CREEKSHED CONTRIBUTORS Zoe Aldrich, Tatiana Avdelas, Kallie Blakelock, HG Garner, Amanda Hagood, Sarah Joy Milner, K. Olivia Overton, Zoë Spanbroek, Grace Tvenstrup, Alexa Will
PHOTOGRAPHERS Dave Decker
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Taylor Dillon Con Amor
Felicia Lacalle Quiote Tequileria
Max McKee Bar Terroir
Mike Morales Sunda
David Reyes Uno Mas
Olivia Gielser The Pearl at Water Street
Yanick Destine Bulla Gastrobar
Anthony Santos Private Chef
Cody Tiner District South Kitchen + Craft
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Billy Brannen Maru
Cristian “Cris” Ruiz Sal Y Mar
Saravanan Appadurai Palmette Brasserie & Bar
Creative Loafing Tampa Bay readers have thoughts and they’re not shy about letting them fly. Since taking ownership of the paper last January, CL staffers have worked to bring many of these voices to this page every week. Hell, someone even called my cell (813-5306384) to say they were chuffed about Bob Whitmore’s May 14 cartoon depicting six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices as members of the Ku Klux Klan. Keep the feedback coming, and we’ll keep posting.—Ray Roa
WMNF: Outside St. Pete City Hall, protestors continue call for police to end agreement with ICE
10 of them... I think we're fine—Christian Greenon via Facebook
Florida considers cancelling 4th of July fireworks over drought concerns
Every dog in Florida thanks you.—Rita Anna on Facebook
We have 30 days to get out of drought. Rainy season started this week. Calm the heck down.— Jacob Micheels on Facebook
Floridians are famously known for listening to this….— Tiffany Gayle on Facebook
Op-ed: ‘Just say no’ to Rays stadium deal, says former Tampa elected officials
Look, this is an investment that will transform the entirety of Drew Park. It literally is 1000s of Acres of blank canvas in the middle of the city. Not one building there isn’t ready to be torn down and made into something else. This could, and in all likelihood will, create a whole new city within the city. It could double the office and apartment spaces in Westshore.—Joe Nappi on Facebook
Tampa Bay Brewing Co. will close Ybor City location this month (feedback via Facebook, read more on p. 45)
I remember when it was gaybor and that's when it was good variety of restaurants and clubs with diversity—Jessie Littlejohn
How am I supposed to pre-game trips to the Castle?—Edward Wolfe
We need to regroup and figure out a way to keep them in St Petersburg! Game days bring in lots of revenue to restaurants and visiting downtown. Lots of people work at the stadium who will lose jobs, not to mention we can make an entire experience if done right! Fix It!!!—@esmeraldadukeson on Instagram
Giving billions to billionaires is absolutely ridiculous. They can build themselves a stadium with many other partners. MLB isn’t going to let them leave for a smaller market, so their threat is empty.—@w.sean.campbell on Instagram
Was there more discussion as to where the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s Office/ DMV office on that site would be relocated to and who would pay for the land, relocation, and costs for a new building? That building was constructed in 2015 for around $4 million. Replacing it with a similar building would now cost $15 million, or more. Who would be on the hook for those expenses?—Dana Jasper on Facebook
NOOOOO! Our first date! Our honeymoon dinner. This place has been so special to us. Thank you for providing a place for us to celebrate.—Deb Kruelskie
I will be honest I think the rising parking fees are not helping. We used to jump in to eat or have a couple of drinks when parking was free or reasonable. The last time we stopped on a Friday after work the parking garage was $10. Too many other options. Dennis Burgeson
Busch Gardens Tampa announces the return of free beer
17 year-old me loves being blacked out on the school bus on the way home. I had such a horrible fake ID and they never looked twice at it. Thank you @buschgardens—@djmega___ on Instagram
We had free passes on my birthday back in the 90s. my brother and I we got a beer and got back in line finished the first beer by the time we got our second beer and got back in line and we got back up and they said you could only get two so we went to a different line and got two more and got back in line and we ended up getting two more and then we started to walk around the park, but we ran out of beer and went back and got two more and then they said the park is closing in an hour so we went back and got four more and then they said the park will close in 10 minutes so we got two more each. then it was time to go home, stopped on the way and got us a six pack. We never did ride any rides.—Lance Williams on Facebook
Indie night night
Photos by Dave Decker
The back-to-back, 10th and 11th Indie Night concerts at Crowbar were sold-out well before doors opened last weekend, and for good reason. Over the last five years, Rohna—the rock bandpromoters behind the wildly successful series—have built a community around the idea of discovering new music while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other fans. The quintet played one last Crowbar set on Saturday night, even bringing in a giant video screen to light the place up further. The crowd last Saturday sure looked like they were having a blast. Now, Indie Night will look for a new home as it seeks to re-create the vibe in the wake of Crowbar’s imminent closure this summer. See more photos via cltampa.com/music.—Ray Roa
BEST FITNESS STUDIO / BEST PILATES STUDIO
BEST WOMAN-OWNED BUSINESS
BEST PERSONAL TRAINER / BEST GROUP FITNESS
Tampa Bay's best things to do from May 21 - 27. Read more A&E listings via cltampa.com/arts
Hibiscus, lowbiscus
Hibiscus only bloom for one day, but that doesn’t stop flower fanatics from chasing the high(biscus) of a beautiful bloom. Lucky for us, blooming season is most of the year in Tampa Bay and southern Florida. Folks at the Lealman Exchange this weekend are selling hundreds of plants and promising guests they can “see blooms 10 inches wide or more that are so spectacular that you will ask if they are real or plastic,” per the event description. Originally from Asia, the most common hibiscus came to Florida via Hawaii around 1900. But Florida also has nine native species that have sprouted from its marshes. Oh, and as part of the mallow family, hibiscus are related to cotton and okra. Hibiscus Show and Plant Sale: Saturday, May 23. 1 p.m.-3 p.m. No cover. Lealman Exchange Community Center (LEX), 5175 45th St. N, St. Petersburg. sunsetchapter.org— Selene San Felice
We’re more than halfway to Halloween, so pumpkin spice season is practically just around the corner. Whatever costume you think up now will be irrelevant by Oct. 31, but you can start getting in the spooky spirit. The Paranormal investigators at Spirits of St. Petersburg host this hands-on table tipping class in the supposedly haunted VFW Post 39. The Victorian séance ritual—where participants put their hands on a table and use its movements to interpret communication from the spirit world—led to the creation of the Ouija board. Podcaster Jamie Loftus covered the practice and the famous Fox sisters who popularized it in her 2022 investigative podcast, “Ghost Church.” Table tipping: Sunday, May 24. 6 p.m.-8 p.m. $30. VFW Post 39, 2599 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. spiritsofstpete.com—Selene San Felice
Impulse control
Bookstores and pole dancing studios don’t usually mix, but anything goes in the biggest romance book boom of all time. To celebrate Impulse Studios’ sweet 16, St. Pete bookseller Pages & Perks will be among the poles for a daytime “Booty, Books & Bubbles” party that includes “booty-rific class fun,” raffles, and spicy reads. About six miles south of Impulse, Pages & Perks plans to open its brick-and-mortar location in Historic Roser Park this summer. Booty, Books + Bubbles Party: Saturday, May 23. 12:30 p.m- 2 p.m. $25 (no cover for members). Impulse Studios, 5508 Haines Rd. N, St. Petersburg. impulsepoledance.comg—Selene San Felice
In the heyday of craft beer, hipsters (as they were called in the ancient 2010s) would line up for hours outside breweries waiting for new releases. Nowadays, people will only wait hours for beer if it comes with a meet and greet with their favorite weatherman. Last year, at one of multiple tastings for Crooked Thumb’s “Rule #7” citrusy IPA, fans waited four extra hours to meet the man who made the rule, Denis Phillips. The iconic WFTS meteorologist’s Rule #7, “Don’t freak out unless I’m freaking out,” has been around since 2004 when hurricane Charley struck the Bay Area. After Hurricane Irma hit in 2017, the suspender-wearing weatherman was honored with his very own beer. And just before hurricane season starts again, he’ll grace fans at Crooked Thumb with that TV-worthy smile for at least a couple of hours this weekend. Rule #7 Beer Release and Meet & Greet with Denis Phillips: Sunday, May 24. 3 p.m.-5 p.m. No cover. Crooked Thumb Brewery, 555 10th Ave. S, Safety Harbor. crookedthumbbrew.com—Selene San Felice
What on earth?
