regular people who watch TV. It really does change the depth of the story. I decided the best way to tell the story was to follow a linear timeline of representation but focus on key shows that changed the conversation, using the fan interviews to bolster the things the creators of the show had to say.
In 2021, Beth asked me to sign on as Associate Producer of the project. It made sense since we lived together and often had conversations about the doc after hours, mostly in bed. I can untangle her thoughts and execute them in ways someone who doesn’t know her as intimately can’t. In 2022, I took over as the main producer and social media manager. I continue to also help Beth with the narrative plot of the film, using my understanding of not only more recent television, but the larger conversations around representation that are happening in a variety of spaces to craft a well rounded story. Because I’m a total research nerd, I also do a lot of the historical research that will inform the early parts of the film. I had never envisioned myself as the producer of a documentary, but I believe in this film so much that it felt like a no-brainer when I was asked. However! I will admit that this project is an absolute labor of love. Emphasis on the labor part.
We are doing this project completely independently, which is a lot harder than people think, especially when you don’t have a lot of money. The bulk of the interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 were done after a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise $50,000. We were able to raise about $7,000 last year after mounting another crowdfunding campaign, but we were so unprepared for it. Crowdfunding is like jumping without a net; you really have to trust that people see enough of your value to give you money. There is a vulnerability to asking people for money in that way. What if people don’t donate? What does that say about us and about the project? We have heard from so many people that this is such an important and necessary film, and that doesn’t seem to translate into money when we need it. There have been many nights where Beth and I have sat up and wondered what it is about the project that keeps people from donating. Of course we know that some people simply aren’t in a position to, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
Finding funding for independent projects is really fucking hard. If you’ve never done it before, you cannot fathom how exhausting and demeaning the process can be. Crowdfunding is just one (very important) part of making an independent project happen. It’s stress-inducing: The lulls in donations sit like a pit in my stomach as my thoughts swirl with what happens if we can’t make it happen. It’s hard not to take it personally, even if half the audience is strangers.
And people who try to offer advice often mean well but only make it worse. We recently had someone suggest we simply release what footage we have now and start a new project to fill in the gaps we’re missing. As if it’s that easy! “Well, why don’t you just ask the celebrities you interviewed for money?” Okay, first of all: These people are doing these interviews for free. We cannot then turn around and ask them for thousands of dollars. It doesn’t seem right. A few have offered help in various ways, and we do try to take them up on it, but they’re also impossible to get in touch with, especially when you have to go through a manager or an assistant. People ask why we don’t apply for grants and we do! But after the pandemic, there are less of them to go around, and many of the ones you’d think would be available for us just aren’t. Plus there are a lot of equally deserving people who are also applying for the same grants. There’s only so much money going around, and even though we believe in the strength and necessity of our documentary, we’re small fish in a big pond full of fish. I can write an amazing application, but again, I have no control over their decisions. We’ve applied to several large grants in the last couple of months, and now we’re sitting on pins and needles waiting to see what happens.
Feeling Seen is as relevant as ever; we’ve all seen the shows we love either end or be canceled in the last couple of years. Each loss has been devastating to our community, and to each of us personally. Since Beth started this project in 2017, almost all of the shows she discussed are off the air. By our hopeful release year of 2025, there’s a chance that all of the shows we plan to discuss in depth will be off the air. And the way things are going, there aren’t going to be a whole new crop of shows popping up in their place. It’s fucking depressing.
When we interviewed the inimitable Lea DeLaria in the summer of 2022, she said queer women are being written out of their own narrative, and I couldn’t agree with her more. As part of my research, I watched a lot of documentaries that focused on LGBTQ+ representation, especially on television and it was an eye-opening experience. I watched Visible: Out of Television, which explores similar subject matter to take notes. In five hour-long episodes, the mentions of queer women were only enough to fill one sheet of notebook paper. And despite being produced by high profile LGBTQ+ actors, there were so many queer women who were left out of the conversations completely. It was so disappointing to see.
For so long, we have had to feast on scraps, and when we finally did have good representation, it was systematically taken away from us. When we create things for ourselves, that gets destroyed too. We can’t win, but we can keep trying to fight. That’s why it’s so important to us to not only finish making Feeling Seen, but to get it out into the world for others to see.
We’re currently fundraising to finish filming the last 10-15 interviews we need to be able to tell the full scope of the story. Shooting an interview (or several) isn’t cheap; each shoot costs us anywhere between $1,500 and $2,100 between crew fees and rentals. This means that if we want to finish, Feeling Seen needs to raise $30,000 in the next month. We want to have filming finished before the go into the Christmas season so that we can start 2024 in post-production. We’re determined to get as far into this project as we can independently so we can maintain our artistic vision and integrity without compromise. But we can’t do it alone.
I intentionally chose Pride month for our fundraiser for two reasons: making so called “allies” put their money where their mouths are by asking them to donate and to show that, no matter what, we’re committed to this project. Pride is about the riot but also the resilience of our community, and no one has to be more resilient than a couple of independent documentary makers.
We need to take back control of our own narrative. I will never stop trying to tell our stories.
Clare Forstie Wants To Change the Way You Think About the Queer Midwest
Last April, my friends and I found ourselves driving through rural Illinois around 1 a.m. We spent an evening at The Office, the only gay bar in Rockford, Illinois — home to the fictional Rockford Peaches of A League of Their Own — where we grabbed drinks and stayed late to watch the Saturday night drag show. We were all faculty members at a liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin, a small city of about 36,000 on the border of Illinois, and made the trip 18 miles south because The Office was our closest gay bar. Older faculty members told each of us about a gay bar in Beloit, but it had long since closed. So off to Rockford we drove.
