OutWrite 2019 - Special Literary Issue

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CONTENTS

August 1, 2019

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Volume 26 Issue 13

JEWISH STAR

From growing up Hasidic to strutting the stage in heels, Lady SinAGaga’s transformation is the fulfillment of a dream.

by John Riley

OUTWRITE 2019: SPECIAL LITERARY ISSUE A selection of writing by participants from this weekend’s annual OutWrite event, celebrating LGBTQ poetry and prose.

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Cover Illustration by Scott G. Brooks

TO BE REAL

Relive the bravery, the bitchery, and the history as Paris Is Burning returns to the big screen.

By André Hereford

SPOTLIGHT: SUTTON LEE SEYMOUR p.7 OUT ON THE TOWN p.10 FALSE PRETENSES: WILLIAM DAMERON p.12 THE FEED: A NEW LOW p.19 THE FEED: SEEKING VICTORY p.19 COMMUNITY CALENDAR p.21 MUSIC: OF MONSTERS AND MEN p.37 NIGHTLIFE: OTTER HAPPY HOUR AT TRADE p.39 NIGHTLIFE LISTINGS p.40 NIGHTLIFE HIGHLIGHTS p.41 LAST WORD p.46 Washington, D.C.’s Best LGBTQ Magazine for 25 Years Editorial Editor-in-Chief Randy Shulman Art Director Todd Franson Online Editor at metroweekly.com Rhuaridh Marr Senior Editor John Riley Contributing Editors André Hereford, Doug Rule Senior Photographers Ward Morrison, Julian Vankim Contributing Illustrator Scott G. Brooks Contributing Writers Sean Maunier, Troy Petenbrink, Bailey Vogt, Kate Wingfield Webmaster David Uy Production Assistant Julian Vankim Sales & Marketing Publisher Randy Shulman National Advertising Representative Rivendell Media Co. 212-242-6863 Distribution Manager Dennis Havrilla Patron Saint E. Lynn Harris Cover Illustraion Scott G. Brooks Metro Weekly 1775 I St. NW, Suite 1150 Washington, DC 20006 202-638-6830 All material appearing in Metro Weekly is protected by federal copyright law and may not be reproduced in whole or part without the permission of the publishers. Metro Weekly assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials submitted for publication. All such submissions are subject to editing and will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Metro Weekly is supported by many fine advertisers, but we cannot accept responsibility for claims made by advertisers, nor can we accept responsibility for materials provided by advertisers or their agents. Publication of the name or photograph of any person or organization in articles or advertising in Metro Weekly is not to be construed as any indication of the sexual orientation of such person or organization.

© 2019 Jansi LLC.

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Spotlight

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Sutton Lee Seymour

Y PARENTS MET AT OUR LOCAL COMMUNITY theater, and so theater has been in my life always,” says Preston Seymour. The suburban Chicago native made his performance debut at the age of five, as Winthrop in a school production of The Music Man. Seymour characterizes his performance career, developed over the past 30 years, as one going “from a little lisping boy to a grown adult lisping man. But now I do it in a dress and heels and a lot of sass.”

Seymour launched his drag career after working with Charles Busch seven years ago on the famous gay playwright’s stage adaptation of the children’s book series, Bunnicula.

“When we closed that show, I was just kind of whining about having to audition again,” he says. “Charles just turns to me and says, ‘Try drag. It works great for me.’”

A side hobby quickly became a full-time pursuit, as Seymour booked regular gigs on Atlantis Events cruises and in Puerto Vallarta, as well as hosting Broadway Mondays at

Hardware Bar in New York. He also tours around the country, and this Friday, August 2, will appear at Freddie’s Beach Bar in Virginia.

“I do a lot of parodies of Broadway musicals and pop songs, styled very much like a Bette Midler show in the bathhouses,” he says about his show as Sutton Lee Seymour, a name referencing a reigning Broadway star (Sutton Foster) and the ingenue from Gypsy (Gypsy Rose Lee), to say nothing of a signature song from Little Shop of Horrors. Seymour always sings and only lip-syncs occasionally.

At a typical show, Seymour will perform either a condensed song parody of the plot to Titanic or The Lion King — and then end the evening with his namesake, “Suddenly Seymour,” festooned with original parody lyrics. “It’s such a beautiful love duet,” he says. “It's just kind of a nice warm, sentimental way to spread a little love out into the audience and say goodnight.” —Doug Rule

Sutton Lee Seymour performs Friday, Aug. 2, at 8 p.m., at Freddie’s Beach Bar, 555 South 23rd St., in Arlington. Tickets are $8 to $10 for reserved spots, or $24 to $90 for reserved tables. Call 703-685-0555 or visit www.freddiesbeachbar.com.

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Spotlight BE MORE CHILL

The story of a socially awkward teenage boy who lands on a pill that makes him cool, Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz’s Be More Chill generated a lot of buzz after an Off Broadway production last year.

Virginia’s Monumental Theatre Company was able to secure the rights to stage the show using the script from its 2015 debut in New Jersey.

Monumental is hosting a drinking game for the show’s closing “Late Night” performance on Friday, Aug. 2, at 10 p.m. The Ainslie Arts Center in Episcopal High School, 3900 W. Braddock Rd., Alexandria. Tickets are $25 to $40. Call 703-9333000 or visit www.monumentaltheatre.org.

LOVE, SEX AND MARRIAGE: THE STAGE PLAY

Darrin is a rising music superstar being encouraged, even compelled, to stay in the closet by management at his homophobic music label — ultimately forcing him to choose between doing what he loves (music) and who he loves (his boyfriend Ken). Originally developed as a web series, Love, Sex and Marriage aims to show the diversity of the black gay experience as well as to bridge the gap between gay and straight African-American audiences. Currently on a multi-city national tour, the show stops in the D.C. area for two performances only.

Friday, Aug. 2, at 6:30 and 9 p.m., at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre, 8641 Colesville Road. Tickets are $30 to $50. Visit www.trefloyd.com.

RIO BRAVO

This 1959 Western stars a crooner (Dean Martin) and a teen idol (Ricky Nelson), and its director, the great Howard Hawks, highlights his musical bounty by featuring the two singing three songs. But the true star of this Western is the ultimate screen cowboy, John Wayne. Rio Bravo returns to the big screen as part of the Capital Classics series at Landmark’s West End Cinema. Wednesday, Aug. 7, at 1:30, 4:30, and 7:30 p.m. 2301 M St. NW. Happy hour from 4 to 6:30 p.m.

Tickets are $12.50. Call 202-534-1907 or visit www.landmarktheatres.com.

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Spotlight KELLI FERRELL: KOOKING WITH KELLI

Owner of the Nana’s Chicken-N-Waffles, just outside of Atlanta, Ferrell offers two area combination book signings and cooking demos.

Ferrell’s newly published cookbook instructs readers how to make soul-satisfying southern dishes, including Honey Fried Chicken, Shrimp and Grits, and Southern Sweet Potato Pie, most requiring short preparation and cooktime. Friday, Aug. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. Williams-Sonoma Tysons Galleria, 1833 International Dr., McLean, Va. Call 703-9170005. Also Saturday, Aug. 3, from 3 to 5 p.m.

Williams-Sonoma Columbia Mall, 10300 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Maryland. Call 410-884-0324.

Visit www.williams-sonoma.com

THE FAINT

The Nebraska electronic act The Faint, Saddle Creek labelmates of Conor Oberst, helped set the pace for the now-common dance-rock sound, per its dancefloor-ready album Danse Macabre from 2001. The band returned this year with its seventh studio set Egowerk, which lead singer Todd Fink says in official promotional materials is about the “toxic battleground” that is today’s Internet: “Social media is turning well-meaning people into self-important cruel monsters.” Ritual Howls and Closeness open. Saturday, Aug. 3.

Doors at 8 p.m. Nightclub 9:30, 815 V St. NW. Tickets are $25. Call 202-2650930 or visit www.930.com.

SARAH MCLACHLAN WITH THE NSO POPS

Over the past decade this pet-rescuing Canadian crooner has been offering dramatically reimagined versions of her quiet-storm ballads in concerts with various American orchestras. The acclaimed singer-songwriter, also celebrated as the founder of the legendary Lilith Fair and Vancouver’s Sarah McLachlan School of Music, returns to the symphonic well next weekend with Sean O’Loughlin conducting the National Symphony Orchestra outside in the summer heat. Saturday, Aug. 3. Gates open at 6:30 p.m. The Filene Center at Wolf Trap, 1551 Trap Road, Vienna. Tickets are $40 to $90. Call 877-WOLFTRAP or visit www.wolftrap.org.

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Out On The Town

FIREFLY: LEGALLY BLONDE-INSPIRED OFFERINGS

With the fictitious Elle Woods ensconced in Dupont Circle for the month of August in Keegan Theatre’s production of Legally Blonde, the neighborhood’s hip and cozy American bistro Firefly is getting in on the act. Ticket-holders get 20-percent-off lunch, dinner, or happy hour (excluding wine), and the promotion is good for one visit anytime during the run of the show — it’s “not limited to the date of the show printed on the ticket.” Additionally, the bar will offer a special rotating “Drink Pink” flight of cocktails — three 3-ounce pours for $22 — with names including the “Bend and Snap,” “Gemini Vegetarians,” and “Valley-dictorian.” Opened in 2003, Firefly was one of D.C.’s first trend-setting hotel restaurants and is part of the Kimpton boutique chain alongside the Kimpton Hotel Madera. 1310 New Hampshire Ave. NW. Call 202-8611310 or visit www.firefly-dc.com.

Compiled by Doug Rule

FILM CABARET

After Chicago, this Weimar Republic-set musical is Kander and Ebb’s most popular. Only a few numbers from the original stage score made the cut in Bob Fosse’s 1972 cinematic take, starring Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli, replaced with new ones written by the composers. Cabaret returns for two nights on the big screen as one of the first offerings in a two-month series at the AFI Silver Theatre titled “The New Hollywood” and focused on the new, disruptive generation of Hollywood filmmakers and stars who emerged between 1969 and 1979 — everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Jack Nicholson to Steven Spielberg — and revitalized the studio system on their own terms, with baby boomer appeal.