When they sit still long enough, humans inevitably start wondering why the hell they even exist. Tampa lawyer and songwriter James Shaw shares some of his answer with the congregation at the Unitarian Universalist church near USF this weekend. “How come we are talking space-monkeys? What’s the point of being one, and what are we supposed to do in this brief moment before we return to oblivion?,” Shaw asked Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, adding that most people just don’t give it that much thought. “Or we find one of the canned answers from one of the many who claim to have it all figured out for you already and just say, ‘Sure, that.’ But I demand an acceptable answer and think maybe I have one.” His talk comes after an extended period of study, meditation and fasting—and if you listen you might not have to do all that nonsense. James Shaw—’Why Are We Here and What Are We Supposed to Do While We’re Here?’: Sunday, May 24. 10:30 a.m. No cover. UU Church of Tampa, 11400 Morris Bridge Rd., Tampa. uutampa.org—Ray Roa
Morning time
When it comes to Tampa’s art scene, Tracy Midulla has very much been a bus driver. On Thursday in Ybor City, the Tempus Projects founder and Kress Contemporary leader will talk about other artists who’ve taken the wheel to change cultural and urban landscapes. “Through exhibitions, public programming, partnerships, and community-building initiatives, I’ll discuss how artists and independent arts organizations adapt, create opportunities, and foster connection while navigating growth, change, and shifting ideas around access, identity, and place,” she told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The talks—curated around a theme adopted monthly at Creative Mornings chapters across the world—are short (20 minutes) and include free coffee and brekkie snacks. This month’s theme is “create.” Creative Mornings Tampa Bay: Thursday, May 21. 8:30 a.m. No cover. Hotel Haya, 1412 E 7th Ave., Ybor City. @cm_tampabay on Instagram—Ray Roa
Gator goggles
Welcome to another round of ‘Creekshed’ stories.
By Dr. Amanda Hagood
Have you noticed the alligators on your social media feed? Start looking, and they won’t be hard to find: over the last few months, Florida folks have discovered alligators hanging out in culverts, slinking through neighborhoods, venturing into swimming pools. One post from early March 2026 offered the following “very important announcement”: STOP MOVING TO FLORIDA WE ARE ON FIRE ALLIGATORS EATING PEOPLE !!
That’s at least partly true. Florida is in the midst of a historic drought. Here in the Tampa Bay area, it’s a modified Phase III “extreme” water shortage world: familiar lakes and streams have shrunk, now ringed by a border of semi-solid, half-baked mud. Restaurants are no longer starting you out with a free glass of water—you have to ask for it. And irrigation systems, the bane of early morning walkers like myself, are running just once per week, and only
at night. The gators are feeling it, too. They are crisscrossing the human-modified landscape in search of the water that sustains them. Either that, or they dig: alligator wallows, burrowed into drying ponds or streambanks, help retain the water that gators and other wetlands animals need to avoid dehydration during dry times. In this way, alligators are ecosystem engineers. Like human Floridians, they build a way of life on the waterscapes they create. Except they’ve been doing it for 37 million years. How we live with the water—and just as often, how we live against it—has been the subject of Creative Loafing Tampa Bay's City Wilds and Creekshed columns for the past 10 years. What started as an ill-advised kayak trip down an urban creek marginalized by a toxic combination of development and neglect has broadened into a platform for telling the many stories that drain into Tampa Bay. We are now a confluence of
voices speaking of, for, and with our local waterways, and we are beyond honored to bring nearly a dozen new pieces, crafted by students in Professor Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s graduate poetry workshop at USF, that take us across the watershed, from Lakeland’s Lake Wire to the Gamble Plantation on the shores of the Manatee River, from Clearwater Beach, to Seminole Heights, to the towering piers of the Skyway Bridge. Written in the ekphrastic tradition—that is, literature that responds to visual works of art— these poems respond to archival items the writers discovered in the vast cave of wonders that is USF Libraries Special Collections: postcards, photographs, and newspaper clippings that document an evolving Florida landscape of beaches and bridges, seashells and slavery, groves, graves, and gas stations. Of their work, Scenters-Zapico reflects: “There is so much uncovered history that poetry in particular as a genre has a way of shining a light on.”
CREEKSHED
In the world their poems conjure, alligators also have a way of emerging in curious places. K. Olivia Overton’s poem treats a guidebook to Florida’s crocodilians, contrasting the
muddy, muscly enterprise of nestbuilding with the desiccated tone of the naturalist’s description: “Alligators are unusually maternal.” Kallie Blakelock’s “Old Sport” reimagines the only-in-Florida tourist pastime of riding an alligator-drawn cart with the visceral undertone it so richly deserves. Alligators nip at the straps of women’s swimwear in the sexually charged beach postcards profiled in Zoe Aldrich’s “WE ALLIGATORS”; they lurk in the landscape of a 1902 group portrait captured in Alexa Will’s “Dear Jakob Sisters.” Like our state reptile itself, this collection delves deep into the rich, 20-percent soil / 80-percent water muck on which the Sunshine State was constructed—because, as these young poets so brilliantly intuit, that is where we find the life of this place. So, this drought season, don’t fear the gator. Notice the gator. Learn from the gator. Throw on your gator goggles and high walk the ditches, retention ponds, and parking lots of our busy Bay area tuning into the way water moves across our prosperous and momentarily dry landscape. Take a picture—it’s bound to get a few likes.
VINTAGE & VIRAL: A crowd gathered around a large captured alligator at Boyd’s Service Station, 5401 Nebraska Ave..
(summer 1926)
They go through seven gators a day. For one whole dollar, you can feed them a fried chicken leg. Just five cents to spectate. Yankees in town on holiday, transatlantic accent. Waddya say, sport, why don’t we head down to the ol’ alligator derby, place a few bets on some sweet & scalies, pick up a few fat cigars in Ybor, how about it?
Metal grinds the roof of the mouth & into dun-white armpits. Men are dragged for their own pleasure, slow & heavy weight in perpetuity. They fork over dirty nickels to sit on a makeshift cart held together by splintered wood & anchored in limp scales. The vendor wipes off the gator blood before the next ride.
Non-paying customers wait until after hours,
pour whiskey into the pink throat of whichever reptile still stands–two men pry the mouth open so another can stroke its vulnerable tongue without having to fuss around with pain. Bourbon can warm cool arteries, after all.
When the bowler hats are hung up to rest & stubs of cigars have cooled in the dead night, the gators rest their weary necks & hope for a soft & unflinching hand to slip them a kind fish. Their bodies make do with what’s given, liquor & mush churn like so many minnows writhing. Behind three sets of eyelids a picture show: razor teeth pierce unbattered flesh; a cart driven by crawling, naked men.