I was thrilled to see a diverse group of queers show up to cheer on the local queens that night. Having lived in New York City and Chicago for most of my adult life, I was accustomed to LGBTQ scenes in larger metropolitan cities, where nightlife is often segregated by race, age, and gender. Do rural queers spend more time in community with each other, if only because they have fewer places to go?, I wondered. This resonated with my own experience: I was at the bar with three gay male colleagues who had quickly become my lifelines to queer community that year. In a small city without many resources or social networks for LGBTQ folks, we became a small queer crew, frequently showing up for one another to celebrate our achievements and kvetch about our complaints.
Clare Forstie’s book Queering the Midwest: Forging LGBTQ Community explores how LGBTQ Midwesterns cultivate community in seemingly “unfriendly” cities, in places like Rockford and Beloit. Forstie interviewed more than 50 residents of “River City,” a pseudonymous city of about 50-60,000 people in the Midwest, to understand the nuances and complexities of building community outside of major metropolitan areas. The book resonated deeply with my own experiences of looking for and creating queer community in the Midwest.
“I am a queer person who grew up in and has lived in small communities, small towns, and small cities for my entire life. And I found that some of the narratives both that we hear nationally [and] within academia about LGBTQ communities more broadly tend to flatten the experience of folks in small cities and towns,” Forstie, an Education Program Specialist at the University of Minnesota, told me when we spoke about the book last month. Pushing back against generalizing narratives that cast the Midwest as a conservative place to escape from, or a group of monolithic “flyover” states without rich culture or community, Queering the Midwest tells a dynamic story about the varied ways queer and trans people experience life in River City.
Forstie’s interviews and ethnographic observations of LGBTQ events in River City painted a picture of what she calls “ambivalent communities.” “Ambivalent communities” helps describe how LGBTQ people in River City feel about their community as well as how community institutions wax and wane over time. “LGBTQ communities are persistently ambivalent and not easily located along a trajectory toward assimilation or progress,” Forstie writes in her Introduction. “While LGBTQ institutions anchor communities in large cities, people anchor communities (and sometimes LGBTQ institutions) in smaller cities like River City. As people migrate to and from these communities, relationships, institutions, and events rise and fall…LGBTQ community has been necessarily temporary in contexts where institutions cannot be sustained.” In other words, in towns and cities too small to have an LGBTQ community center or a network of LGBTQ cultural institutions (bars, social clubs, sports teams, book stores, activist groups, etc.), a sense of community may fluctuate over time and is often dependent on particular individuals who help create it.
Forstie’s understanding of communities differs from other sociological accounts of queer community, which tend to imagine it as moving through particular stages of development: At first, LGBTQ people are largely closeted, then enter a coming out era, and eventually assimilate into the mainstream (what some scholars have called “post-gay” community). Complicating this progress narrative, Forstie argues that the “unsettledness of communities varies and is specific to each community’s contours and histories.” She explores how the broader contexts of communities like River City — geography, racial and gender demographics, political and industrial histories — shape how LGBTQ people feel and experience it. Rather than generalize about LGBTQ community formation based on case studies of urban coastal cities, Forstie wants to see how our understanding of community shifts when we look elsewhere.
“What, precisely, does ambivalent community look and feel like?” Forstie asks. To find out, Forstie asked LGBTQ River Citizens about their relationships. She found that friendships between LGBTQ people were key to their sense of community (or lack thereof). While existing research focuses on how queer “chosen families” are crucial to LGBTQ community survival, Forstie finds the reality was a bit more complicated for the people she interviewed. It is not just that friendships create community: Forstie wants to know, “Which friendships generate community, and under what conditions?”
Interestingly, she told me there is very little research on LGBTQ friendships in general: “There’s a lot of research on LGBTQ folks in families and what that means for folks, there’s a lot of research on LGBTQ institutions as a source of community, but not so much about the relationships that form them or don’t form them. So I think there’s a need to dive deep into understanding what relationships actually create a sense of community.” Her work helps us understand “how friendship may, in fact, hold LGBTQ institutions together or constitute communities after such institutions have faded away.”
Forstie told me,“Friendships where folks affirmed and validated [queer] folks’ identities were really important for LGBTQ folks’ survival. But not all friendships are created equal, right? Just because someone had a shared identity doesn’t mean that they were going to be friends…Some friendships didn’t allow LGBTQ folks to be seen at all.” Family relationships and friendships were variable, and some of her participants complained that LGBTQ community in River City was too “clique-y.” Yet those without connections to LGBTQ friends, romantic partners, or acquaintances often felt lonely. People without those community ties “were the folks who are most likely to leave” and move to other cities, Forstie said.
This is the ambivalence that Forstie finds so interesting about LGBTQ communities. She writes, “Ambivalent community reflects a sense of both/and—a sense of both the need and lack of need for LGBTQ community.” Some of Forstie’s participants complained about the community that existed but still desired to be a part of it. Others had close LGBTQ and straight ally friends, but still didn’t feel an attachment to a larger community. Still, others felt safe in River City precisely because they didn’t tend to associate with other LGBTQ people. For Forstie, these tensions and contradictions show us community isn’t a linear, stable, or objectively “good” thing. As she told me, “communities can be inclusionary and exclusionary at the same time.” Instead of romanticizing community, Forstie suggests that exploring how people understand community can tell us about “how people imagine their futures” in relationship to one another.