Other titles in the series include

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Easy Rider, The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver, and Alien. Thursday, Aug. 1, at 7:20 p.m. 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. Tickets are $13 general admission. Call 301-4956720 or visit www.afi.com/Silver.

EAT PRAY LOVE

The 5th annual Georgetown Sunset Cinema carries the theme “Out of Office,” with a five-week run of tripthemed movies as voted on by the public. The series concludes with this Julia Roberts-starring vehicle from Ryan Murphy — yes, that Ryan Murphy — about a recently divorced woman who packs her belongings into storage and begins a year-long, three-country quest to learn about herself through different cultures, based on author Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling 2006 memoir. Upon the film’s 2010 release, a Metro Weekly critic wrote that “Roberts is strongest when playing off the rest of the cast, ranging from the wonderful Viola Davis as her best friend to the talented Richard Jenkins as her biggest challenger. But Javier

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Bardem melts hearts with his sexy charm and his tenderness and vulnerability. He’s clearly the champion of the film.” The screening takes place on the grassy knoll along the banks of the Potomac River, with the panoramic Key Bridge as backdrop. Everyone is encouraged to bring a blanket, food, and water or soft drinks — just no chairs or alcohol. Tuesday, Aug. 6, in Georgetown Waterfront Park, near the intersection of Water Street and Cecil Place NW. The area opens at 6:30 p.m., and the screening starts at sunset, around 8:30 p.m. Call 202-298-9222 or visit www.georgetowndc.com/ sunset-cinema.

FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW

Humanity officially jumps the shark with this, the first spin-off of the impossibly long-running and high-earning The Fast and the Furious franchise. We as a planet have collectively allowed these films to make over $5 billion at the box office — it’s time we take

a stand and let this (presumably average) Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham-starring action comedy die. But that won’t happen. It’ll earn millions, and before we know it we’ll be suffering through Fast & Furious Presents: Citizen Kane 2: Roadbuds. Opens Friday, Aug. 2.

Area theaters. Visit www.fandango. com. (Rhuaridh Marr)

MA VIE EN ROSE

Part of the original “25 Gay Films Everyone Should See” list that Metro Weekly assembled a decade ago, the 22-year-old LGBTQ classic was a relatively early entry in the category of coming out films from the trans perspective. Featuring French dialogue and English subtitles, Ma Vie En Rose focuses on a young girl struggling to own her gender identity, as her otherwise loving parents continually fend off embarrassment by pushing her back into her prescribed box. Alain Berliner’s drama has touches of fantasy to help illustrate the degree to which social demands curtail personal liberty and

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self-expression. Screens as part of the now one-year-old Screen Queen series on Monday, Aug. 5, at 8 p.m. at the cozy Suns Cinema, 3107 Mount Pleasant St. NW. Tickets are $11.49 including service fee. Visit www. sunscinema.com.

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

Landmark's E Street Cinema presents its monthly run of Richard O’Brien’s camp classic, billed as the longest-running midnight movie in history. Landmark's showings come with a live shadow cast from the Sonic Transducers, meaning it's even more interactive than usual.

Friday, Aug. 2, and Saturday, Aug. 3, at midnight. 555 11th St. NW. Call 202-452-7672 or visit www.landmarktheatres.com.

SHARONA JACOBS

UNION MARKET DRIVE-IN: JAWS

FALSE PRETENSES

William Dameron chronicles his struggles with both catfishing and coming out in a powerful new memoir.

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FEW YEARS AGO, I RECEIVED AN EMAIL FROM A WOMAN I HAD NEVER MET,” says William Dameron. “And the first line of her email read, ‘Your face has meant a lot to me, but now I've found out it's a lie.’ She went on to describe how she had a four-year online relationship with somebody who used my pictures to catfish her. When I did a reverse-image search, I found out she was not the only one. My face was synonymous with the search term ‘40-year-old white man.’ And it had been used by many men to create fake dating profiles. The irony is, I pretended to be somebody I was not for 20 years: I was a gay man married to a straight woman.”

Dameron chronicles his situation in the new memoir The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out. “It's sort of me looking back at my life through that lens of catfishing and discovering what happens when you pretend to be somebody you're not and how do you repair that.” Having grown up in the conservative and homophobic era of the 1980s in North Carolina, Dameron delayed coming out until 2007, at the age of 43 and after 21 years of marriage. The information technology officer by day started a personal blog about his experiences a few years later.

“I couldn't find stories of men who had been in the closet and married and had children and what it was like when they came out,” he says. The book has helped strengthen the relationship between Dameron and his ex and two twenty-something daughters. “Once she read my book,” he says about his eldest, who was 16 at the time of the divorce, “she told me it answered questions she didn't even know how to ask. It's honestly healed some old wounds.”

Dameron uses his experience as catfishing bait with new hires at the Massachusetts-based company where he works overseeing cyber-security efforts. “I tell them to pull up their phones and do a search for ‘40-year-old white man’…. They look at that, they look back up at me, and they're sort of surprised. And I say, ‘Okay, this is the way we're going to be hacked. Somebody's going to pretend to be somebody they're not. You're going to trust them, and then you'll give them something you shouldn't.’”

The key takeaway? “Always, always, always make sure you know who you're talking to. And in your personal life, make sure you do a reverse-image search on a picture before you swipe right or swipe left. Make sure you really know who that person is, because you can do a little bit of research to find out.” —Doug Rule William Dameron will appear for a reading and signing on Thursday, Aug. 8, at 6:30 p.m. at Kramerbooks, 1517 Connecticut Ave. NW. Call 202-387-1400 or visit www.kramers.com.

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Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller about a great white shark introduced the world to the idea of the summer blockbuster, helping transform Hollywood into an industry dependent on summer mega-hits (George Lucas sealed the deal two years later with Star Wars). Jaws earns its scares by rarely and barely showing us the shark. The opening, in which a young swimmer is viciously attacked by an unseen assailant, ranks with Psycho’s shower scene as one of cinema’s most intense moments — one magnified by the iconic two-note ostinato that won composer John Williams an Oscar for Best Score. You don’t have to drive a car to partake in the experience, as you can just nab a viewing spot in Union Market’s free picnic area. Food and beer are available from market vendors and neighboring merchants. The DC Rollergirls will be on hand to sell and deliver candy. Remaining films to screen on first Fridays this summer include Coco, and The Wiz. Friday, Aug. 2, with screening starting at 8:45 p.m.

In the parking lot at Union Market, 1309 5th St. NE. Free for walk-ups or $15 per car. Call 800-680-9095 or visit www.unionmarketdc.com.

(Randy Shulman)

STAGE DEAR EVAN HANSEN

If you missed it when it started its life at Arena Stage four years ago, the Tony Award-winning masterpiece from the hit stage and screen songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul returns to the area as part of its first national tour. Michael Greif directs the deeply personal and profoundly contemporary tale, featuring a book by Steven Levenson, about the power and overpowering effects of social media and social standing.

Opens Tuesday, Aug. 6. To Sept.

8. Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. Tickets are $79 to $175.

Call 202-467-4600 or visit www. kennedy-center.org.

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ALWAYS WANTED TO PERFORM,” SAYS MOSHIEL Newman Daphna. “But when you grow up as a Hasidic Jewish boy, performing isn't really something that is pushed in any real way. So I never really had the opportunity.” That all changed after Daphna came out as gay and witnessed his first drag queen at a gay

D.C.’s Mr. Nice Jewish Boy Pageant is Sunday, Aug. 4, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. at U Street Music Hall, 1115 U St. NW. Tickets are available via www.ticketfly.com. Search “nice Jewish boy.”

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/NJB.DC. Follow Lady SinAGaga on Instagram at @ladysinagaga.

PHOTO COURTESY OF LADY SINAGAGA

From growing up Hasidic to strutting the stage in heels, Lady SinAGaga’s transformation is the fulfillment of a dream.

bar. Four-and-a-half years ago, Daphna created a drag alterego and Lady SinAGaga took her first high-heeled steps as a participant in a sober drag pageant. Besides the obvious pun in the name — “I always joke that the best thing I’ve ever done in drag is pick a name and after that, it’s all gone downhill” — SinAGaga pays homage to her upbringing by incorporating the “Star of David” into her costumes, jewelry, and even makeup.

“I was at a Michael’s and Hanukkah had just passed, and they had a sales table with a thousand little plastic Stars of David,” she says. “So I just took the bag and started using them and putting them as like a little beauty mark.”

Despite her name, SinAGaga doesn’t only lip sync to Mother Monster’s hits. “People always expect Lady Gaga [songs] because my name is Lady SinaGaga, so I always oblige,” she says. “But I also love a good ballad. I love anything that really gets the crowd going.” SinAGaga will get D.C. audiences going on Sunday, Aug. 4, when she emcees the Nice Jewish Boys pageant at U Street Music Hall along with 2018 titleholder Jeremy Sherman.

“I’ve never performed in D.C. I’m really excited just to see what the queer Jewish community down there is like,” she says. And this being D.C., SinAGaga isn’t ruling out political jokes. “I’m the type of person who believes, if I’m lucky enough to be a queer person who's given a microphone, I can't shy away from important things. I can't not say things that are going on.”

SinAGaga is proud of the influence she’s been able to have on her fans — particularly when she hears from her own Nice Jewish Boys. “The amount of messages I get on Instagram, just private messages from Jewish people, from young gay Jewish boys, from young gay Jewish boys' mothers, about how much it means to them that I’m a queer Jew, who is visibly both queer and Jewish simultaneously, always humbles me.

To me, it's all about human interaction, because at the end of the day, behind the huge costumes and makeup and the hair, there’s just a person that wants to connect to other people.”

—John Riley

JEWISH STAR

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LEGALLY BLONDE

Dupont Circle’s Keegan Theatre closes out its 22nd season with the stage adaptation of the hit movie, based on Amanda Brown’s novel about effervescent Elle Woods and her journey to Harvard. Ricky Drummond helms Keegan’s production of the show, featuring music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Neil Benjamin, aided by music director Walter “Bobby” McCoy and choreographer Ashleigh King.