—Kallie Jess Blakelock
Old Sport
HAMPTON DUNN COLLECTION/USF DIGITAL COMMONS
I’ve been here before but only driving through
So this time I stop at a corner store stuck in 1940, at the bottom edge of Tampa Heights, still in black & white. All I ever wanted spelled in frosty block letters on the awning: COLD BEER fading into pale gray. I approach a man hunched forward where the fuel dispenser would have been. He says, We’re closed. It’s New Year’s Day. Figures. Someone once told me the reason why you see so many vacant service stations in Florida is because the gas reservoirs beneath the ground need to lay dormant for a certain period of time before the land can be converted to anything else.
I wonder how long he’s been there, crouching, spine curved like a snail shell, feet digging into the spot where a gas pump once fit snug inside the Earth. He says, You can try the food hall down the street. You’ll have to wait 86 years, though. The color of the land is balanced at the tip of his hand and all I have to do is wait 86 years for a Google Map Street View to show me where the green would’ve gone into what scrawny oaks now remain, what cabbage palms haven’t been cut down. Where St. Augustine grass chokes out the brambles and weeds that once clutched the edges of Service Station, B . Someone once told me Armature Works was a good place to visit if I needed something to do like pay
$20 flat rate parking on a weekday, or eavesdrop on awkward first dates who need loud places to be comfortable together, or experience a disharmonious convergence of soundwaves.
The moment I step outside I am toppled by the rooftop bar DJ, the food hall speakers, and a live singer’s guitar all vying for my scattered attention. How could I begin to explain to this man the way we see things now: A dead end is for building a roundabout through . An oak-lined street is for toppling
so the summer sun can burn through. 21st century heat yellower than the neon sign of the crosswalk no one walks through . New pay-by-plate parking is where red cobblestones still poke through . I wonder at what point in time a place get to becomes a place to drive through. I bring the man back
a plum wine cocktail from the food hall. He takes a sip. He turns to me. He speaks in Yeatsian cadence: And what hipster watering hole, its $20 parking and cacophony of DJs, slouches towards my service station, waiting to gentrify? He spits out the rest on sun-bleached concrete. The splatters shine like gasoline
— Zoë Spanbroek
Dear Jakob Sisters,
A golden shovel using selected quotes from Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”
The camera, a sublimation of the gun, the photograph’s act a subliminal murder. But what’s being killed? Bangs are wispy. Thin hands, demure. But a salt-burst wound in canoe side, but a canoe boot, left behind. And the way I render the woman on the far left queer. How sure of it I am. It’s the way she holds the oar and her cheek’s stark imprisoning of tongue. Over muck palms all five of you climbed to creek-water reality
Until your boots knew marsh. So your lips could smirk at the moving camera, for a still-sepia-capture by Felix Pinard, your painter of skirts—those thick mosquito sheet nets. Alligator territory constructs your backdrop. Dear Jakob Sisters, tell me: Is the canoe your vessel or your prop? Like me, did your photographer know your favorite? The frill-neck woman in the middle. History discloses.
— Alexa Will
GANDY, GEORGE SKIP IV/USF DIGITAL COMMONS
State
My university collects bodies. My university collects bones. Bones asleep for hundreds of years, reopened. I am reopened when I see the newspaper article from my university bragging about pulling bones from the ground. The anthropology department collects 60 skeletons and a dozen more.
There’s a picture of Dr. C. with a scalpel in hand, scraping at the remains of Seminole bones found while development for a $9.4 million parking garage was underway. “But who exactly these dead Indians are, how they died and why they were buried so close to the site of Fort Brooke, an army outpost built in the 1830s to protect settlers from the Seminoles, is still a subject of speculation” the article declares. I speculate my watery eyes, turning away from the photo. What other dignity
can I honor? My university mines bodies and labels them “Culturally unidentifiable” to evade consulting with tribal leaders. My university’s Anthropology department has catalogued the remains of 200 individuals collected over several decades. My university’s collection is affiliated with nine tribes across Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, and California. My university, which in 2022, has begun “the final steps in a long process to return the ancient ancestors of Native Americans, previously used for research, to the Seminole Tribe of Florida”— hosts a Native American Awareness Week in the late 80’s with Russel Means as guest speaker while mining our ancestors’ bodies. I look around— I don’t see any Awareness Weeks happening while I mine my university for a degree in 2026. I archive this for their newspapers—Sarah-Joy Milner
Seminole Indian Burial Site In Tampa May Be Largest In
Clearwater Beach 6
An ekphrastic exploration of thehuman and natural stories that drain into the Gulf.
1 Florida State Fairgrounds
Kallie Blakelock reimagines the only-in-Florida tourist pastime of riding an alligator-drawn cart.
2 Tampa Heights
Zoë Spanbroek takes us to the corner store and wonders if we should just drive through.
3 Bullfrog Creek
Alexa Will wonders what’s being killed in a sepia-toned photograph.
4 Downtown Tampa
Sarah-Joy Milner reflects on the fact that the university collects bodies and HG Garner revisits the ghosts that haunt local parking garages.
5 Gamble Plantation State Park
Alex Rivera on why white shells bring to mind the Confederacy and Black bodies.
6 Clearwater Beach
Zoe Aldrich takes us to the beach where alligators nip at the straps of women’s swimwear.
7 Bayshore Boulevard
Grace Tvenstrup is at the balustrade showing us crabs, dolphins, and speeding cars, too.
8 Plant City
Hurricanes, dipping mercury and sweet, foul orange peels are the center of a poem by Tatiana Avdelas.
Tampa Heights 2
Gamble Plantation State Park
Bullfrog Creek 3
Bayshore Boulevard 7
Seashells Planted in the Center of a Black Field
Inside the field of Manatee sits a house built of seashells and ash.
I am a Black body walking over the hands of buried Black men and women. No matter where you stand your eyes will fixate onto the white shells casting shadows in your direction. A white man pushes me through crooked and creaky halls where the ghost of mosquitoes circle ancient beds in hopes of drawing blood from the withered white daughter of the confederacy who waits in a rocking chair. Her skin melts into the bones on the back of her hand. She points to the old slave quarters out back and says, You are welcome to visit them . But refuses to take me there herself. The slave quarters have become the field. Erased, like Black ink that bled onto a page from a finger dipped in whiteout. The fingerprints will always look like seashells.
—Alex Rivera
We alligators
hunger. Flesh between our teeth, we swallow in one go. A wet dream, we aren’t lipped enough to spit. Keratin kids, we hear the allure of our skin stretched tan and taut into the kind of leather that sex sells or that sells sex. In developments, we
learn of caught cousins strung up in the bayou, scales glinting the last of their water while with baited breath their value is weighed. Sunrise singers, bound to biology, we seek some seclusion to mount bodies and get pushed down to almost drown. We fresh water feeders, what business do we have on this bikinied beach besides play acting a fantasy of our jaws
poised to snap jagged teeth into sun kissed ass that spurts blood like citrus juice. Keep us in the girl crossing and we’re
bound to roll as salt water waves crash into a give and take that screams postcard pin up almost porn is the hottest summer souvenir, and we complicit consume and can speak no words. We too are undressed at our seams and gnawed at by the postcard holders who read Playboy on the toilet and know they’re safer only when they keep our mouths duct taped shut.
—Zoe Aldrich
American Casket Syndrome
“The bodies were buried in caskets, which was not an Indian custom, but were buried with household items, called grave goods. That definitely was an Indian custom[.] …City officials, however, are concerned about the delay of the garage construction, which will support a modern custom, that of driving and parking downtown.”
When the old man’s mouth is sewn closed, the mortician can’t get the expression quite right.
It’s difficult to make death imitate any kind of rest. Still, rosy cheeks are painted on ice-white skin, eyes are glued shut.
In the cemetery, each epitaph seems almost to be advertising its body, his grave one soon-to-be forgotten business card in a pile of many.
For the funeral attendees, rot cannot be acknowledged within themselves or others. There isn’t much talk.