As two East Coast transplants living in the Midwest, Forstie and I ended our conversation talking about how the political context has shifted here since she conducted her research in the 2010s. As state legislatures introduce record numbers of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ across the country, will this shift how we understand and feel a sense of community? Forstie shares that LGBTQ activists in River City occasionally create one-off events — like a 2016 vigil to honor the lives lost after the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Florida — to support one another. Standlone events put on by dedicated organizers can help create a sense of togetherness and solidarity during times of crisis without relying on longstanding organizations or institutions, she suggests. Forstie also predicts that “migration patterns are really going to change pretty substantially,” as LGBTQ people, and especially trans folks and/or families with trans children, consider leaving states increasingly hostile to their wellbeing. She and I colloquially share stories of friends and colleagues planning to leave Ohio and Missouri, the states where we both currently live.
“But folks do stay, for a variety of reasons,” she affirms. “I think it’s important for folks who don’t live in small cities in towns to be good allies to folks who are in small cities and towns. We [can] think about how we can support those folks in this moment, and to not be like, ‘Wow, it must really stink to be there,’ [but] to think about how we can share resources, right? So I started a monthly contribution to a mutual aid organization in the state that River City is located in.” Rather than just encouraging our friends and loved ones to leave their rural communities, Forstie encourages us to ask what they might need to sustain their wellbeing.
Despite the increasingly dystopian news about transphobic and homophobic legislation in the Midwest and across the country, Forstie wants us to recognize “there’s something to be said for the joy that can be found in those communities, for those of us who live in them, who are from them, who choose to stay.” She tells a heartwarming story about attending a small town Pride celebration with her family in Brunswick, Maine last summer — the town’s first! — where she ran into a former professor who hugged her warmly. As she tells this story, I think back to the joy I felt last year at The Office, surrounded by my colleagues and queers of all kinds. It felt powerful to participate in Rockford’s local LGBTQ culture, out with my friends at a thriving gay bar in a region many don’t associate with queer nightlife. “There’s something about a small town pride that really reinforces the importance of relationships, and not viewing community as a source of consumption,” Forstie reflects. “So I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to be all doom and gloom. I want to retain that feeling of joy alongside the struggle. So ambivalence to the end, right?”
Queer Mom Chronicles: Happy Pride Y’all!
I came out when my son was almost five years old. He was at an age where we could talk about what my identity meant and about life as a queer person. It was important for me that he not only understand my queerness in relation to his life but understand the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. Young kids are often way more open minded; it’s much easier to explain queer life to a four and a half year old and have him accept it.
One of the ways we did that was through picture books. There are so many picture books for kids that explain queer life and tell queer stories. One of his favorites was a book about Stonewall; not just the riot, but the building itself. When we lived in New York, we would pass it often because it was near the salon I took him to for haircuts. When we got to the part about the riot, I appealed to his empathetic nature and his sense of fairness to make it all make sense. Once he understood it in terms he could make sense of, I knew it would be easy to build on that over time.
By the following year, he understood that Pride started as a riot and why it’s important to acknowledge the origins of the month. I was able to teach him the un-whitewashed version of the Stonewall riots, giving power to the black and brown folks that put their bodies on the line so that his mom could be free to love freely. He already knew that people fear those who are different and how that can lead to violence, but that marginalized groups always find ways to fight back. But I didn’t only focus on that. I did teach him about the joy of being queer, and that even though Pride’s roots are a riot, we continue to celebrate to show the world what liberation and joy look like. That’s why we have a parade every year. When he was younger, the parade was not his vibe, and then the pandemic happened, so we had to wait to celebrate publicly.
Last year was the first time my family celebrated Pride, and woo wee, did we go all out. LA actually has TWO Pride weekends. West Hollywood Pride is the first weekend of the month (by time as you all read this, we will have already been!) so we went to the parade, which was a fun time. Driving would have been a nightmare, so we took public transportation; the city has trolleys that take you to the start of the parade route. On the trolley, there was an older gay man with a speaker playing a bunch of 70s and 80s disco, but then he put on the soundtrack to Rent and the whole trolley whooped. Did my partner and I participate in a singalong of “La Vie Boheme” and “Seasons of Love”? You bet your ass we did. It’s truly one of the gayest things I’ve ever done in public, and I loved every fucking second of it. That’s what Pride is all about!
Somehow, we ended up in an area with a lot of families, so he found other kids to play with. People were handing out flags and signs, so I taught him to chant “no cops at Pride,” and he really got into it while we waited. He got a beach ball and it kept him occupied, which was a godsend. His other favorite part was seeing JoJo Siwa on a float; he told all of his friends about it at school the next day. We walked the length of the parade because there’s a Salt & Straw at the end and we could all use an ice cream.
I planned our summer trip to New York to coincide with New York Pride. It was something I never got to experience when I lived there, and I just had to go. I convinced my best friend to come (she’d never been either), and I requested my mom’s presence, mainly so she could take my son home afterwards. To my absolute surprise, my dad decided he wanted to join in on the fun. You haven’t lived until you’ve gone to a Pride parade with your eight-year-old son and your seventy-seven year old dad who’s going blind and walks with a cane. But they had a great time! It was really special to experience that day with my whole family.