Previews begin Saturday, Aug. 3.

To Sept. 1. Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW. Tickets are $52 to $62. Call 202-265-3767 or visit www.keegantheatre.com.

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THE CAT IN THE HAT

A rainy day is turned into a miraculous, mayhem-filled adventure in an adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic imported from across the pond, via the National Theatre of Great Britain. The theater for young audiences production out at Adventure Theatre-MTC in Glen Echo Park is directed by Adam Immerwahr, who has become known for works that are far more serious and adult in his day job as the artistic director of Theater J. Surely The Cat in the Hat is a nice change of pace, maybe even allowing him, to paraphrase from the late Mr. Geisel’s book, “good fun that is funny.” To Aug. 18. 7300 MacArthur Blvd. Call 301-634-2270 or visit www.adventuretheatre-mtc.org.

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THE FEW

A drama from playwright Samuel D. Hunter (A Bright New Boise) set in an Idaho town where residents are struggling to connect, relate, and make sense of it all. Baakari Wilder (Broadway’s Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk) plays a man returning after a few years away, Dawn Thomas Reidy plays his friend and former lover, and Andrew Flurer a newcomer who complicates his future in a changed town. Audrey Cefaly, Ira Joe Fisher, Michael Grenham, and Zach Brewster-Geisz also lend their voiceover talents to this production from Maryland’s Unexpected Stage, a company that director Christopher Goodrich founded 10 years ago with his wife Rachel Stroud-Goodrich.

To Aug. 4. Fireside Room in the

River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation building, 6301 River Rd., Bethesda. Tickets are $10 to $29.50. Call 301-337-8290 or visit www.unexpectedstage.org.

TREASURE ISLAND

Virginia’s Synetic closes out its season with a high seas adventure full of pirates. The original adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel of the same name is the latest caper from a physical theater-focused company that’s made its name producing wordless variations on classics, particularly those by Shakespeare. Synetic’s impressive crew of athletic actors will bring to life the coming-of-age tale focused on the orphan Jane Hawkins and a ruthless band of buccaneers on a wild hunt for bur-

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including beer, wine, and sangria, as sold by the Pavilion Café. New menu items for 2019 include the popular vegetarian Teriyaki Impossible Burger, a Bahn Mi Turkey Burger with ginger soy aioli, and more traditional sandwiches of pulled pork and beef brisket, all available at grill stations throughout the Sculpture Garden. The series continues with Cincinnati’s eclectic pan-Caribbean, pan-American Latin dance outfit Son Del Caribe on Aug. 2, and New York’s Django Reinhardt-inspired gypsy jazz band The Bailsmen on Aug. 9. Evenings from 5 to 8:30 p.m.

Sculpture Garden, between 7th and 9th Streets NW. Call 202-289-3360 or visit www.nga.gov.

RACHEL DAVIS

JUSTIN TRAWICK

MID CITY DOG DAYS: 20TH ANNIVERSARY SIDEWALK SALE

“They’re always by far the biggest sale days of the year,” Pixie Windsor says of the annual Mid City Dog Days Sale. “And the store right now is packed to the brim getting ready for it. So there will be lots to choose from.” Miss Pixie’s Furnishings & Whatnot has been participating in the annual Dog Days event ever since the eclectic, mostly mid-century vintage home furnishings store moved onto 14th Street in the Mid City area of D.C. in 2008. Founded 20 years ago by Home Rule, the home decor store that closed this past spring, the annual Dog Days promotion covers 25 blocks and features approximately 100 businesses in the heart of D.C., encompassing the neighborhoods of Logan Circle, 14th Street, the U Street Corridor, and Shaw. Ann Sacks, Bonobos, Cherry Blossom Creative, Lee’s Flowers, Logan Hardware, and Salt & Sundry are among the local merchants joining Miss Pixie’s with special offerings and sales, along with the area outposts of national chains including Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, Filson, and Room & Board. DC Noodles, Doi Moi, the Meatball Shop, Nellie’s Sports Bar, and Taqueria Nacional are among the restaurants getting in on the act with weekend promotions this year. It all launches with a Kick-Off Party on Friday, Aug. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m., with food from Barcelona Wine Bar and live music from the Herron Quartet, at Miss Pixie’s, 1626 14th St. NW. Dog Days runs all day on Saturday, Aug. 3, and Sunday, Aug. 4. Visit www.dogdaysdc.com.

ied treasure. To Aug. 18. 1800 South Bell St., Arlington. Tickets are $35 to $60. Call 800-811-4111 or visit www.synetictheater.org.

MUSIC 1964: THE TRIBUTE

A four-piece band with a self-titled PBS special to its credit and acclaim from Rolling Stone as “the best Beatles tribute ever,” the popular 1964: The Tribute returns for another area show channeling the vibe of the Fab Four’s early ’60s concerts, from the instruments to clothing to onstage banter. Sunday, Aug. 4, at 7:30 p.m. The Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria.

Tickets are $35. Call 703-549-7500 or visit www.birchmere.com.

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ABBA - THE CONCERT

“The best ABBA tribute band in the world,” touts the Official ABBA Fan Club. Featuring two original members of the Swedish pop group’s rhythm section, “ABBA - The Concert” is about as close as we may ever get to a performance by the actual band — not counting the digital avatars, dubbed “abbatars,” that have been developed and expected to make their debut “performing” in a TV special later this year. Sunday, Aug. 4. Gates at 6:30 p.m. The Filene Center at Wolf Trap, 1551 Trap Rd., Vienna. Tickets are $30 to $60. Call 877-WOLFTRAP or visit wolftrap.org.

CHERISH THE LADIES

Formed over thirty years ago as a means to showcase the brightest female musicians in the male-dominated Irish-American folk scene, this group took its name from a

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traditional Irish jig. Joanie Madden, on flute and tin whistle, leads the group of multi-instrumentalists including Mary Coogan, Mirella Murray, Grainne Murphy, Deirdre Connolly, and Kathleen Boyle, and accompanied by step dancers.

Sunday, Aug. 4, at 3 and 7 p.m. Amp

by Strathmore, 11810 Grand Park Ave. North Bethesda. Tickets are $25 to $35. Call 301-581-5100 or visit www.ampbystrathmore.com.

JAZZ IN THE GARDEN: SON DEL CARIBE, THE BAILSMEN

A summertime staple, the National Gallery of Art offers free outdoor concerts immediately after work every Friday through late August.

Bands offering a range of jazz styles, from swing to Latin to ska, perform amidst the museum’s collection of large-scale sculptural works while patrons enjoy food and drinks,

“It's the first record that I've done that I feel really represents me as a musician and us as a band,” Justin Trawick told Metro Weekly last year after the release of the Americanafocused EP Riverwash, featuring his band The Common Good. The Northern Virginia-based singer-songwriter is less rock-oriented now than when he made music his full-time pursuit over a decade ago, but however different in sound, the songs on Riverwash are every bit as personal as his prior output. “The best part about this job is that you're writing things that come from the heart, and oftentimes you're connecting with people based on the emotions that you've conveyed in a song. If you write something that people identify with, that's when you make a fan forever. That's what I'm trying to do.” Trawick performs a “Free Late Night in the Loft” this Saturday, Aug. 3, at 10:30 p.m. Loft Bar in the Hamilton, 600 14th St. NW. Free. Call 202-787-1000 or visit www.thehamiltondc.com.

SCOTT BRADLEE’S POSTMODERN JUKEBOX

A rotating musical collective founded by the arranger and pianist Bradlee in 2009, PMJ became a YouTube sensation through amusing reworkings of recent pop and rock songs, sung in the style of vintage swing and jazz. Also including original tunes, this “traveling band of throwback minstrels” returns to the area on the “Welcome to the Twenties 2.0 Tour,” a year-long run of shows to help prepare fans for a new decade of music, chiefly by channeling the musical style birthed in the 1920s — namely, jazz.

As Bradlee puts it in the tour’s promotional materials: “Get ready for the most sensational ’20s party this side of The Great Gatsby.” Friday, Aug. 2, at 8 p.m. Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Tickets are $29 to $69, or $119 for VIP Package with premium seating and tour poster, $169 for VIP Package also including post-show Meet & Greet. Call 202-467-4600 or visit www.kennedy-center.org.

SIGNATURE THEATRE’S SUMMER CABARET SERIES

Signature presents a cabaret series with seven different shows, most of them featuring musical actors known from productions at the Shirlington complex. The lineup concludes with Awa Sal Secka (Blackbeard, Jesus Christ Superstar) and Christian Douglas (United States Army Chorus) in “Two’s Company,” “a cabaret toast to dynamic duos,” on Thursday, Aug. 1, at 8 p.m.; Wesley Taylor, the gay star of Cabaret four years ago, in the personal romp through his life and career “Finally, A Show About Me,” on Friday, Aug. 2, at 8 p.m., and Saturday, Aug. 3, at 2 and 8 p.m.; and Joel Coleman, the lead vocalist of the Platters (“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” “Only You”), and his “No Boundaries” mix of songs that share “the soundtrack of his life,” on Sunday, Aug. 4, at 2 p.m.

The Ark at 4200 Campbell Ave., in Arlington. Tickets are $38 per show, or $175 for an All-Access pass. Call 703-820-9771 or visit www.sigtheatre.org.

SUMMER SPIRIT FESTIVAL

Previously billed as a “one-stop shop for a soulful good time,” this year’s festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion scales down from two days to one. Anthony Hamilton headlines a lineup featuring other, somewhat underrated R&B/soul acts, among them Jhené Aiko, Raphael Saadiq, and PJ Morton. Returning for another consecutive year are local go-go acts BackYard Band featuring Anwan Glover and Sirius & Company featuring Ms. Kim & Scooby. More homegrown go-go is represented via Be’la Dona feat.

Sugar Bear, while two up-and-coming acts round out the bill, the Drake-supported, ’90s-R&B-channeling duo DVSN and the 23-yearold falsetto crooner Kyle Dion.