All details of the proceedings will quickly fade from their minds, except for one unusual request, recalled occasionally by grandchildren.
A small glass house is buried with the old man. Pristine and eternal, an old paperweight from his time as a construction company consultant.
In an effort to stave off the festering as long as possible, a grave vault is made airtight. Sterile soil is packed on top.
A casket, air pocket, and several hundred pounds of concrete lie between the corpse and the earth on top of it. The corpse rots anyway.
Just slower. In a grave vault without proper air flow, and especially in this climate, gas pressure can build up inside until it suddenly, violently explodes outwards.
When it does, the thing onlookers will recall most, aside from the smell, is how the sunlight reflected off of shards of glass as they flew through the sky.
– HG Garner
VISIT
IN CONVERSATION
SARAH ANN WEBER AND STEFANO DI PAOLA
THURSDAY, MAY 28 | 6-7 PM
Known for her richly layered works on paper, Sarah Ann Weber creates lush, immersive environments that blur the boundaries between landscape, memory, and inner life. In this conversation, Weber and gallerist Stefano Di Paola will discuss the evolution of her practice, the role of material and process in her work, and the artist–gallerist relationship.
MARLY MUSIC PRESENTS
THE ROSSINI CLUB
ROSES OF GOLESTAN
SUNDAY, MAY 31 | 1-3 PM
Journey through a musical rose garden with the musicians of the Rossini Club in a concert inspired by Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist. Themes of conflict, beauty, synesthesia, and cultural fusion serve as landmarks in pieces by Messiaen, Sorabji, Ravaei, and others.
Maternity Shoot
After Florida’s Alligators and Crocodiles, Victoria Brook Van Meter, 1997.
Observe her blue labor: a Florida gator’s mud mucked maw mastering the scoop and slop mechanics of bog nests and meticulous homemaking, hours of pacing and packing silt, the tilt of her head as she circles to inspect her haystacked home, needling parts into a whole. She loots the shoots, teethes their green sleeves, pulls up, puts down, pats flat, carries too much, always.
It’s 1997 and Van Meter writes: “Alligators are unusually maternal for a reptile.”
It’s 1997 and I’m a week late on the cusp of Cancer in June, my mother’s induced womb, unyielding. We make our own time
to be covered in scales, to bear and bury, to ferry new pups over old waters.
To hiss through talon teeth, to tear apart the whole world. To do it alone.
To be tallied, taxidermied, trophied.
To be leered, looked upon, labeled cold-blooded To be feared, fearsome, unyielding.
Others find her nurturing nature unrecognizable, but we, wild-wombed, whisper Mama . – K. Olivia Overton
Low-Tide on the Boulevard
After The Dunn Photo Collection’s “Bayshore Boulevard near Howard Ave, Tampa, 1896, Looking East”
On most evenings, I walk to the water. I wind down old streets— Packwood, Inman, Rome . On the sidewalks, oak roots push through concrete cracks. I know I’m close when the opening ahead is all blue. I cross in front of cars. I walk the boulevard, edged by tall houses. Over the balustrade, oysters reef. Crabs dusk-hunt underneath. Bodies stream like tides do, both ways. When I first drove my car through Tampa, I made loops. Up and down Bayshore. Windows open, arms stuck out and lifted by wind. But to hold something dear you must look close. So I sit on a concrete stair cut into the seawall and watch as the tide tufts up and catches light. All around me, gasps. Movement in the waves. Three bottlenose dolphins, dorsal fins pinking as they crest. – Grace Tvenstrup
MON - FRI 12pm - 9pm SAT - SUN 11am - 9pm
Orange Peels Curdle On Asphalt
Tampa 1942
The hot, wet summer unfurls hurricane eyes for white seagulls to coast through. Thunder bursts through citrus picnics
and fruit floods the Gulf. Sweetness salts the soil left unfed. Seagulls shimmy through road construction, work that never seizes in these storms.
Hurricane eyes twirl open so heat trickles in petrichor. Trees lay their branches to sleep after storms but orange bleeds
through leaves. If farmers feed citrus fields hurricanes wither the root and splinter each peel. Harvests were left sour, land watered but unfed.
Tampa 1977
A flurry of sleet on Interstate 275 stiffens a citrus field. Mercury dips against white.
A small girl writes snow on a car window and kids use beach toys to build a town of ice.
Highways, hotels, condos patted down with mittens but small hands grow too cold to meld oranges.
Sweetly foul peels splat down on sand. Kids stomp on frozen oranges and pulp mushes in the Gulf.
The small girl watches slushy waves lap oranges into the sunset. The citrus field is now soil drenched in plump rot. Is there time to warm each seed to bloom?
Tampa 2025
Groves lay as graves disease declines produce
Navels melt in farmer hands citrus greens into acidic bile
The highway steams with gas rubber sardines on asphalt
Apartment buildings, parking garages eat groves even when they’re sour
Groves eat soil with their dry leaves scoop dry earth and stay hungry
Kids run barefoot on cement kick a pool water path home
because sand is a limited road for citrus trees to rest in pulp
Hurricanes watch seagulls pick at plastic bottles and book Airbnbs
Eyes shed tears over carcassed land as sandcastles drown in orange waters
—Tatiana Avdelas
the code to regsiter or go to www.dfac.org/summer
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“Stewardship is commitment, and it’s an ongoing process, and it takes time.”
Defend me
Creeks are vital to Florida’s ecosystem, but experts say we’ve largely stalled on measuring their health.
By Noah Bookstein
Salt Creek runs quietly through the Old Southeast neighborhood of St. Petersburg, past Bartlett Park and beneath a canopy of oaks, connected at its southern end to Lake Maggiore. To people driving through the neighborhood, it might seem like a drainage ditch, but it is far more.
“Salt Creek and Booker Creek are natural creeks. They’re not ditches or dredge canals. They’re natural hydrological features of our area.” said Kira Barerra, an environmental scientist, city water resources manager, and Sierra Club leader.
Creeks are vital to Florida’s ecosystem. They serve as natural nurseries for species like tarpon and snook, conduits of freshwater that balance the salinity of Tampa Bay, and they help connect inland and coastal ecosystems. “Changing rainfall patterns, harbor temperatures, and sea level rise are all things that profoundly affect the ecology of these creeks,” said Maya Burke, a tidal creek scientist with the Tampa Bay Estuary Project.
While the creekshed face pressure from development and a changing climate, we are losing the ability to protect our water for a less visible reason—we’ve largely stalled on measuring its health. “The majority of creeks are still understudied or not studied at all. That represents a list of opportunities for additional data collection, but there’s no active plan or effort for people to take up additional monitoring in those areas,” Burke added.
TBEP maintains a dashboard updated every two years where color-coded creeks reveal their health at a glance—Salt Creek in yellow for caution, Bayou Creek in red for priority, and large clusters of light blue lines representing creeks with no data at all. When a water body is officially designated as impaired under Florida’s Impaired Waters Rule, local governments become legally obligated to take remedial action.
“If you’re waiting for an impairment to be listed through the impaired waters rule, you’ve waited longer than I would like to see,” Burke said. “With water quality, it’s always easier to prevent an impairment than it is to try and remediate one after the fact.”
Without consistent data, we cannot tell whether or not a water body is impaired or if
preventative and remedial measures are working. Where data is collected, it enables people to approach the problem.
For Salt Creek, volunteers and the city work together to gather data and preserve the creek, which helped drive its restoration process.
“I’m a St. Pete native. I went to school at USF St. Pete, and all of those campuses are right there hugging Booker Creek and Salt Creek. I got to see them and work on and around them every day. And it just seemed like a really spe -
LOCAL NEWS
The broader restoration effort involved testing for all kinds of different things that can get into the water in a city.