We also did Dyke Day in LA, which was so much fun. Some friends brought a whole picnic setup, and we brought our puppy and his puppy bestie. The pups were absolutely the belles of the ball. If you’re single, bring a puppy to Dyke Day. You won’t be single for long. The NYC Dyke March was a lot of fun too, especially because we skipped the marching part and waited for the march to reach Washington Square Park. You can hear them coming, and the energy in the park is electric. We hadn’t planned to stay long, but our kiddo had a blast playing with other kids who had families that looked like ours. We had to drag him out of the park.
This year, I’m planning on doing a Pride slideshow with his class. Most of his classmates know that he has two moms, but I don’t think they truly understand what that means. I did a slideshow presentation for Black History Month, and it went over really well, so I’m super excited to do this one. I’m going to teach them some vocabulary words, some LGBTQ+ icons, and have a printout of the progress Pride flag for them to color. My son gets mini lessons all the time, but I have no idea what his classmates know. I’m a little nervous, but I know the kids in his class are open to learning, and who knows? Maybe they’ll be able to teach someone close to them a little something.
I was curious to see what some other families are going to be doing this year. The WeHo Pride parade is full of families, but I know that not every family does that. Below are my favorite responses.
“I will be in Arlington, VA reading my debut picture book Molly’s Tuxedo at the Family Pride event at the Museum of Modern Art Arlington, co-sponsored by Rainbow Families. My daughter is home from college and will be there, too to help me out.” – Vicki Johnson
“We always talk a little bit about history and why we have to be visible and celebrate and activate because we weren’t always free to do so and many people fought for us to be here. Every year she gets older we talk a little deeper and a little more real in that regard. Otherwise it’s just a party and it’s really not. It’s important to me she knows that part especially now.” – Audrey Babcock
No matter how you celebrate, I hope you have a Happy Pride month!
Queer Mom Chronicles is a monthly column where I examine all of the many facets of queer parenthood through my tired mom eyes.
Eight LGBTQ+ Country Music Singers on Pride and Queering Country
“What kind of music do you listen to?” is always a question I dread. My response, “I listen to everything,” while mostly true, is a cover-up for how much time I actually spend listening to country music. I’ll admit that at any given moment you could turn on the local country radio station and I would probably know the lyrics at a moment’s notice. There’s shame in admitting that because popular country, as we know it, is for the white, conservative, heteronormative people of the world. Almost all of the top 40 musicians are cisgender straight dudes, and who among us wants to support that, right?
Since coming into my queer identity, this is one of the many contradictions I’ve felt I need to reckon with. But I am determined to prove to myself and to you, my skeptical readers, that country (and its associated genres like folk and americana) is so queer — and not just cis gay male queer but expansively, fluidly, gloriously queer! So, I went digging to find us some of the most radical, raging, talented queer country and americana artists for us to listen to this Pride.
Want to know how to RAGE this Pride? Host a cookout, bump our queer country playlist, and get these queers to the top 40.
Before I delve into the mini interviews I conducted with each of these artists, take a look at their bios to get to know them and their music a little better.
Madeleine Kelson (she/her) is a Nashville based Americana artist. She pulls from a rich tradition of folk, country, and Americana, challenging its boundaries as a queer artist, to represent the modern world.
Brody Ray‘s (he/him) music is a cross between the rock/pop influences he loved growing up and the country music and lyric that surrounded him and his whole life as he grew up and experienced life in Kearney, NE. It’s just what comes out when he writes!
Mercy Bell (she/hers) is “A potent, progressive take on emotive, modern folk” (Rolling Stone Country) and a “shape-shifting songsmith” (The Nashville Scene).
Jobi Riccio (she/they) is a songwriter and performer based out of Nashville, TN originally hailing from Colorado. They are a queer lifelong country music fan. While not all the music they write is specifically country, there is a strong twang-y thread that runs through it, and they hope to use this to challenge ideas of what it means to be both queer and country.
D’orjay (they/them) says “this ain’t your grandaddy’s country music,” despite it paying homage to the classic country music that artist D’orjay grew up with in rural Alberta. And it sure as hell ain’t stadium girls-trucks-beer country. Instead, they colour outside the lines with anthemic, bold blues, honky-tonk and rock-flavoured roots with a distinct queer twist.
Mya (Mimi) Byrne (she/her/and sometimes they) is a celebrated singer-songwriter signed to Kill Rock Stars Nashville, and her new album, Rhinestone Tomboy, has been lauded in NPR, Rolling Stone, and No Depression, among others.
Like a crackling backyard fire outside of a city at dusk, stars on one side of the sky and light pollution on the other, Mya’s music is in the pocket of traditional country and Americana, yet firmly rooted in the modern world. A proud and out queer trans woman, she is at the forefront of the queer country movement.
Meredith Shock (she/hers) is a queer singer/songwriter whose songs are her journal entries.
Kimber Springs (she/they) music is heavily inspired by their hometown, Nashville. They love giving their own take on country music.
What/Who inspired you to become a musician?
Madeleine
I grew up surrounded by music. My mom started my sister and I on violin when we were four, and we grew up singing along to the radio in three part harmony. Music and songwriting have always been my emotional outlet, so I guess the feeling of catharsis, and the adrenaline of being on stage inspired me more than any one artist.