Saturday, Aug. 3, starting at 2:30 p.m. 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, Md. Tickets are $60 to $250. Call 800-551-SEAT or visit www.merriweathermusic.com.

WHITE FORD BRONCO

“D.C.’s all ’90s party band,” cheekily named after O.J. Simpson’s notorious failed getaway car, is a five-member ensemble consisting of singer/guitarist Diego Valencia, singer Gretchen Gustafson, guitarists Ken Sigmund and McNasty, and drummer Max Shapiro. White Ford Bronco sings through that decade’s songbook in all styles of popular music. Saturday, Aug. 10. Doors at 8 p.m. Nightclub 9:30, 815 V St. NW. Tickets are $25. Call 202-265-0930 or visit www.930.com.

COMEDY VINCE EBERT: SEXY SCIENCE

Nearly two decades after launching an improbable career as a comedian with a satirical science bent,

this German star, who has a degree in physics, brings the Englishlanguage show he debuted at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival to the Kennedy Center. The show riffs on everything from skeptical thinking to fake news to “the secret of German cars,” while also posing the question: “Do strippers in the southern hemisphere turn around the pole in the opposite direction?”

Saturday, Aug. 10, at 6 p.m. Terrace Theater. Tickets are free, distributed two per person in line in the States Gallery at approximately 5 p.m. Call 202-467-4600 or visit www.kennedy-center.org.

READINGS CHARLES KING: GODS OF THE UPPER AIR

King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, offers a group portrait of the pioneers of cultural anthropology in his newest work Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the 20th Century. The book traces the shift from seeing human behavior in terms of biology to viewing it as a product of culture and learning, chronicling the groundbreaking experiments of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas as well as the work of his students, including Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston. He offers a reading and signing the day before the book is officially published by Doubleday.

Monday, Aug. 5, at 7 p.m. Politics and Prose at the Wharf, 70 District Square SW. Call 202-488-3867 or visit www.politics-prose.com.

STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The award-winning journalist who spent nearly 20 years covering labor and the workplace for the New York Times traces today’s blight of wage stagnation, income inequality, gender-pay gaps, and a host of other social and political problems directly to the long decline of worker power. Yet in Beaten Down, Worked Up: the Past, Present, and Future of American Labor, Greenhouse sees glimmers of hope for the future via documenting the concrete ways workers today are organizing and reclaiming their collective power, from hotel housekeepers to G.M. laborers to Uber drivers. Thursday, Aug. 8, at 7 p.m. Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Call 202-364-1919 or visit www.politics-prose.com.

ART & EXHIBITS AMERICA IS…

Touchstone Gallery presents its third national juried exhibition — after 2016’s Art as Politics and 2017’s Art of Engagement — exploring national identity and values

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I Need Diverse Games, joins for a keynote presentation expanding on the theme and titled “Barriers are Meant to be Destroyed, Not Just Broken.” The Arcade is open Saturday, Aug. 3, and Sunday, Aug. 4, from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. 8th and F Sts. NW. Free. Call 202-633-1000 or visit americanart.si.edu.

FOOD & DRINK PEPINO POP-UP AT COTTON & REED

CREATIVE CAULDRON’S SUMMER CABARET SERIES

The 10th annual summer cabaret series at ArtSpace Falls Church continues with Katie McManus in “My So-Called (Mid)Life,” a swing through showtunes, pop, and jazz standards accompanied by Elisa Rosman, on Friday, Aug. 2, a tribute to Nat King Cole from acclaimed local jazz pianist/vocalist Mark G. Meadows (pictured) with fellow vocalist Danielle Wertz, on Saturday, Aug. 3, Erin Granfield in “If The Dress Fits,” an evening of song addressing sartorial and other quintessential questions, on Friday, Aug. 9, and performer/lyricist Stephen Gregory Smith, leading “Game On: A Game Night Cabaret,” on Saturday, Aug. 10. All shows at 8 p.m. Series runs to Sept. 14. 410 South Maple Ave. in Falls Church. Tickets are $18 to $22 per show, or $60 for a table for two with wine and $120 for four with wine. Call 703-436-9948 or visit www.creativecauldron.org.

during a time of divisive politics and great social change. Four jurors from across the nation — Rachel Adams of Omaha’s Bernis Center for Contemporary Arts, Taylor Bythewood-Porter of the California African American Museum, Jen Mergel of the Association of Art Museum Curators, and Jennifer M. Williams of New Orleans Museum of Art — helped select the works on display from nearly 50 artists, ranging form paintings and photographs to multimedia pieces to life-sized scale sculpture installations. LGBTQ discrimination is among the themes represented in the exhibition alongside political corruption, racism and xenophobia, police violence, climate change, women’s rights, drug addiction, and digital distractions, among others.

Opening Reception, featuring hors d’oeuvres by Occasions Caterers and gourmet frozen desserts by Moorenko’s Ice Cream, and where cash prizes will be awarded to four of the participating artists, is Friday, Aug. 2, from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

On display to Aug. 29. 901 New York Ave. NW Call 202-347-2787 or visit www.touchstonegallery.com.

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BLACK AND WHITE AT GALLERY CLARENDON

The latest group show from members of Clarendon’s Overlook Gallery offers a twist on the traditional “colorless” approach to art.

While no color is apparent in the works in Black and White, no black paint was used, either. Instead, a mixture of other colors was created as a replacement. “This dynamic expression made us examine everyday scenes in a unique way,” according to painter and teacher Jane Coonce, who conceived of the exhibit. Other new member artworks, in a range of media including sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, and photography, are on display in the main gallery of Gallery Clarendon, a pop-up art space where professional artists work, exhibit, and teach classes open to the public. To Aug. 4. An Arlington Artists Alliance Gallery, 2800 Clarendon Blvd., Arlington. Call 571-312-7813 or visit www.galleryclarendon.org.

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM: SAAM ARCADE

The Smithsonian American Art Museum was one of the first museums in the U.S. to acquire video games as part of its permanent collection, recognizing the compelling performance space, activated by artists and players alike, whose interaction can create a unique artistic as well as educational experience. At its annual SAAM Arcade, participants get the chance to play games, from the analog (card games, pinball machines) to digital classics (Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, available on their original devices).

But the centerpiece is the “Indie Showcase” in the museum’s Kogod Courtyard, a display of independent games created by both student and professional developers. With a theme of “Breaking Barriers,” the 5th annual event puts the spotlight on indie games that recognize the diversity of gaming audiences, makers, players, characters, and cultures, encouraging the industry to break barriers and celebrate underrepresented segments with the gaming community. On Saturday, Aug. 3, at 6 p.m., Tanya DePass, founder of the nonprofit

Cotton & Reed, the rum distillery and tasting room in the Union Market District, plays host to a special culinary pop-up over the next month from Christian Irabién, the Mexican-born, D.C.-based chef who spent years working with José Andres and his Mexican outpost Oyamel. Pepino is designed as a preview of Amparo (www.amparofondita.com), Irabién’s forthcoming contemporary Mexican restaurant that is set to open this fall as part of the new Latin marketplace La Cosecha. The pop-up features six special ceviches (priced at $7 to $16 each). Meanwhile, Cotton & Reed complements Irabién’s menu with “Prickled Pink,” a specially concocted slushie consisting of white rum, mezcal, prickly pear, and lime ($12).

To Aug. 18. Pepino is open from noon to 8 p.m. on weekends and 4 to 10 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays.

1330 5th St. NE. Call 202-544-2805 or visit www.facebook.com/cotton. and.reed.

THE GRAHAM GEORGETOWN: SUNSET CINEMA SERIES COCKTAILS

In conjunction with Georgetown’s Sunset Cinema series, this nearby luxury boutique hotel features a different specialty cocktail available for $14 each Tuesday and inspired by the screening later that evening.

On Tuesday, Aug. 6, in advance of the concluding film in the series Eat Pray Love, you can order at the hotel’s open-air rooftop bar the cocktail “You’re wishin’ too much, baby,” a slight twist on a Sex on the Beach with grapefruit-flavored vodka and peach schnapps plus cranberry and orange juices. Named after Alexander Graham Bell, the famous Scottish-born American inventor who was also a Georgetown resident, the Graham Georgetown is located near the historic C&O Canal on a quiet side street running south from M Street NW down to the Washington Harbor. In addition to fun, sophisticated alcoholic beverages, the Graham Rooftop, which opens at 4 p.m. weekdays, offers sweeping views of Georgetown, the federal city, and beyond. 1075 Thomas Jefferson St. NW. Call 202337-0900 or visit www.thegrahamgeorgetown.com. l

DONNA BURTON

theFeed

Hastings

A NEW LOW

Trump administration clarifies its policy of separating migrant children from HIV-positive parents. By John Riley

T

HE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS ATTEMPTING to clarify comments which implied that migrants’ HIV status could be used to separate them from their children at the border.

The comments, which GLAAD slammed as a “new low for the Trump administration,” were made by Customs & Border Protection Chief Brian Hastings while testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on CBP’s policies dealing with migrant families who attempt to cross the U.S.Mexico border illegally.

The Trump administration has largely been on the defensive since last year after it was revealed that, under its “zero tolerance” policy, it was detaining and separating parents from their children, placing the adults in federal jails and leaving the children in the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services while they wait for deportation hearings.

While the Trump administration claims it has halted family separations, Hastings’ testimony raised eyebrows when he appeared to say, under questioning from U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), that family separations are still occurring in some instances when an adult has a “communicable disease.”

Even more alarming, to health experts and immigration advocates alike, was when Hastings appeared to agree with the classification of HIV as “communicable,” which generally means that a disease can be transmitted easily through human contact (HIV cannot be spread through casual contact).

“If a mother or father has an HIV positive status, is that

alone enough to justify separation from their child?” Raskin asked Hastings.

“It is, because it’s a communicable disease under the guidance,” Hastings replied.

“We have reports of kids being separated from their parents on that basis,” Raskin told Hastings. “Is that what we mean by communicable disease? It’s not communicable from contact.”

Hastings responded: “That’s the guidance that we follow.”

Raskin later noted that the flu was communicable, and asked if CBP would “separate parents from their kids if a mom or dad had the flu?”