“We tested for bird indicators, dog genetic markers, human DNA, and even reclaimed water signatures. We did dye testing studies, sewer inspections, stormwater inspections, looking for any cross connections or defects in those pipes that might be leaking into the watershed,” Barerra said. “For Salt Creek, we’ve been able to select projects in a more strategic way.
cial, under-loved, underserved water body,” Barerra said.
She was a citizen leader in the community effort by Sierra Club, the Old Southeast Neighborhood Association, and USF St. Petersburg to form Friends of Salt Creek. Then she was hired by the city to help work on its restoration. “We had canine sewage detection dogs flown in to walk the watershed,” Barerra added.
Having the data to make those informed decisions about what type of restoration activity is going to have the most impact has been really awesome,” Kira said.
However, government monitoring has plateaued. “There is a cost associated with monitoring programs. The city goes above and beyond what is required for compliance monitoring by FDEP. But not every city, especially with everything that’s going on with state budgets right
now, is probably able to contemplate expanding programs,” Barerra said.
The most expansive data has come from citizen initiatives. Government monitoring and community-driven monitoring are often out of step with each other, testing for different parameters and using different locations on waterbodies. For Salt Creek, community-driven monitoring accounts for four locations sampled monthly. The city monitors one.
“Most local governments are capped on the monitoring side of things,” Burke said. “None of them are looking to add to their ongoing routine water quality monitoring because they don’t have staff time, staff capacity, or the money to process lab samples.”
Florida Lakewatch, a volunteer-program in partnership with the University of Florida, has been effective in training citizens and connecting them with university resources to conduct more testing. The expansion of community-driven monitoring is uniquely positioned to address gaps in data across the creekshed.
Volunteer water quality data can identify trends and flag problems, which is valuable, but under Florida’s impaired waters rule it cannot on its own compel regulatory action.
“If you live near one of these creeks that is colored blue with no data, you could form a little neighborhood team and participate in this community science program to collect these data and contribute. But if we don’t have volunteers to do that, or we don’t have anybody actively coordinating that program, then we just continue to have those data gaps,” Burke said.
Barerra added that, “Stewardship is commitment, and it’s an ongoing process, and it takes time. There’s not a magic bullet usually in environmental restoration.”
Florida Lakewatch offers training to help communities start tracking water quality in their areas.
Restoration often looks like a leaking pipe traced and repaired, a sediment sample taken, or an invasive plant pulled from a streambed.
“We’re not done with Salt Creek. I think we’re really just getting started, but I do think that it is an early success story and could be used as a bit of a framework for other watersheds and creeksheds,” Barerra said.
YOU KNOW WHERE I WANT TO GO? At its southern end, Salt Creek connects to Lake Maggiore.
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RESTAURANTS RECIPES DINING GUIDES
Minty fresh
Rooster & the Till founder to open music-driven lounge, plus more local food news.
By Ray Roa
Tampa Heights’ Yellow Brick Row is getting a shot of flavor this fall. Last week, Rooster & the Till founder Ty Rodriguez shared plans to open the music-driven Peppermint Lounge at 1607 N Franklin St., on the same block as Rialto Theater, Hidden Springs Ale Works, and Florida School of Woodwork, and just a block away from Cafe Hey. The space was formerly home to Elevation Coffee and Flower Crown Kombucha.
In a press release, Rodriguez said Peppermint Lounge—inspired by the New York City ‘60s-era lounge where the “Twist” was born—is meant to be “a spot with soul, where music, photography, hospitality, and personality come together in a way that’s intentional and honest.”
Large format photos by rock photojournalist Jim Marshall will be on the walls and an outdoor patio will provide more space to linger, listen, or host a large party.
Drinks and service, the release added, will strip away the pretentiousness of the modern cocktail scene and provide refuge for “bartenders who give a damn about being bartenders, and anyone looking for a place to have an honest drink.” Anyone seeking unnecessary, over-the-top flair and fluff may have to go elsewhere since the concept promises a “sharp and forward-thinking” bar program and “real drinks for real people made the right way.”
local music teachers to host afterschool lessons before doors open.
“Being able to open our doors during the day and give kids access to instruments and lessons is just as important as what happens at night,” Rodriguez added. “If we can help one kid discover that spark inside them, then we’ve done something that lasts far beyond us.”
Tampa Heights’ Peppermint Lounge hopes to open this fall and operate from 5 p.m.-2 a.m. Details about the grand opening will be announced in the coming months, according to the release. Follow @peppermintloungetampa on Instagram.
OPENINGS & CLOSINGS
Guy Fieri did indeed film ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives’ at Tampa’s Supernatural Food & Wine— and the episode will air on May 22 Reddit wasn’t lying. Last month, the Mayor of Flavortown was indeed in downtown Tampa filming “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” at Supernatural Food & Wine. The episode airs on Friday, May 22 at 9 p.m. EDT according to the Supernatural crew, which will host a watch party at Mighty Fine, located at 1018 E Cass St. just a 10-minute walk away.
The old school feel will even extend to the register where Peppermint Lounge will promote a cash payment option.
Rodriguez, a lifelong music and art lover who will fight someone about Bob Dylan then talk to them about “The Tao of Pooh,” said that music is the focus at Peppermint Lounge.
Each day, he and the bar team will curate a fresh crate of records and release it before doors open. The LPs will be played in full, with plans to host themed nights (think CBGB, Muscle Shoals) to spotlight artists from certain eras and locations. A small stage will also host intimate performances.
Rodriguez, who is one of the last remaining original board members on the Gasparilla Music Foundation, will even offer the space to
“Up to this point, we been locked up by an NDA, and general best practices, to neither confirm nor deny the existence of this footage,” Supernatural Food & Wine wrote on social media. “Come join and watch the SN team ham it tf up on national television!”
To celebrate, the crew will have one free keg of beer and just 50 commemorative Mighty Fine x Supernatural t-shirts.
Last month, a post on Reddit caught Fieri, 58, outside the revered wine and sandwich shop, red Camaro and all. Some users thought that this reporter was also in the photograph, but Creative Loafing Tampa Bay contributor Annalise Mabe got no comment due to a nondisclosure agreement.
It’s unclear what other Bay area spots Fieri may have visited, but other restaurants he’s filmed at locally include Tampa Bay Brewing
Tampa Bay Brewing Co.
will close Ybor City location this month
After nearly three decades, Tampa Bay Brewing Co. is leaving Ybor City. Last weekend, owner Dave Doble posted a video to social media announcing the upcoming closure of the brewery’s Centro Ybor location, at 1600 E 8th Ave.
“I know there’s probably a lot of questions, and if you find me at one of our locations I can talk. But I want to extend our deepest gratitude to our employees, customers and obviously this entire community for years of support,” said Doble in the post. “We are truly grateful for your patronage and look forward to writing new chapters as we move forward.”
Doble did not go into detail explaining what led to the decision, but stated that the Ybor location’s last day will be Sunday, May 31. “It’s not the best news, but it’s also not terrible news either. It’s just time to turn that page,” he continued.
TBBC has called Ybor home since 1997, opening its first location on 15th street and later moving to its current Centro Ybor home in 2006. The company opened its second location in Westchase in June of 2015.
The Centro Ybor outpost was a popular and consistent favorite for years, offering a solid lunch and dinner menu, a massive outdoor patio, plus live music and a hearty draft beer selection. Notably, the spot was featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in March 2011 when he went in on the hot wings tossed in cider sauce made with TBBC’s Red Eye Amber ale.—Colin Wolf.
TWIST AGAIN: TAMPA’S Peppermint Lounge is inspired by the ‘60s NYC hotspot.
Co. in Ybor City, Buya Ramen in St. Petersburg and Keegan’s in Gulfport.