Brody
My inspiration for music started at a very young age. My mom has video footage of me running around in a diaper and cowboy boots with a Flintstones toy guitar jamming out to whatever music video was on the TV. My mother was and still is a very talented pianist, singer, and accordion player, and when I was about eight years old, she asked if I wanted to play an instrument and she took me to the music store and we picked out my first guitar! I also picked up singing, cello, and piano and took lessons all the way through college. My uncle used to teach me piano and singing as well. I had so many favorite artists that inspired me to chase a career in entertaining and songwriting. Artists like Dashboard Confessional, Sheryl Crow, Lenny Kravitz, Michelle Branch, Third Eye Blind, Taking Back Sunday, The Starting Line, Paramore, Tim McGraw, Jason Aldean… I could go on for days with a list of all the artists and groups that have made me fall in love with music and influenced my songwriting.
Mercy
I grew up in an artistic family, and creativity was part of every day life. They were supportive of my talents before I believed in myself. I remember my mom telling me I should move to NYC and pursue music and my uncle showing me how to book gigs because he had been a promoter. And my voice teacher Marcelle, who also encouraged me to make music.
Jobi
My first musical loves were angry female country artists: The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, the list goes on. I was obsessed with the way they sang with such attitude and power and spent hours in my room singing along to their CDs. It wasn’t until I began writing my own songs and was supported by older musicians in my local scene that I felt confident enough to start playing out, so I owe a lot to their support and the support of my family.
D’orjay
I think certainly just growing up in a musical family. My mom just was a fan of the arts in general. Even growing up in a small town, and in particular, growing up on a farm on an acreage at a young age, there was still just a bunch of value that was put on music and creativity and acting and imagination and that kind of stuff in my family. As much as listening to other artists was a part of it, I think it really started there.
Mya/Mimi
Since my childhood, I wanted to be a musician, ever since I saw a guitar being played. My earliest influences were Elvis and Madonna, to be honest, and Jimi Hendrix really showed me the extent of expressiveness I wanted to aspire to. Once I found him, there was really no turning back.
Meredith
I’ve always wanted to be a singer. As a young kid, I was constantly singing along to the country songs my mom would play in the car. There isn’t just one performer that I can point to as inspiration — the country women in the 90’s were my favorite! Eventually Taylor Swift inspired me to write more truthfully and continue to want to chase my dreams.
Kimber
My father was a singer, so I was surrounded by good music and some of the best musicians around, including my guitar teacher Regi Wooten. He had a huge impact on me.
What are you most proud of thus far in your career?
Madeleine
In the past couple years, I’ve gotten to play with artists that I really look up to and was featured a couple times in NPR, which has been a bucket list thing for me! Even more than that, I’m really proud of a queer country song I put out last year called “The Way I Do.” The tag is “if I don’t get to heaven for loving her true, god has never loved a woman the way I do.” It was essentially my career coming out. I was so nervous to release it, but the response has been incredibly encouraging. Hearing people say that they grew up on country music and felt like it didn’t represent them as adults until they found this song is really moving. Being able to be that artist for people makes me feel like I’m doing something right.
Brody
I think the one thing I’m most proud of so far is the opportunity I got to sing on America’s Got Talent season 13 when I came out as trans to the whole room and world. From all the thousands of messages I got on social media, I realized it really helped a lot of people understand what it means and looks like to be trans and for others like me to come out, transition, chase their dreams, and just be authentic and happy. That was such a huge moment for me as a person and an artist and for representing trans people around the world. It really boosted my musical career as well! Recording and producing my cover version of the first song I sang on the show “Stand In the Light” was a big deal as well. It has over 1,270,000 streams on Spotify. I’m super proud of that!
Mercy
That I’ve made the music I want to make without anyone restricting me. I’ve made all my albums through crowdfunding (and maxing out my credit cards) so I’ve had complete artistic freedom. I can be myself.
Jobi
I’m really proud of my choice to come out as queer professionally, not just personally, which I did via social media in 2020. I feel like when I perform now, I can show up as my whole self and not like I’m playing a character and wearing a costume like I often felt before I came out.
D’orjay
Honestly, I think just that I went for it you know. I guess for some people, it doesn’t really resonate. But I felt like before I went down this music route, I already had lived a pretty full life and kind of really went for some things. And this is just something for myself I really wanted to do. And I had to just overcome a lot of internal and certainly some external barriers. So to kind of pick up the microphone, quote, unquote, at around 35. And just kind of going for it. I think that’s what I’m proud of. Everything else is, honestly, a cherry on a nice cake. I’m proud that I did this, so I won’t regret that.
Mya/Mimi
Quite frankly, staying alive and continuing to work without compromise. On a career goal level, playing in front of 18,000 people at the Love Rising concert in Nashville this spring, sharing the bill with Allison Russell, Maren Morris, Yola, Jason Isbell, and other heroes. Kissing my trans partner Swan Real in front of all of those people, showing the world that trans love is sacred…that’s my proudest moment onstage. But offstage? Probably the person who came up to me after a recent show who told me that my openness was the catalyst for them coming out to their parent as nonbinary. It made me cry.
Meredith
I’ve played two really energetic shows this past year — one being a single release show that my mom and aunt flew out and surprised me for. This was my first full band show with all original music, which was just crazy to hear that happening in real life! The second show I’m proud of was for Louisville Loves Emo. I did three acoustic emo cover songs to a crowd of over 600 people. This was the largest crowd I’ve ever played in front of, and I felt like I was on top of the world.