“We’re not, sir,” said Hastings.

Even though Hastings reiterated over and over again that “separation is not taken lightly” and that separate cases will differ based on individual circumstances, the exchange with Raskin sparked immediate outrage among immigration and HIV advocates, who blasted CBP over the concept of using HIV status as a justification for separation.

“Targeting people living with HIV as part of the cruel family separation policy is a new low for the Trump administration,” the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD said in a statement. “This policy relies on discriminatory falsehoods about people living with HIV, and will undoubtedly bring harm and further stigma.”

“HIV has not been considered a communicable disease of public health significance since 2010 when advocates succeeded in ending the HIV Travel and Immigration Ban,” Aaron C. Morris, the executive director of Immigration

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

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theFeed Equality, said in a statement. “Immediately after the ban was lifted, the CDC removed HIV from its list of communicable diseases. We are appalled to learn that the U.S. government is again stigmatizing immigrants living with HIV. Separating children from their parents because they are HIV-positive deeply misunderstands basic public health and will irreparably harm families and children.”

Metro Weekly sent an email asking CBP for a copy of the guidance that was cited by Hastings during the hearing and if HIV was being considered a “communicable” disease that would merit separating children to protect their health.

In response to that inquiry, CBP issued the following statement, attributable to Hastings: “As I noted multiple times when presented with hypothetical scenarios or specific allegations by members of the Committee, I would need to review the full facts and circumstances associated with a case before speaking definitively. To clarify my exchange with Rep. Raskin regarding potential reasons for separation due to communicable diseases, while HIV is not a communicable disease that would bar entry into the U.S., HIV does present additional considerations that may affect how migrants might move forward in processing.

“CBP would not separate families due to the communi-

cable nature of HIV. Generally speaking, separations of this type are due to the potential requirement for hospitalization and whether it is in the best interest of the child to wait for the disposition of the their parent in HHS or CBP custody.

“Similarly, while a simple flu case would generally not be grounds for separation, complications requiring hospitalization may impact the best approach for maintaining custody of the child. For these reasons, Border Patrol makes all separation decisions on a case-by-case basis and these decisions are not taken lightly.”

NMAC, a national nonprofit organization focused on mitigating and combating the HIV epidemic among marginalized and underserved communities, released a statement condemning the use of HIV status to justify separations as “wrong on multiple levels.”

The organization noted that not only is HIV not “communicable,” but separating people with HIV from their only support system could be “disastrous for their health, particularly in stressful and unstable conditions.” Additionally, the organization said it was concerned about whether those in U.S. custody who have been diagnosed with HIV are receiving treatment, as delays or interruption in care will endanger their health and lives. l

SEEKING VICTORY

LGBTQ Victory Fund endorses gay N.Y. Councilman Ritchie Torres for Congress. By John Riley

O

PENLY GAY NEW YORK CITY COUNCILMAN Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) is getting a boost in his campaign for Congress, earning the endorsement of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, the national organization dedicated to electing out LGBTQ individuals to public office.

Torres recently jumped into the race for New York’s 15th Congressional District seat, which is vacant after incumbent U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, who has held the seat for the past 29 years, announced he would not seek re-election in 2020 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

Torres’ chief primary opponent is fellow Councilman Ruben Diaz, Sr., a Pentecostal minister and longtime politician who previously served in the State Senate, where he amassed a record of opposing measures to expand LGBTQ rights. The winner of the primary is favored in the general election given the Democratic tilt of the district.

If elected, Torres would become the first openly LGBTQ Afro-Latino ever elected to Congress.

In a release announcing its endorsement of Torres, the LGBTQ Victory Fund called Diaz “one of the most antiLGBTQ Democrats in the entire nation” — referencing his opposition to LGBTQ rights and his courting of anti-LGBTQ figures, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whom Diaz invited to his district to help the senator court conservative black and Latino evangelical voters in Cruz’s bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

“This is among the most important Democratic Congressional primaries of 2020, with voters choosing 20

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

between one of the most homophobic Democrats in the nation and an openly gay man who champions equality,” Annise Parker, a former mayor of Houston and the president and CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, said in a statement.

“Ritchie will become the first openly LGBTQ AfroLatinx person ever elected to Congress when he wins in 2020 — adding a crucial voice to a Congress where people of color and LGBTQ people are severely underrepresented.

The South Bronx deserves a leader who uses their position to champion the urban poor and other underserved communities, not a man who uses his platform to denigrate his own constituents because they are women or LGBTQ.” Victory Fund’s endorsement of Torres is just its fifth federal endorsement for the 2020 election cycle. The organization has also endorsed South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg for President of the United States, Dan Baer for U.S. Senate, and Gina Ortiz Jones and Jon Hoadley for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Torres expressed his gratitude to Victory Fund for its endorsement.

“This primary presents a stark choice: between a progressive new guard and a reactionary old guard; between an LGBTQ trailblazer and a vicious homophobe; between a new generation of leadership and more of the same,” he said in a statement. “This endorsement makes clear that this race is of upmost importance to the LGBTQ community and will have a profound impact on the types of policies that are pushed in Washington, D.C. to impact LGBTQ people.” l

Community THURSDAY, August 1 The DC Center holds a meeting of its ASIAN PACIFIC

ISLANDER QUEER SUPPORT GROUP. 7-8 p.m. 2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105. For more information, visit www.thedccenter.org.

Weekly Events ANDROMEDA TRANSCULTURAL HEALTH

offers free HIV testing and HIV services (by appointment). 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Decatur Center, 1400 Decatur St. NW. To arrange an appointment, call 202-291-4707, or visit www.andromedatransculturalhealth.org.

DC AQUATICS CLUB practice

session at Takoma Aquatic Center. 7:30-9 p.m. 300 Van Buren St. NW. For more information, visit www.swimdcac.org.

DC FRONT RUNNERS run-

ning/walking/social club welcomes runners of all ability levels for exercise in a fun and supportive environment, with socializing afterwards. Route distances vary. For meeting places and more information, visit www.dcfrontrunners.org.

DC LAMBDA SQUARES, D.C.’s

LGBTQ square-dancing group, features an opportunity to learn about and practice various forms of modern square dancing. No partner required. Please dress casually. 7:30-9:30 p.m.

National City Christian Church, 5 Thomas Circle NW. For more info, call 202-930-1058 or visit www.dclambdasquares.org.

DC SCANDALS RUGBY holds

practice. The team is always looking for new members.

All welcome. 7-9 p.m. Harry Thomas Recreation Center, 1743 Lincoln Rd. NE. For more information, visit www.scandalsrfc.org.

THE DULLES TRIANGLES

Northern Virginia social group meets for happy hour at Sheraton in Reston. All welcome. 7-9 p.m. 11810 Sunrise Valley Drive, second-floor bar.

For more information, visit www.dullestriangles.com.

HIV TESTING at Whitman-

Walker Health. 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 2:30-5 p.m. at 1525 14th St. NW, and 9 a.m-12 p.m. and 2-5 p.m. at the Max Robinson Center, 2301 MLK Jr. Ave. SE. For an appointment, call 202-745-7000 or visit www.whitman-walker.org.

KARING WITH INDIVIDUALITY (K.I.) SERVICES, 20 S. Quaker Lane,

Suite 210, Alexandria, Va., offers $30 “rapid” HIV testing and counseling by appointment only. 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Must schedule special appointment if seeking testing after 2 p.m.

Call 703-823-4401. www.kiservices.org

Lindsey Rogers, as well as tarot readings, zines, chapbook sales, and bookselling. Free.

Please note the first floor has an accessible entrance, but the venue is a historical building accessible only by stairs. 6:309:30 p.m. 3813 Georgia Ave. NW. For more information, call 202-682-2245 or visit www. thedccenter.org/outwrite.

METROHEALTH CENTER

Weekly Events

offers free, rapid HIV testing.

Appointment needed. 1012 14th St. NW, Suite 700. To arrange an appointment, call 202-8498029. www.metrohealthdc.org

STI TESTING at Whitman-

Walker Health. 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 2-3 p.m. at both 1525 14th St. NW and the Max Robinson Center, 2301 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave. SE. Testing is intended for those without symptoms. For an appointment call 202-745-7000 or visit www. whitman-walker.org.

US HELPING US hosts a

Narcotics Anonymous Meeting.

The group is independent of UHU. 6:30-7:30 p.m., 3636 Georgia Ave. NW. For more information, call 202-446-1100. www.ushelpingus.com.

FRIDAY, August 2 GAY DISTRICT, a group for

GBTQQI men between the ages of 18-35, meets on the first and third Fridays of each month.

8:30-9:30 p.m. The DC Center.

2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105.

Visit www.gaydistrict.org.

Join LGBTQ people all over the D.C. area for GoGayDC’s monthly FIRST FRIDAYS HAPPY HOUR SOCIAL at Pinzimini Lounge in the Westin Arlington Gateway. Ballston Metro is two blocks away. Free to attend. Everyone welcome.

6:30-8:30 p.m. 801 N. Glebe Rd., Arlington, Va. For more information, visit www.gogaydc.org.

OUTWRITE, the nonprofit fes-

tival celebrating LGBTQ literature at the Reeves Center, kicks off on Aug. 2 at the Ten Tigers Parlour. Featuring writers Kristen Arnett, Jericho Brown, and Wo Chan. Hosted by Rebecca Kling. Event will feature “Ask an Editor” with Jay Wolf and K Tyler Christensen, impromptu poetry from Sybil Mahone, and a craft conversation around genre hybrid work with Ruth Joffre and Elizabeth

BET MISHPACHAH, founded

by members of the LGBT community, holds Friday evening Shabbat services in the DC Jewish Community Center’s Community Room. 8 p.m. 1529 16th St. NW. For more information, visit www.betmish.org.

DC AQUATICS CLUB holds

a practice session at Howard University. 6:30-8 p.m. Burr Gymnasium, 2400 6th St. NW. For more information, visit www.swimdcac.org.