There’s a particular grief that comes from growing up in Florida: loving a place while watching it become increasingly inaccessible in real time. Vanessa Frances’ debut novel “Orange Island” understands that feeling intimately. It’s set in a near-future version of the state shaped by climate collapse and runaway development, but its emotional center is quieter and more familiar to those who grew up here—yearning.
Beneath the speculative fiction scaffolding is a grief-struck love letter to a state that feels on the verge of disappearing. Frances writes about Florida as a precious ecosystem that people are still fighting to recognize before it’s gone. Ahead of her talk in St. Petersburg this Thursday, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay spoke with Frances about Octavia Butler, old Florida mythology and what it means to love something enough to worry about its future.
a “please don’t let this happen” kind of book. The relationship Savannah has with Dove represents my relationship with this place. It’s this idea of a better outcome that could have been... a Florida that looks different from the one we have today.
BOOKS
An Evening with Vanessa Frances Thursday, May 21. 7 p.m. No cover, RSVP requested. Tombolo Books, 2153 1st Ave. S., St. Petersburg. tombolobooks.com
One thing I immediately loved about ‘Orange Island’ is that it feels deeply Floridian in ways that are subtle if you grew up here. There were little details where I thought, ‘there’s no way this person didn’t grow up here.’
“I’ve always thought about love and worry as very intertwined.”
I love this state so dearly, with all of its quirks and nuance and nonsense. It’s such a special place. It’s so special because it is so fragile. When I’ve talked about “Orange Island” with people outside Florida, it’s been interesting trying to explain Florida beyond Disney, beaches, crazy people and alligators. Florida existed long before the parks.
There’s this idea running through the book that so much suffering is preventable... the brutality is constantly laid alongside wealth and access and artificial comfort. Growing up here, so much of Florida can feel just barely out of reach.
I’ve always thought about love and worry as very intertwined. When you care about something deeply, it’s inevitable that you worry about its future... ‘Orange Island’ is definitely
I loved that you took the history of Florida all the way back in the book... It reminded me of ‘The Everglades: River of Grass.’ You’re grounding this futuristic, techno-dystopian landscape in something ancient and fragile. I was also thinking a lot about speculative fiction while reading it. Writers like Octavia Butler were often relegated because of genre, even though they’re some of the greatest novelists we have. And reading ‘Orange Island,’ it feels like the narrative is constantly on our heels here. I struggled with the genre label while writing it because it feels so close to reality... I wanted to market it as literary fiction at first because some of the things inside it barely felt speculative. There were things in the original draft I literally ended up taking out because they happened by 2024. Some parts stopped feeling speculative entirely. I think there’s often more commentary on the present inside speculative fiction and sci-fi than there is in a lot of literary fiction.
The idea that Orange County becomes the last coveted safe haven in Florida feels both horrifying and kind of funny.
“Orange Island” is actually a real geological term. It was some of the first land to emerge from the water in Florida... and in the book it becomes the last thing left above water. Growing up in Central Florida, I was always hearing about these hundred-year development plans. The idea of people retreating inland from the coasts, trying to preserve what little elevation is left, felt very surreal but also very possible.
Melissa Febos once said her wife, the poet Donika Kelly, described the music she listens to as “begging-ass songs,” and ‘Orange Island’ feels
like a begging-ass book about Florida. It feels like it’s pleading with the state to survive itself. I’ve been a professional yearner since I was a kid... This is literally my yearning book. Dove represents my relationship with this place. It’s a story about grief, but also longing for a version of Florida that feels increasingly out of reach.
I mportant Florida question: What’s your 7-Eleven order?
Since I was a little kid, I’ve been a quesoand-chips hyperfixation person... so I’ll get
the really cheap nachos with the jar cheese and an electrolyte drink because I’m constantly dehydrated. I have to balance out all the salt in my 900 million milligrams of sodium nachos. I’m an ocean girl. Salt, sand, any body of water is not safe for me... I think it’s years of perpetual salt exposure. I’m like, “I gotta drink the ocean water and then eat my nacho chips.”
Orange Island cheese. It is functionally Orange Island cheese.
MOVIES THEATER ART CULTURE
TREAD LIGHTLY: Vanessa Frances says Florida is so special because it is so fragile.
By Ray Roa C CL Recommends
THU 21
The 502s Last year, The 502s signed with Nashville’s Big Loud Records, and celebrated by releasing the band’s fourth studio album Easy Street . The 13-tracker, said to be one of the most upbeat albums of last year, opens with “Sayonara,” a ska-like farewell to negativity that’s pretty well-kept throughout the rest of the record. Frontman and main creative force Ed Isola follows with love letters to friends and lovers alike and assurance towards his listeners that life will be better one day, while also managing to sulk over a romance that’s fizzling out on “Quicksand.” While there are other Florida shows on the roster, this Jannus Live gig—the selfdescribed beach-folk outfit’s first in Tampa Bay since performing at the ultra-rainy, 2023 Gasparilla Music Festival—is the closest to a homecoming show the Maitland fivepiece has lined up for this tour. Ahead of his return to his old stomping grounds, Isola told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about the album that made him realize what he wanted to do with his life. Read his full quote at cltampa. com/music. 7 p.m. $38.87. Jannus Live, St. Petersburg—Josh Bradley
FRI 22
C Santigold Santi White is in the “Yo Gabba GabbaLand” era of her career (the 49-year-old has collabed with creators of the Emmy-nominated kids show), but her catalog—a pre-algorithm blend of electro, hip-hop, pop, dub, reggae and more—still stands as one of the hardest-hitting in modern pop. Touring behind her vulnerable 2022 album Spirituals , the songwriter best known as Santigold brings a storied discography (including hit 2012 single “Disparate Youth”) to St. Petersburg. 8:30 p.m. $47.38 & up. Jannus Live, St. Petersburg
SAT 23
Benefit for Cuban Food Relief: Have Gun Will Travel w/Tension Electric/ Tiger 54/Dave!Ja!Vu! Long victims of the American embargo on their country, Cubans, as of late, have been trying to find a way through the darkness during an extreme fuel shortage. With Trump continually threatening to attack our neighbors to the south, our musical nextdoor neighbors— playing Americana, punk, and electro—have organized this benefit to send food. 7 p.m. $10. Deviant Libation, Tampa
C Social Wreckage (EP release) w/Face The Fence/High Press/Area of Refuge It’s been less than a year since Social Wreckage played a packed Crowbar in support of
Underoath, and the Tampa rock band is already back in the same room to release a new EP, Moving On . On it, Maren McTague leads the four-piece through a radio-ready lead single, “Eyes Everywhere,” with the rest of the four-track outing following suit thanks to pop-punk anthems (“Grow Up Kid”) and dramatic EP-closer “Dream.”6 p.m. $15. Crowbar, Ybor City
Tampa Bay Barbecue Festival & Competition: Rodney Atkina w/ Blackberry Smoke/Austin Snell/Graham Barham/Fox N’Vead/more Organizers for this meaty gathering could’ve popped the word “music” in front of “festival.” Heavy hitters of the Bay area ‘cue scene will be in the pit (shout out Kenny Alexander from Big Red BBQ), but the lineup of bands is no small feat. The appropriately-named Blackberry Smoke is set to close it out, but don’t miss Fox N’Vead, a Carolina quartet that blurs the lines between southern and garage rock on songs like a 2025 breakout single, “Waste Away.” Saturday-Sunday, May 23-24. $15 & up. Vinoy Park, St. Petersburg
SUN 24
C L8 Night Flights: Pier Pop Up w/ Special Guest/Quinn Blalock/Nick Rinderle/more It’s a shame that St. Pete’s pier closes at 11 p.m. because it’s one of the Sunshine City’s best places to just chill. This weekend, the L8 Night Flights team returns to the middle of the span (underneath the tilted lawn) where it hosts an eight-hour house music concert. 2 p.m. No cover. St. Pete Pier, St. Petersburg
Triumph w/April
Wine Rush is hands down the most famous Canadian rock-trio, but Triumph can apparently play arenas, too. They peaked in the late-’70s and early-’80s thanks to hard-rock tunes like “Lay It on the Line,” “Magic Power,” and “Fight the Good Fight,” and guitarist and vocalist Rik Emmett, drummer and vocalist Gil Moore, and bassist Mike Levine are backed and backed by Phil X, bassist-vocalist Todd Kerns and drummer Brent Fitz for this reunion.