Kimber
I am most proud of my songwriting. I have always struggled to feel like my words were any good, but I feel like I’ve gotten to a place where I really believe in what I have to say.
Have you ever felt out of place in the industry?
Madeleine
One hundred percent, yes. When I first moved to Nashville, I played a lot of country shows and wrote with a lot of country writers. Country has a long history of excluding queer people (and people of color, women…basically anyone that’s not a straight, white, Christian man…) and although we have the same taste in women (cue the laugh track), as a queer, Jewish woman, I don’t exactly fit that bill. I thought coming out publicly would kill my career before it could even take off. There are still times I find myself not playing more overtly queer songs at shows. Fortunately, in the past few years, the Americana community has made an intentional effort to not only include, but uplift queer artists, and artists of color.
Brody
I think I have always felt out of place in the music industry and country music mostly, mainly because I feel like most of the industry people would run if they actually knew I was trans, and I think that it has kept me from really getting much further here in Nashville. I just feel STUCK, and that’s is such a terrible feeling. I could be wrong though, and I think it’s worth sticking around to find out. I have been met with only kindness and love for the most part here, but most people don’t know I’m trans until I tell them.
Mercy
Not in indie scenes. Not with other artists. Yes, in the music industry proper. Music Row in Nashville doesn’t know I exist, or if they do they’ve never reached out. I’ve also kept my distance somewhat, because there’s a lot of sexual harassment and misogyny. I had enough instances of being around creeps that I finally just stopped seeking out those industry spaces. Music journalists have been really kind to me and my lifesaver. They’ve always taken notice and helped me out. (I’m talking to you, case in point). And fans. Fans have given me my career.
Jobi
I’ve felt a little out of place in lots of spaces both musical and otherwise; I think lots of queer people feel this in all facets of our lives. In music, I’ve been called “too country” for the indie scene, and “not country enough” for the country scene — in a way it’s perfectly representative of who I am as a person and the music I make, kind of somewhere in the middle of a few different things.
D’orjay
Yeah. All the time? I don’t know. All the time. I think it’s too much for me to even go into that further. Other than just to answer the question directly. I feel out of place in the industry often and all the time. And it’s why I I don’t think I really participate in a ton of things traditionally that musicians in my position do.
Mya/Mimi
I often feel out of place. Despite being lauded by my peers and industry allies, I’ve been told more than once that I don’t fit in, literally, to so many of the wonderful places I aspire to play, or to agents who want to put me in a box. At the end of the day, I just want to make a living, and since the anti-trans laws started ramping up last year, I’ve found it extremely difficult to get work.
Meredith
I’ve most definitely felt out of place in the industry — maybe even most of the time. I live in Nashville, so you’d think it would be easy to feel comfortable being a musician in “music city” but it’s quite hard. It’s easy to fall into the habit of constantly comparing yourself to everyone around you. Luckily, there’s a wonderful and supportive queer music community here.
Kimber
I have definitely felt out of place in the industry. I think in any genre, there is a lot of pressure for women and perceived women to be feminine and sexy, and I don’t exactly fit that mold.
Why is it important for us queer folks to make country music?
Madeleine
I think at its core, music is supposed to represent and resonate with people’s feelings and experiences. Country is no different. Any time you exclude the perspective of an entire group of people, you miss out on their stories and experiences. We deserve to be heard, and we deserve to hear music that we can hear ourselves in. The best way to make that happen is to keep showing up, keep being loud, and keep making music.
Brody
I think it’s so important for queer folks to keep making country music, because representation and visibility is the most important thing. Music, no matter the genre, is a human experience we all connect with in some way. It speaks for us, it helps us process things, it brings people together, it helps us feel things we need to feel and express. It’s therapeutic. It unites humans in a way nothing else can. Having queer representation in country gives hope to queer people around the world that country music is for ALL and ALL are welcome. Unfortunately, more than any other genre, I think country music has always had a stigma around it that straight white religious/conservative people hold the reigns of country music, and to have queer folk infiltrate that space is sinful, forsaken as queer folk try to scale the conservative walls that so many of us queer country folk seem to run into at some point as artists. As if we aren’t included or welcome. It’s the signal I’m getting anyways. But as time goes on, more and more artists are emerging and coming out AFTER they have made it big. Which is kind of discouraging for me as a person who’s already come out. But if we don’t have these big artist infiltrating country music this way, how will it ever change? It’s almost like a trojan horse hahaha. So I totally get it. They are coming out from within and unlocking the doors from inside for the rest of us to come in. Music doesn’t discriminate. Everyone, queer, Black, white, brown enjoys country music just because they do! We as humans don’t need to have reasons for enjoying a certain genre of music. We just like what we like! I think being open in country helps unite our people and country. There is no other genre of music out there that singles out a certain type of person for the way they were born. Knocking down those barriers is so important for progress. If we don’t talk about it or see it, we stay stuck.
Mercy
Harlan Howard said “‘All you need to write a country song is three chords and the truth”, I’m pretty sure queer folks have a lot of truth to tell.
Jobi
Up until very recently, I feel like it was understood in the broader culture that country music belonged to primarily straight cis white conservative people. Of course, LGBTQ country artists have always been here — pioneers such as Lavender Country were writing and releasing queer country music long before the internet — but they were either never taken seriously by the industry or silenced by it. Because of this history and those who paved the way, it’s a huge deal that queer country artists and fans feel empowered enough to create spaces that celebrate our love for — and our place in — country music.