PROJECT STRIPES hosts

LGBT-affirming social group for ages 11-24. 4-6 p.m. 1419 Columbia Road NW. Contact Tamara, 202-319-0422, www. layc-dc.org.

SMYAL’S REC NIGHT provides a

social atmosphere for LGBTQ and questioning youth, featuring dance parties, vogue nights, movies and games. 4-7 p.m. For more info, email rebecca.york@smyal.org.

tival celebrating LGBTQ literature at the Reeves Center, holds its second day of events, with a focus on writing workshops, discussion panels, and literary-style workshops throughout the day. There will also be a zine-making table, a used book sale, and a variety of LGBTQ vendors on hand. 10 a.m.-7 p.m.

2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105.

For more info, visit www.thedccenter.org/outwrite.

Weekly Events DC AQUATICS CLUB holds a

practice session at Montgomery College Aquatics Club. 8:3010 a.m. 7600 Takoma Ave., Takoma, Md. For more information, visit www.swimdcac.org.

DC FRONT RUNNERS running/ walking/social club welcomes runners of all ability levels for exercise in a fun and supportive environment, with socializing afterwards. Route distance will be 3-6 miles. Walkers meet at 9:30 a.m. and runners at 10 a.m. at 23rd & P Streets NW. For more information, visit www. dcfrontrunners.org.

SUNDAY, August 4 OUTWRITE, the nonprofit festi-

val celebrating LGBTQ literature at the Reeves Center, holds its third day of events, with a focus on writing workshops. Free and open to the public. 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. 2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105. For more info, visit www. thedccenter.org/outwrite.

SATURDAY, August 3

Weekly Events

ADVENTURING outdoors group

LGBT-inclusive ALL SOULS

hikes 10 strenuous miles with 1200 feet of elevation gain to dramatic Humpback Rocks off the Blue Ridge Parkway, west of Charlottesville, Va. Bring plenty of beverages, lunch, bug spray, sunscreen, and about $20 for fees, plus money for dinner on the way back. Meet at 8:30 a.m. in the East Falls Church Metro Kiss & Ride lot to form carpools. Return after dark. For more information, contact Joe, 202-276-5521, or visit www. adventuring.org.

Join Bet Mishpachah, D.C.’s LGBTQ synagogue, for an informal PARSHA BRUNCH and discussion of this week’s Torah portion. Bagels will be served. 11 a.m.-2 p.m. The DC Center, 2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105. For more information, visit www.betmish.org.

OUTWRITE, the nonprofit fes-

MEMORIAL EPISCOPAL CHURCH celebrates Low Mass

at 8:30 a.m., High Mass at 11 a.m.

2300 Cathedral Ave. NW. 202232-4244, www.allsoulsdc.org.

DC AQUATICS CLUB holds

a practice session at Wilson Aquatic Center. 9:30-11 a.m.

4551 Fort Dr. NW. For more information, visit www.swimdcac.org.

DC FRONT RUNNERS run-

ning/walking/social club welcomes runners of all ability levels for exercise in a fun and supportive environment, with socializing afterwards. Route distances vary. For meeting places and more information, visit www.dcfrontrunners.org.

DIGNITYUSA offers Roman

Catholic Mass for the LGBT community. All welcome. Sign

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interpreted. 6 p.m. St. Margaret’s Church, 1820 Connecticut Ave. NW. For more information, visit www.dignitywashington.org.

FIRST CONGREGATIONAL UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST wel-

comes all to 10:30 a.m. service, 945 G St. NW. For more info, visit www. firstuccdc.org or call 202-628-4317.

HOPE UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST welcomes GLBT community for worship. 10:30 a.m., 6130 Old Telegraph Road, Alexandria.

Visit www.hopeucc.org.

Join LINCOLN

CONGREGATIONAL TEMPLE – UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST for

an inclusive, loving and progressive faith community every Sunday. 11 a.m. 1701 11th Street NW, near R in Shaw/Logan neighborhood. Visit www.lincolntemple.org.

METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY CHURCH OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA services at 11 a.m., led

by Rev. Emma Chattin. Children’s Sunday School, 11 a.m. 10383 Democracy Lane, Fairfax. For more info, call 703-691-0930 or visit www.mccnova.com.

NATIONAL CITY CHRISTIAN CHURCH, inclusive church with

GLBT fellowship, offers gospel worship, 8:30 a.m., and traditional worship, 11 a.m. 5 Thomas Circle NW. For more info, call 202-232-0323 or visit www.nationalcitycc.org.

ST. STEPHEN AND THE INCARNATION, an “interracial,

multi-ethnic Christian Community” offers services in English, 8 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., and in Spanish at 5:15 p.m. 1525 Newton St. NW. For more info, call 202-232-0900 or visit www.saintstephensdc.org.

UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH OF SILVER SPRING

invites LGBTQ families and individuals of all creeds and cultures to join the church. Services 9:15 and 11:15 a.m. 10309 New Hampshire Ave. For more info, visit www.uucss.org.

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AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

MONDAY, August 5 CENTER AGING, an LGBTQ

seniors group of The DC Center, will hold its MONTHLY ADVOCACY MEETING to gauge feedback on The Center’s programs and services for older adults, and see what other issues may need to be addressed. This meeting will be immediately after the Center’s regularly scheduled weekly Coffee Drop-In from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. (See weekly listings below.) 12:30-1:30 p.m. 2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105.

For more information, visit www. thedccenter.org.

The DC Center holds a monthly VOLUNTEER NIGHT for those interested in giving back to the local LGBTQ community. Activities include sorting through book donations, taking inventory, or assembling safe-sex packets. 6:30-8:30 p.m. 2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105.

For more information, visit www. thedccenter.org.

WEEKLY EVENTS DC AQUATICS CLUB holds a

practice session at Dunbar Aquatic Center. 7:30-9 p.m. 101 N St. NW. For more information, visit www. swimdcac.org.

DC’S DIFFERENT DRUMMERS

welcomes musicians of all abilities to join its Monday night rehearsals.

The group hosts marching/color guard, concert, and jazz ensembles, with performances year round.

Please contact Membership@ DCDD.org to inquire about joining one of the ensembles or visit www.

DCDD.org.

The DC Center hosts COFFEE

DROP-IN FOR THE SENIOR LGBT COMMUNITY. 10 a.m.-noon. 2000

14th St. NW. For more information, call 202-682-2245 or visit www. thedccenter.org.

US HELPING US hosts a black

gay men’s evening affinity group for GBT black men. Light refreshments provided. 7-9 p.m. 3636

Georgia Ave. NW. 202-446-1100.

Visit www.ushelpingus.org.

info, call Dick, 703-521-1999 or email liveandletliveoa@gmail.com.

WASHINGTON WETSKINS WATER POLO TEAM practices 7-9

STI TESTING at Whitman-Walker

p.m. Newcomers with at least basic swimming ability always welcome.

Takoma Aquatic Center, 300 Van Buren St. NW. For more information, contact Tom, 703-299-0504 or secretary@wetskins.org, or visit www.wetskins.org.

TUESDAY, August 6 Weekly Events DC FRONT RUNNERS running/

walking/social club welcomes runners of all ability levels for exercise in a fun and supportive environment, with socializing afterwards.

Route distances vary. For meeting places and more information, visit www.dcfrontrunners.org.

DC SCANDALS RUGBY holds prac-

tice. The team is always looking for new members. All welcome. 7-9 p.m.

Harry Thomas Recreation Center, 1743 Lincoln Rd. NE. For more information, visit www.scandalsrfc.org.

THE GAY MEN'S HEALTH COLLABORATIVE offers free

HIV testing and STI screening and treatment every Tuesday.

5-6:30 p.m. Rainbow Tuesday LGBT Clinic, Alexandria Health Department, 4480 King St. 703746-4986 or text 571-214-9617. www.inova.org/gmhc

HIV TESTING at Whitman-Walker

Health. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at 1525 14th St. NW, and 9 a.m-12:30 p.m. and 1:30-5 p.m. at the Max Robinson Center, 2301 MLK Jr. Ave. SE. For an appointment, call 202-745-7000 or visit www.whitman-walker.org.

OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS

holds an LGBT-focused meeting every Tuesday, 7 p.m. at St. George’s Episcopal Church, 915 Oakland Ave., Arlington, just steps from Virginia Square Metro. Handicapped accessible.

Newcomers welcome. For more

Health. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. at both 1525 14th St. NW and the Max Robinson Center, 2301 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave. SE. Testing is intended for those without symptoms. For an appointment call 202-745-7000 or visit www.whitman-walker.org.

US HELPING US hosts a support

group for black gay men 40 and older. 7-9 p.m., 3636 Georgia Ave. NW. Call 202-446-1100. www.ushelpingus.org.

Whitman-Walker Health holds its weekly GAY MEN’S HEALTH AND WELLNESS/STD CLINIC. Patients are seen on a walk-in basis. No-cost screening for HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. Hepatitis and herpes testing available for a fee.

Testing starts at 6 p.m, but should arrive early to ensure a spot. 1525 14th St. NW. For more information, visit www.whitman-walker.org.

WEDNESDAY, August 7 BOOKMEN DC, an informal men’s

gay-literature group, discusses William E. Jones’ True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell at the Cleveland Park Library. All are welcome. 7:30 p.m.

3310 Connecticut Ave. NW. Visit www.bookmendc.blogspot.com.

JOB CLUB, a weekly support

program for job entrants and seekers, holds a special MARRIOTT EMPLOYMENT JOB FAIR for the LGBTQ community. Learn about job openings, meet current employees, and get help with applications.

Computers will be available. 6-7:30 p.m. 2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105.

Please sign up beforehand at www. thedccenter.org/marriotjobs. For more information on Job Club, email centercareers@thedccenter. org or visit www.thedccenter.org/ careers. l

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

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A selection of writing from participants at this weekend’s annual OutWrite event, celebrating LGBTQ poetry and prose.

T

Illustrations by Scott G. Brooks

HERE ARE MANY ASPECTS OF THE ANNUAL OutWrite literary festival to enjoy, but arguably one of the best is also one of the most obvious: picking up new books from the myriad vendors whose tables populate the lobby of the Reeves Center.