”We’ve always said these songs were meant to bring people together - and that’s exactly why we’re coming back now,” the band told Ultimate Classic Rock. “We knew there was still a chapter left to write. This tour is our chance to do it, together with the people who made the Triumph journey possible.”
8 p.m. $68.20 & up. MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre, Tampa
TUE 26
Dave Matthews Band Dave Matthews Band is like a clock, pretty much, hitting the same spots across the country annually. This summer tour is a bit different. It includes three new venues (in Minnesota, Missouri, and Michigan), plus this recurring pilgrimage
THU MAY 21–WED MAY 27
to the old Gary amphitheatre in Tampa. While the roof is still fucked up after the hurricanes two years ago, fans will surely flock to the gig (DMB has sold 19.5 million tickets in the past 25 years according to Pollstar).
7:30 p.m. $73 & up. MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre, Tampa
WED 27
C Teen Suicide w/Cloud Nothings/ Fanclub Wallet After breaking out of the lonercore Baltimore scene, Teen Suicide has constantly evolved and moved to
Orlando—but Sam Ray and Kitty Ray don’t play many home state shows. Their latest outing, Nude descending staircase headless , is the duo’s most-polished offering to date, but still marked by snarling guitar and intimate subject matter from a discography that dates back about 15 years. Before the band moves to Portland, it tops a stacked bill at Crowbar where Cleveland’s king of rock and roll, Cloud Nothings, plays support alongside Fanclub Wallet, the project of Canadian songwriter Hannah Judge. 7 p.m. $29.71. Crowbar, Ybor City
See an extended version of this listing via cltampa.com/music.
Social Wreckage
A bit like Jordan Belfort in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the dykes aren’t fucking leaving. Ybor City hotspot Crowbar will be closed before the fall, but organizers at Dyke Night St. Pete keep booking shows at the legendary, 20-year-old Tampa venue. The latest includes the tagline “Thicker Than G.R.I.T.S.,” as in “Gays Raised In the South.” The poster for next month’s event is giving Waffle House meets Pussycat Lounge and promises to turn the room into a straight up throwdown soundtracked by southern rap, complete with “the hottest queer+ lesbian dancers in Tampa Bay on the main stage.” Bring singles, folks.
Dyke-owned Carupano Kitchen will make hot, fresh arepas on the back patio while Empowerr, DJ Donnie Luv, and a B2B set featuring Fessi K and They Hate Change’s Vonne Parks handle tunes. The gig is Dyke Night St. Pete’s second to last visit to Crowbar, which will close before August, after two decades in the historic district. Like other Dyke Nights before it, the show will most likely sell-out before doors open.
Tynan w/Myr/Lucky/Novuh Saturday, June 6. 10 p.m. No cover with RSVP before 11 p.m; $15.57 for guaranteed entry. The Ritz, Ybor City
Sunny Sweeney Thursday, June 11. 8 p.m.
$23.97. Skipper’s Smokehouse, Tampa
Ian Asher Saturday, June 13. 10 p.m. $26.48 & up. The Ritz, Ybor City
Rohna w/Ra Ra Viper (opening for Old Mervs) Sunday, June 14. 6:30 p.m. $31.99. Crowbar, Ybor City
Crankdat w/Machaki Thursday, June 18. 10 p.m. $62.10. The Ritz, Ybor City
Crankdat w/Celo Friday, June 19. 10 p.m. Sold out. The Ritz, Ybor City
Crankdat w/Costa Saturday, June 20. 10 p.m. Sold out. The Ritz, Ybor City
Grrrls Night: Pinkshift w/Peace Cult/ Sure Thing/WSAB/more Saturday, June 27. 7 p.m. $28.03. Crowbar, Ybor City
Subhumans w/The Iron Roses Monday, June 29. 7 p.m. $30.45. Crowbar, Ybor City
Over Wait Mammal w/Government Subs/No Context/Back and Forth/more Friday, July 10. 7 p.m. $12. Crowbar, Ybor City
Pablo Cruise w/Orleans/David Pack Saturday, July 25. 7 p.m. $49.75 & up. Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater
American Vanity Wednesday, July 29. 7 p.m. $22.94 & up. Music Hall at New World Brewery, Tampa
Tickets to Dyke Night St. Pete at Crowbar in Ybor City on Thursday, June 4 are still available for $20. See Josh Bradley’s weekly roundup of new concerts coming to Tampa Bay below.—Ray Roa
L'Eclair w/Charlie Chimi Friday, July 31. 7 p.m. $17. Bayboro Brewing Co., St. Petersburg
Wax Motif Saturday, Aug. 15. 10 p.m.
$20.77 & up. The Ritz, Ybor City
Devo Thursday, Aug. 27. 7 p.m. $102 & up. The BayCare Sound, Clearwater
Teddy Swims Sunday, Oct. 25. 7 p.m. $75 & up. Benchmark International Arena, Tampa
Il Volo Thursday, Nov. 12. 8 p.m. $76 & up. Benchmark International Arena, Tampa
Valery Meladze Sunday, May 2, 2027. 7 p.m. $105.20 & up. Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg
Cancellations/reschedules
Tobehonest w/Pushman/Alex Antle at The Ritz, May 2 Postponed to Friday, July 3
Straight up
By Dan Savage
Dear Readers: I’m off this week. So, let’s enjoy—and perhaps relitigate—this column from July 12, 2022. — Dan
I’m a cis woman in her 30s who lives on the East Coast. I’ve been in an LTR with the same cis man for 12 years. No issues there at all! But we are considering opening up our relationship and I have a question about my sexuality. Basically, I’m attracted to people with penises. PIV is only sex that really arouses me—the only kind of sex I like to have or fantasize about—although I do enjoy everything that leads up to it. I’m that rare woman who comes easily during PIV and honestly prefer it over all things. So, although I am attracted to people regardless of what they look like, if I were to hook up with someone who didn’t have a penis, I would be disappointed.
I hooked up with two women during group sex and I liked their breasts and kissing them, but I quickly realized I do not find vaginas sexy at all.
So, what am I since not all people with penises are men? I ask because I don’t want to use a label on hook-up apps that’s transphobic in any way. I’m mostly attracted to people with penises, but I want non-binary people with dicks to slide into my DMs too. So, I am attracted to all men and non-binary people with penises (no matter how they present themselves). Is this messed up? I don’t know. I have searched for a term that describes this fixation on specific genitalia, but I have yet to find any. So, am I just straight? It seems some people think attraction and sexuality are separate from genitalia and anything else is transphobic, but for me, it’s the opposite. Dick or bust.
dicking, you’re open to sex partners who don’t identify as men so long as they 1. have dicks, 2. know how to use them, and 3. wanna use them. And who knows? In addition to getting dicked down by cis men and non-binary AMAB peeps, you might enjoy getting pegged down by cis women and/or AFAB non-binary peeps who 1. have a strap-on, 2. know how to use it, and 3. won’t ask you eat or touch their vaginas/front holes. All of the above could be included in your bio on whatever hook-up app you’re using.