D’orjay
Because it’s hard fucking music man. Three chords and the truth. I think queer people are always at the forefront, and the trailblazers of living their most authentic and genuine lives and being their most authentic selves and striving for that and creating space for more people to be able to do that. And I feel like that is the essence of country music in my mind.
Mya/Mimi
Queer people and trans folks have always been a part of country. Our lives carry a gravitas that are in line with what is most cherished in this music…stories, relatable stories, of the outsider, of warmth, of love, of simple enjoyment of moments. We are the ones who can truly lay claim to being the children of the outlaw country movement, and we have that in our bones. There’s a throughline from Waylon to Willie to Jessi Colter to all of us queers. And the more visible we are, the more we can change the status quo. I’m a firm believer in the power of being out, and there are still so many in the closet. I hope all of us who are doing it inspire more folks to be able to do so.
Meredith
I moved to Nashville wanting to do country music because it’s what I grew up listening to. The first songs I released really show that country side of me, but my music has since evolved. Heteronormative narratives are woven so deeply into country stories, so as I started to relate less to the genre, I started aligning more with the soft pop genre.
I’ve still embraced the storytelling style of songwriting that country music is all about. This country influence will always be the core of my musicality, and I am so excited when I see queer country artists perform. I think it’s important for folks to stake a claim within a space that might not always be tolerant and accepting. This is really the only way the genre will grow. I don’t ever want kids now who love country to look up and walk away from the genre because they don’t see themselves in these stories.
Kimber
It’s important because there’s a lot of country ass queer people. I don’t think people realize how many of us are out here.
Can music be an act of protest? Celebration? Love?
Madeleine
I think music is innately all of those things. With queer music, it’s often all three at once. When I play a queer love song, its existence alone is, for better or for worse, an act of protest. On the one hand, making music is a genuine and meaningful way to be visible. On the other hand, it kind of sucks that any time I write a love song, it’s not just a love song, but a political statement.
Brody
I think that’s exactly what all music IS. It’s all human emotion. Fear, anger, sadness, grief, celebration, love, happiness, freedom, protest, education, fiction, letting go, moving on, partying and having fun, overcoming, soaking up life’s many turns and experiences. Especially country music. It’s all about heart, and we all have that. Music is uniting if done correctly and with the right intentions. It’s how we express our individuality. It should always be that way!
Mercy
A catchy song has power. It gets stuck in your head rent free, no matter who you are. Think of how much impact that is if you start saying things that are subversive and true. That’s the ultimate protest move.
Jobi
Music, like all art, is a documentation of human history and culture. In my opinion, any art created by people who’ve been silenced and oppressed is a form of all three of those things: protest, love, and celebration. I recently came across a sermon from a trans preacher based out of West Virginia (@the..reverend on tiktok) who put it beautifully so I’ll share their words here:
“Let’s use our rage to make art and dance. To leave so many beautiful pieces of ourselves in the history books that no one can burn us away entirely”
D’orjay
Yes, yes, and yes, absolutely. I feel like I have songs that are an act of all of those things in “New Kind of Outlaw” and my album.
Mya/Mimi
Music can and is celebration, catharsis, love, hope…when you can create a moment that resonates across boundaries that separate us as human beings, when music carries a power, it breaks down the divisions in the working class and brings us together. And that’s why so many people are scared of our power and our love. It’s our freedom that frightens those who push against us.
Meredith
I think all of the above! Music can be anything we want it to be. Even songs that I’ve written with personal experience in mind, people have come up to share that they connected with the lyrics in a completely different way — and that’s okay! A song doesn’t have to have one meaning. Relating to a song is about what you think it means, and in some ways, what you need it to mean in the moment — even if the writer didn’t intend for this.
Kimber
Country music has always been rooted in speaking your truth and questioning the status quo. Artists like Charlie Pride, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson are great examples of that.
Pretend we could hook you up with anyone in the industry to collaborate on a single? Who would you choose and why?
Madeleine
I’m a huge Brandi Carlile fan! I used to think that I couldn’t be queer and have a successful career in country or Americana. Watching her success showed me that I could be out and have a career. I think I owe a lot of my courage as an artist to her. She’s such a massive talent, and she’s also just so cool.
Brody
Oh gosh that’s a hard one! I think it would come down to probably Sam Hunt because I LOVE his style of songwriting and wish I could be as good! I feel like his style is exactly what I hope to achieve. Maren Morris, honestly the same, she’s so talented and has so much love for the queer community. Can we throw Hayley Williams and Dolly in there? Cuz why not? What’s not to love?
Mercy
Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift. I think they’re pop geniuses, and Taylor Swift is one of my favorite songwriters.
Jobi
I would love to do a song with Aaron Lee Tasjan. His latest record has been on repeat for me basically since it came out, and I really relate to how he writes about and celebrates his queerness in his music. I’ve always identified with being both masculine and feminine and have come to celebrate that, so his song “Feminine Walk” really hits for me.
D’orjay
Oh, man. I’ve got a few. Like, I want k.d. lang. I would love to because we’re from a really similar region. And in terms of like, queer country music and tickets to the music. She’s making the 80s so good. I think it’d be cool to do a song with Lil Nas X for so many obvious reasons. I think it’d be cool to have a country tune produced with Pharrell or something like that or just a cool producer that you wouldn’t normally expect to do a country song. And Pharrell was behind so much of the music, you know, r&b and hip hop, that I listened to in that era when he was part of the Neptunes. And then as always, Garth Brooks, you know, he’s always gonna be that guy. He was a big part of my connection to country music and family and just growing up honestly, just sitting in a garage. You know, singing songs with my best friends growing up.