“I like getting more titles for my to-be-read pile on the nightstand,” says David Ring, chair of the LGBTQ-focused annual event. “I always walk away with a lot of books, just being excited about new stories I’ve heard about.”

OutWrite — which takes over the Reeves Municipal Center on 14th Street NW this weekend — has a simple purpose says Ring: “To elevate and celebrate LGBTQ writers and writing.”

To achieve that, published LGBTQ writers are invited to perform readings of their own works, lead panel discussions on various literary topics, and teach writing workshops where aspiring authors can learn tricks of the trade. There are six workshops in total, all on Sunday, Aug. 4, including sessions on food and its role in world-building, the psychology of monsters in horror, and how to write about diverse bodies — both real and imagined.

On Saturday, there are 18 readings and nine panel discussions, with more than 100 authors reading their work and sharing their insights. The festival will also have a table with demonstrations on how to make ’zines, as well as a number of book vendors and a used book sale.

“Saturday, the main day of the festival, is a different experience than a bookstore,” says Ring. “I think it’s really about the mix of personalities. Our featured writers this year are Jericho Brown, who’s a poet being celebrated for emotional honesty [and] who has a lot of literary and mainstream appeal. We have 24

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

Kristen Arnett, who has a New York Times best-selling book that is just exploding off the charts with a wry, messy Florida humor.

Then we have the poet Wo Chan, who is also a drag performer and brings a really acute sense of gender and play and performance to their work.

“To give you an example, with Wo Chan, instead of doing a straight up reading, they’re doing an interview with a local poet, Regie Cabico, where both Wo and Regie will be reading poems.

But it’s while Wo does Regie's makeup up as a drag performer.”

The festival’s attendees appreciate the chance to talk shop and get personal and professional advice from published LGBTQ writers. “The feedback we receive usually talks about the value of sharing space with other writers who are also queer or LGBTQ, and what that means for the sort of conversations that they can have,” says Ring. “Conversations that wouldn’t be possible in a setting or an environment that didn’t already have a group of like-minded folks.”

To top it off, every OutWrite event, beginning with the kickoff party at Ten Tigers Parlour on Friday night, is free and open to the public.

“At the opening party on Friday, we have a couple of performances planned, but it's largely a place for people to socialize and connect,” says Ring. “We also held our first annual chatbook competition this year, and the winning chatbooks from that competition will be for sale beginning at the kickoff. We're excited to put those into people’s hands.”

On the pages that follow, you’ll find an assortment of writing by several of this year’s OutWrite participants. We hope it exhibits the broad array of literary styles that will be on hand at this

weekend’s event. So sit back, pour a nice cup of hot (or iced) tea, and enjoy a good LGBTQ read. —John Riley The OutWrite DC festival runs Saturday, Aug. 3 and Sunday, Aug. 4 at the Reeves Center, 2000 14th St. NW. The opening party is Friday, Aug. 2, at Ten Tigers Parlour, 3813 Georgia Ave. NW. For more information and a full schedule of readings, workshops and events, visit www.thedccenter.org/outwrite. Follow OutWrite on Twitter at @outwritedc.

Rivers, Lament An excerpt from Embarkations (or, Boating for Beginners), a novel-in-progress

By Marcos Martinez

I

F YOU FOLLOW THE POTOMAC UP TO WHERE IT feeds and is fed by the Chesapeake Bay, you might hear a tale of some wandering wailer, someone who’s lost a thing they held dear. Because every river has a soul. They say sometimes this soul gets split, gets fractured into rivulets, tributaries, seasonal runoff. Sometimes this soul gets flailed and flayed and floundered into lost streams. Sometimes it’s people that split a river’s soul, by naming and renaming, flinging words like spit to see what catches hard and mean and true. To see what sticks.

It unfurled as these tales often do: a flung stone of discovery skipping across the surface yet rippling and troubling the depths of home waters, causing waves and wakes of consequence.

Norah Bywater stood by the skiff on the shore and told her husband, Jonah Jr.: “I’ve done seen what you’re up to.”

The bay lulled unseasonably calm while Norah’s heart thundered as she recollected: A glint of sunlight flinted from Jonah Jr.’s gold wedding band onto a bright silver grappling hook hanging from a rafter in the shed. This glint drew Norah’s eyes down, down from wood beams to the thick solid stance of her husband next to his trawlmate, Wally. And it wasn’t even their proximity that troubled her. Weren’t even their stoic shoulders hunched towards one another like trestles waiting to meet but forever kept apart and at bay by beams and bridges and breaches.

No. What stuck in her craw — what kept Norah restless deep into dawn for nights on end — was the sight of her husband’s fingers woven into Wally’s, the need and hunger and ache of bodies wrestling and wrangling into one another that spelled itself out in their hands grappling and roping and braiding. Jonah and Wally. Knotting into one another. She could see whole bodies in the way the morning sunlight slicked and shimmered off the hair on their knuckles and wrists. Wally and Jonah. The way their stubble clashed and scraped as their cheeks and lips grazed each other.

Gold upon gold upon copper and bronze: Jonah’s tan and freckled fingers clashing against Wally’s darker sunbaked hand; Wally’s charcoal mustache stiffening and tangling into Jonah’s copper filament bristle. The sight of it all blinded Norah, unsteadied her, upended her. And in that moment — light glimmering from ring to wrists to hook — all those overnight fishing trips, campouts, and nights when Jonah would stagger in smelling a little like Jack Daniels, a little like himself, and a little like something muskier and heavier — not rank or sour as dredge, but guilty with silt — those nights coalesced into something stranger and more worrisome than any riversurge could be.

Norah’s waters became troubled, riotous.

Her waters crested, then stilled.

“I’ve seen it, and there’s no denying. Just you and him keep it away from me. Keep away from my son.” Because she had Artemio — Temo — to protect, to shield. And no trawlers, fishing folk, or crabbers would shift her boy the way these two pesky perch floundered and wiggled towards one another. No son of hers would be kin to all that fishy business. No son of hers. No heart of hers.

And if Jonah was silent before — quiet and steady as the flat grey calm of waters before a clap of thunder — then he grew more silent still. Said nothing: no complaint, no defense.

So Norah gathered herself in, forced herself to fall fallow, witnessed her own red riverbed blow dry and dusty and cracked.

Her husband could have his pleasure elsewhere, she figured. She didn’t need any touch of her own. But the years weighed and stretched and parched in around her. She hungered for a riverraised fish like a river hungers for its bed. Still nothing wended its way into her: no man, no joy, no life. She thought about taking her son out into the water, sinking it all, but only skimmed past the idea, knew she could never let go of her boy, her blood, her truth.

Temo grew from 7 to 13. The dry heave of sorrow eclipsed Norah as her barrenness settled in. She drew scorn, plain old scorn, into herself. Then she led Jonah out onto the water just once more.

“Once more,” she said. “Like you used to take me, before we had Temo.” Before she’d lost their second baby. Before Wally troubled their waters. Shortly after she’d found them out, barred Wally from her porch, Temo had asked her, “Why can’t I see Uncle Wally?”

“Because. You just can’t. Besides, he isn’t even your uncle.

Heck, his name’s not even Wally.” She’d muttered this last bit under her breath: Guadalupe, she’d thought, a woman’s name.

Figures. She still crunched the thought like gravel under tires, even now as she coaxed her husband toward the dock.

“To Keel Island, out on the bay,” she told Jonah. A glint of tenderness shimmered through her voice, a light brightness she’d denied him these past few years. “Just us, so I can remember.”

He acquiesced, not figuring the fierce angle of her heart — all sleek and sharp like a fish-gutting knife — not imagining the serrated anger she kept buried inside her. As their boat trolled along the bay, the motor thrusting up against water and wind, halfway to Keel, at the deepest part of that slip of the cove: “Look,” she said, “is that Temo? Skirting into the water?”

Jonah turned, glanced sidelong past Norah’s shoulder. She lifted a pinewood oar from the bowels of their tiny boat and swung the oar around, back onto his neck, the oar’s arm cracking against his spine while the long, wide curve of the blade struck her husband’s skull and stunned him dead even, sent him flailing overboard.

Jonah lurched up against the water, but the tiller swung rogue. The boat circled round and round. As he surfaced, his head smacked the motor. Another concussion. Round and round: from there all it took was a push and a shove and it was over. Jonah was over and churned.

As Norah motored back to shore, there stood Temo, lone and still as he watched his mother approach the barren dock alone.

Had she tied a chain to Jonah’s ankles, weighed him down into the murkiest depths of the Chesapeake Bay? She couldn’t remember. A boating accident, she told the authorities. Can’t understand what happened, she murmured. Of course, they AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

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figured, an accident. Couldn’t imagine this tiny woman bringing harm to her strapping husband. Couldn’t perceive that the strength of women sometimes wells up from something deeper than love or loyalty, something rottener and more ruinous than distrust, something as turbulent and villainous as vengeance.

But Temo knew. Or knew well enough. Knew that his Dad hadn’t simply abandoned him. Knew enough to tell Uncle Wally, “The water’s took him.”

And they say a man wailed that night, long and hard, bellowed over, into, and under the water. That he remembered how his cousin, Alma La Llorona, had wandered restless along rivers.

So Wally searched and skulked along the bay, followed its rivulets and streams and rivermouths in hopes of finding what he’d lost. He waved farewell to Temo, then went lunging south, following rivers and creeks, looking for Jonah Bywater Jr.’s bones, beckoning each waterway to ferry him home to his lost love.

No river ever answered.

So Guadalupe Calletano drove further south, even, back to his roots, back to El Río Bravo del Norte that delivered him. Because it was said his mother shuddered him with contractions, began birthing him on El Puente Nuevo, then crowned him in the river — and that in this delivery Esperanza Calletano had split her soul apart. In that lost midmost space between Mexico and Texas, Matamoros and Piedras Prietas, that no-man’s-land that marks the middle of the ever-shifting Rio Grande, one soul was drowned while another soul surfaced.

But who can ever mark a place in water?