Oh, gee. Look at that. The less simple option—the non-complicated option—took longer to explain than the more complicated option. What a world.
SAVAGE LOVE
Anyway, LABELS, there’s nothing transphobic or gynophobic about clearly and respectfully stating who and what you’re looking for. Use a positive framing (what you want), not a negative one (what you don’t). Indeed, letting people who don’t have penises know not to waste their time on you—cis women, nonbinary AFAB peeps, trans men who didn’t opt for bottom surgery, trans women who did—is a courtesy, not an insult. You might hear from some people who aren’t what you’re looking for, LABELS, because they didn’t read your profile or because they did read your profile and they’re pissed about it. You’re under no obligation to respond in either case.
but I wasn’t interested in dating. She asked if it was because she was trans, and I told her the truth. She said she was disappointed, of course, but she understood and appreciated my honesty. When I told my wife about this, she said I was transphobic because I’m not interested in our friend romantically or sexually. I was insulted. I’ve never held any prejudice against people who are transgender! A cousin who was trans committed suicide in the late 1990s and that really opened my eyes and I’ve had a girlfriend for more than a decade now whose daughter is trans and I love that girl. Maybe that sounds like, “I can’t be racist! I have black friends!,” but these are facts! (And I’m black!)
My wife, however, thinks that it’s discriminatory and transphobic for me to reject our friend simply because she has a penis. She insists the presence of a penis should be a non-issue for me. I think this is unfair and, in all honesty, it’s really pissing me off. I like our mutual friend as a person, Dan, and I literally just played with her at a public event! I’m just not interested in dating her! Who’s in the wrong here?!?—Extremely Not Into Dick
You’re a heterosexual male, ENID. You’re a male who’s exclusively attracted to cisgender members of the opposite sex and that’s a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation. Your wife, of all people, should respect your sexual orientation.
listening. If that’s the hurdle they have to clear, most will conclude that they’d rather be transphobes. Essentially saying to straight men, “If you won’t suck a dick, you can’t sit with us,” is not a great strategy for a tiny minority group that needs people to stand with them. And, again, as we so often see on Twitter, it’s not an actual member of the actual minority group in question who’s making this argument. It’s the bumbling straight cis ally who thinks she’s being helpful. (Spoiler: she’s not.)
And let the record also show that there are straight guys and lesbians out there who don’t have a problem with dick, and straight women and gay men out there who don’t have a problem with pussy. For some, gender trumps sex. But no straight guy or lesbian woman should be told they have to suck dick to be an ally. And no gay guy or straight woman should be told they have to eat pussy to be an ally.
I’ve also never been on a dating app, so I am not sure if classifying myself as straight would still leave me visible to non-binary folx looking for women. Maybe that’s true, and finding a nuanced label doesn’t really matter.—Limits About Bodies Expressed Lovingly & Sensitively
You could make this complicated… by describing yourself as an AFAB (assigned female at birth), cis-gender (not trans), femme-presenting (just what it sounds like) allosexual (opposite of asexual) phallophile (dick lover) in an ENM (ethically non-monogamous) LTR (long-term relationship) who is seeking masc-presenting and/or non-binary allosexual AMAB (assigned male at birth) phallus-havers-and-wanna-users for PIV. (“Phallophile” is the term you were searching for.)
Or you could keep it simple, LABELS, and just say you’re straight. Which is what you are. You’re a heterosexual woman—you’re a cis woman who’s attracted to members of the opposite sex—and while you require dick and
I had an “argument” with my wife recently. I’m a 48-year-old straight cis man. I’m also poly and kinky. My wife is a 42-year-old cis bi/pan woman. We’ve been married for 12 years. We are active in our local BDSM scene. Two weeks ago, a mutual friend approached me for a scene at a kink club. She’s a trans woman. She wanted me to flog her. It was a great scene and we both (I hope) enjoyed ourselves. Let me state that it was purely an impact scene and there was nothing sexual about the scene on my end, but I did provide some basic aftercare in the form of snuggling afterwards.
The day after the scene, this friend texted me, thanked me for the scene, and then asked me to dinner. I said I would need to check with my wife, assuming the invitation was for both of us. She then made it clear she was asking me out on a date. My problem is I am not attracted to her. The primary reason, to be honest, is because she is trans—or more specifically, because she has a penis. I think she’s a great person and I’m totally down to get to know her better as a friend, but there’s no attraction on my side. If she was postop, I’d be more open to it, but knowing she has a penis is a dealbreaker for me. I declined politely, saying I would be open to hanging out as friends,
And let the record show— let it be underlined and highlighted—that it’s not the trans woman in this little drama making accusations of transphobia. That woman took her shot, ENID passed, she asked why, ENID was honest with her, she was bummed—no one likes rejection—but she took ENID’s “no” for an answer and moved on with her life. It’s the supposed “ally” here, ENID’s wife, who’s being an asshole. It’s ENID’s wife, someone who no doubt thinks of herself as a “trans ally,” arguing that there’s something bigoted about a straight cis man who isn’t attracted to people with penises.
Not only is your wife in the wrong, ENID, she’s not helping.
If we tell heterosexual males that not being open to dating people with dicks makes them transphobic—if we insist there’s something bigoted about not being attracted to people with penises—most straight cis men are going to stop
And now a little stroll down memory lane… There was a huge kink scene in Seattle in the early 1990s, and there was this posse of hot straight guys who organized big play parties that people of all genders and sexual orientations were welcome to attend. These hot straightfor-sex guys were down to tie up other guys and flog them —gay guys, bi guys, trans guys, even other straight guys— but that was as far as they went with dudes. They described themselves as “bi for kink, straight for sex.” Were these guys homophobes? No, of course not. And it would’ve been creepy and coercive if their girlfriends told them they were anti-gay bigots unless they were willing to suck the cocks of the gay men they flogged at their parties. You are open to play with people with or without penises, but you’re only romantically and sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex. That’s not bigotry, that’s heterosexuality.
P.S. There are, of course, some trans people out there who argue that “genital preferences” are transphobic — it’s not just misguided cis allies. They’re not helping either.
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Humidifier output
Get the lumps out
Author of “The Singin’ Chipmunk”?
67 Caligula’s thing
B&B relative
Check-out time, often 70 Stonewort specimen 71 Singer-turnedprivate eye? 75 A heck ___ guy 76 Wolf’s eye
Neighborhoods
Record-breaking racehorse of the 1960s 79 Morse E
Director with an obstruction?
“Golden Girl” Getty
Consented
Filmed anew
Gin flavorers
Roxanne portrayer
Chagall and Connelly
Little duct
Dawn goddess
Jetsonesque
Singer who sprang a leak at the Indy 500?
Language ending 105 Cat of moviedom 108 Albee’s Zoo Story, e.g. 109 “You’re on!” (gambler’s exclamation) 111 TV host who’s a big crossword fan? 116 “Have I not ___ weep?” (Shak.) 117 Keeps up the grass 118 Great Lake port, in addresses
Merlin and Ole
Most independent
Line of cliffs
Rewind/search mach.
“I see!”
Rex Reed rejection
Out ___ (defective)
Lyon leftovers
Works to get loose
Pull on
Big game roar
Poet with a device for lifting sculptures? 10 Way out of Rome 11 Ex-Saturday Night Live regular Dunn 12 Ascot, for one 13 Existed once 14 Composer who needs to change something under the hood? 15 Delay 16 Maketh whole 17 That darn puzzle bird 19 Sharp rebukes 21 Spotted 23 Jesus of baseball 27 Elect. day 29 Auto chore that’s really draining
Under the Sun
Monthly bill recipient, e.g.
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What Bannister did in 3:59
Gobel or Stang type 38 Like Dickens’s Mr. Murdstone