Mya/Mimi
Well, there are so so so many people I would love to collaborate with. Willie Nelson. Chris Stapleton. Yola. k.d. lang. Harry Styles. Brandi Carlile. These folks all share my love of truth telling, of sharing the resonances of life’s observations that I believe are the cornerstones of the best songwriting, and the truth is that trans artists need to be platformed by our peers who *are* highly successful, because we are still diminished and invalidated by so so many folks. When trans people are being treated as equals, boundaries break down. I think we could write some real bangers, too.
Meredith
Easily Taylor Swift. Her writing is remarkable, and to see how she has grown as an artist and successfully transitioned to a different genre is so admirable. You can tell she loves what she does.
Kimber
It’s my dream to collab with Shania Twain. She’s such a living legend, and I think we would make a banger together!
How are you celebrating this Pride?
Madeleine
Honestly, probably by spending time at home with my fiancée and our dog. I love Pride, and I think it’s so important to celebrate the beauty and joy of being queer. I feel fortunate enough to be surrounded by a community that never makes me feel othered. At the same time, I live in Tennessee, which is essentially at war with queer people. At this point in my life, celebrating Pride looks like taking a moment to hit pause on the fight, and taking time for myself to forget that there’s anything “different” enough about me to celebrate.
There will always be work to do, but there is something so important about letting yourself rest. I know that might sound like kind of a buzzkill, but it has been a really freeing feeling and an empowering act of caring for myself.
Brody
This Pride month, I’m going to spend my time performing for a few Pride-related events like Delaware Pride June 10, the Pride round at the Bluebird Cafe June 22, and Dallas Pride street festival June 24! I always make some posts on social media and put out my Pride flag and lights on the porch. Maybe a Pride photoshoot with my family and always supporting and celebrating inclusive businesses as well.
Mercy
I’m headed to Chicago to help with rehearsals for a queer musical I’m co-writing called “Leather Daddies.” It’s a rock opera about the underground gay sexual revolution in 1950s/60s Chicago. It’s being workshopped through About Face Theatre, and we got a National Endowment for the Arts grant. We’ll have a performance, free to the public, on June 18.
Jobi
I’ve been struggling with this in the wake of so many horrific attacks on the queer and specifically the trans community nationally this year. As cliche as it sounds, I think the best thing we can do in moments like this is be in community with each other and support and uplift those of us who need it most. I think leaning into community is the whole point of Pride and especially important to remember amidst all the rainbow capitalism and heavy drinking culture that tends to really miss the point. Pride is a protest as much as it is a celebration, and it is for us and by us and it can look however we want and need it to look.
D’orjay
Man Prides’ every day. I’m celebrating being queer every day.
Mya/Mimi
One of our sweethearts is flying into New York to stay with me and Swan, and we are going to walk around this city, kiss and hug our friends, and generally be as gay as humanly possible.
Meredith
I will be going to Nashville’s Pride! The day of the festival is also my four years with my girlfriend, so we will be celebrating us, too!
Kimber
I’m celebrating Pride this year by getting the hell out of town and going fishing.
Anything you want to plug?
Madeleine
Check out my most recent album here!
Mercy
Lookout for my song with Melody Walker, “Jesus Was a Drag Queen,” released June 2!
Brody
Hmmm, I did release my new single on Valentine’s Day called “Make A Love Song With Me” and I’m really ‘PROUD’ of this one. I have another queer artist featured on it; her name is Carmen Dianne and she takes the song to a WHOLE different level. Let’s just say I picked the right female vocalist! She’s so amazing, and I want everyone to hear it! I wrote and produced all the parts and went through two producers before I found Gabriel, who brought it all together the way I always imagined it would sound.
Check out his audition on AGT and so much more here and this cover of Carrie Underwood’s “Heartbeat”!
Jobi
I have a new single “Sweet” coming out June 20 I wrote as a queer country self-love anthem for my younger self. You can also preorder my debut record “Whiplash” that will be out in September now!
D’orjay
Yeah, I’m working on a little bit of a rebrand right now; I’m just gonna kind of be going by myself and then including my band in that as well. And just working on some new music. I’m really excited about the next album to come out. When it gets out, who can say, but yeah, I’m starting to do some recording again next month in June, and so yeah, I’ll be releasing that soon.
Mya/Mimi
My record is out now, and I do hope y’all will love it and share it…and buy the purple vinyl! The most important thing to me is getting the word out to trans and queer people that artists like me exist and that there is a world out there for them, that no matter what the genre is, it can be yours. Especially country and Americana.
Meredith
My debut EP was released in the Fall and it’s basically about my entire relationship! It’s catchy, queer, and sweet!
Kimber
I have my first single called “Small Town Love” coming out very soon! Stay tuned.
While these artists couldn’t make it in this piece, I wanted to give some shoutouts to musicians who are 100% queer, country, and phenomenal. Amythyst Kiah (check out “Black Myself”), Thao & the Get Down Stay Down’s (check out “Holy Roller”), and Crys Matthews’ (check out “Prodigal Son”). Check them out in the playlist!