They say he was a creature of two countries, citizen of none by birth, by birth merely the river’s son left floundering. And Wally (this child of water) later married and raised a family all his own.

But unto his death, my Uncle Caine Lance Calletano remembered hearing his grandfather some nights, weeping down by the river, wailing. Calling after his drowned lover Jonah: “Amor, amor! Perdido!”

Rivers, Lament was first published in Pilgrimage Journal, volume 42 issue 1, Colorado State University — Pueblo. For more information on Marcos L. Martinez, visit www.stillhousepress.org.

Deadeye: A Luce Hansen Thriller

By Meredith Doench

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HE SUN SANK LOW ON THE SOUTH CAROLINA horizon. I leaned back in my seat, let the paddle rest across my lap, and welcomed that familiar bump of Harper Bennett’s kayak against mine. The ocean resort directed us to a small inlet where the water shimmered with the evening calm and views of the sunset burned an array of oranges, yellows, and purples. Bennett and I had settled into a silence as the movement of the water gently rocked us. This, I thought, was the true measure of trust with another person — how long that comfortable silence could hold between the two of you.

“Sure beats the office, doesn’t it?” Bennett turned to me, the sunset reflected against the lenses of her sunglasses. She wore a full body suit because she couldn’t stand to be in water below 70 degrees, as if she might suddenly be submerged while kayaking.

A film of sweat lined her upper lip.

“Not to mention the unforgiving weather in Ohio this time of 26

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

year,” I added. “Let’s stay another week.”

Bennett laughed. “Amen to that.”

When the sun became only a burning orange sliver, Bennett interrupted our silence. "I've been meaning to check in with you. With us."

I held my breath. Despite the fact there was no indication that Bennett wanted to end our relationship, my mind always went there first — a negative thinking loop that rarely left my mind quiet.

"Are you happy, Hansen?"

If Bennett could have seen beneath my over-sized sunglasses, she would have noticed the furrow in my brow and the tension lines beginning to crease around my eyes. I tried not to let my paranoid thinking take over, still, my mind churned with questions. Had I done something wrong? Where was this coming from?

“I am happy, Bennett,” I said cautiously, “but the bigger question here might be, are you?”

Bennett nodded.

Along the shoreline, a seagull screamed and cawed for its mates. I tried to fill her silence: “Almost a year together, and we still call each other by our last names."

"We aren't exactly the conventional lesbian couple, are we?"

"If by conventional, you mean U-Haul trailers and monthlong camping trips filled with crowded pride festivals, then no.

But it's okay — we do our own thing."

Bennett groaned, and leaned back into her kayak. “Why not a camping trip now and then? Or a few Pride festivals?

Conventional or not, I want a relationship that’s stable. I need someone I can count on. I need to know that you are safe at work and will return home at the end of your day.” Her words came out in one long breath. “I want to grow old with you, Hansen.”

There it was — the huge boulder that wedged between us since we met. Bennett worried that my work as a serial killer profiler for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation would lead to my eventual demise. My work always had a way of digging its hooks into me, of gripping tight my mind, body, and soul in a way that made my breath quicker, my heart beat stronger.

Nothing, absolutely nothing else had ever made me feel more alive than the hunt for a killer and the need for justice.

“There is only one thing I am certain of.” Bennett’s hands fisted over the oar that rested across her kayak. “I will not be that woman who stands by her partner’s grave after she has been murdered by some senseless idiot while on the job. I will not be that sobbing widow who they hand the folded flag to, the one who nearly faints while the blank shots fire from the gun salute.”

“Ben, that’s not going to happen.” I reached across our kayaks for her hand.

“You cannot promise that.”

“I also can’t promise I won’t die of a heart attack, a car wreck, or cancer.” I squeezed her hand. “Love is a gamble, right?”

Bennett smiled as she squeezed back, winding her fingers through mine.

When the sun had completely dipped below the horizon, we slowly paddled towards shore. My air-raid siren ringtone screamed, the one I’d assigned to all work-related calls.

For a second, both of us froze. Then Bennett hollered, “You brought your cell phone on the water? What about our rule!”

I hated "the rule," and I regularly defied it. Floating time, according to Bennett, was unplugging time — no phones, no music, no texting or email checking. The world can wait, she always told me, at least until we come in from the water.

“It’s not a safe rule, Bennett,” I said, reaching for the phone.

“Something could happen.”

"You’re a Special Agent, and I'm a doctor. Who else could we possibly need in an emergency?"

The phone’s siren screamed again. I didn’t want the argument that had been

By Jose Gutierrez brewing between us to suddenly land, but this mattered.

EL SUSPIRO DEL ANGEL It mattered a lot because of Marci Tucker. I’d struggled Tal vez no me queda long and hard with the effects otra cosa que hacer of PTSD since I found my que encerrarme first love murdered. I’d only en mi cuarto missed her murder by minutes, her body still warm and servirme unos bludgeoned inside a cave tragos de licor, where we regularly met. It encender tu faro was the moment on which de recuerdos everything in my life hinged, the moment that defined me. navegar hacia I gestured to the trees tu puerto, and water surrounding us. besar tu fotografia "I know the terrible kind of en la soledad mayhem that can go down de mi mar in nature without access to phones. Death won’t wait for y fumar, fumar, fumar... a 911 call.”

RAICES DE AMOR Bennett looked away as the story of my past washed Mi pasado over us. We didn’t talk much no era mas about Marci, yet she was freque cuando quently around us, lingering bese tus like a ghost I couldn’t shake. labios de It had taken years for me to canela salvaje come to terms with the fact bajo la luna that the murder might not coqueta have happened if I had been de marzo on time to meet Marci, if I hadn’t have gotten caught in a y amanecimos traffic jam on the highway, if I cantando de amor had taken a different route to junto a los grillos entre el verde the caverns. alucinante de If, if, if. This tiny word una manana endlessly needled me, particEnamorada. ularly when it came to the death of Marci Tucker.

For more information I reached up, my fingertips on Jose Gutierrez, visit landing on the cool pendant of www.latinoglbthistory.org.

Marci’s Celtic cross that I still wore around my neck. It was one of the ways that she was always with me.

“Hansen here.”

“It’s Sanders."

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. Then, he added, "gobble, gobble.”

I laughed at Colby Sanders' sad attempt at a joke and suddenly missed him. My boss’s voice was one I never wanted to hear on vacation, but if I had to, at least he always made me smile.

“What’s up, Sanders?”

“I hope you're having a good Thanksgiving down there,” he started, "but we have a situation. A prison break at Hartford

Latinx LGBTQ Poetry

Correctional.”

My mind turned over everything I knew about the Ohio prison: high security, older prison, with some disturbing reports of officer violence on inmates. Then it hit me. “No, Sanders! Please tell me this has nothing to do with Deadeye.”

His silence on the other end of the line told me it did.

I looked over at Bennett who mouthed what.

“He’s a high risk inmate. How could this even happen?”

“A transport situation and a lot of help from the outside.”

I pressed the heel of one hand against my forehead, the place where a headache teased me. Holidays tended to be a time on prison campuses when officials let their guard down, when fewer eyes focused on the inmates. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who knew that secret. “How long has he been gone?”

“The last documented sighting was over four hours ago.

Search teams are out.” He flicked the wheel of his lighter, and I imagined him igniting the end of his cigarette.

As Sanders went on about the flight details out of Charleston, and I thought about Deadeye. The serial predator had been hunting humans long before I joined the BCI, and was finally apprehended in southeast Ohio after murdering at least six victims, hunter-style, in the rural hunting areas of Simmons County. Deadeye was better than a good shot — generally the victims were taken with a single bullet through the head. And he always removed and took with him the victim’s blood-stained shirt, his trophy of death. Deadeye loose and on the streets was more than dangerous — he was explosive.

“Hansen? You with me?”

“Yeah,” I blinked myself back to focus. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

I hung up and looked out over the glass-calm water. The evening breeze felt good against my face.

“Hansen? What’s going on?”

“Deadeye.”

Her eyes widened with his name. “What do you mean?”

“He’s on the lam.”

I handed Bennett my paddle and then rolled away from her, the weight of my body spinning the kayak upside down. Salty water enveloped me as I slipped out of the kayak underwater and let my body sink into the cool thick darkness.

Deadeye: A Luce Hansen Thriller, first published July 2019, is available from Politics and Prose and online. For more information on Meredith Doench, visit www.meredithdoench.com.

Queer True Crime in Postwar America An excerpt from Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall

By James Polchin

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HE AMBASSADOR HOTEL FACED SOUTH ALONG Franklin Square in Washington, D.C. Built in 1929 by the son of an Italian immigrant, the hotel had. a distinctive and starkly modern orange brick and white stone façade. Its architecture avoided the ornate Victorian opulence of many of the well established hotels in the nation’s capital, like the Hay-Adams or the Willard. Instead, the Ambassador appealed to modern, middle-class travelers. It offered free radio service in every guest room, and by the late 1940s boasted it was “comAUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

27

pletely air conditioned.” Guests enjoyed one of the first interior swimming pools in the city. Specially designed submerged lights illuminated the two-story art deco pool room in shimmering blue light. Guests also enjoyed the sleek cocktail lounge called the Hi-Hat Club, described in newspaper advertisements as “the most popular place in town.”

The hotel made front-page headlines in the fall of 1948 when Dorothy Kinsler, a hotel maid, entered room 604 and discovered the badly beaten body of Charles Hines. The forty-eight-year-old Hines was a house painter from Madison, Wisconsin. Days earlier, he was in North Carolina visiting his son, a marine stationed at Camp Lejeune. From there, according to his wife, Hines took the train to Washington to do some sightseeing. He checked into the hotel on a Monday afternoon, two days before he was found murdered.

Reports of the crime filled the front pages of the D.C. press for several days. In its extensive coverage, the Washington Post described how Hines was found dressed only in his underwear, “lying on his back on the bed. His head was covered with blood, which had dripped over the bed and onto the floor.” More details illustrated the complex torture that Hines endured: “A rolled-up sheet covered his mouth and was tied tightly around his neck.

His hands had been tied together with his own leather belt, which in turn was fastened by a hotel towel to the head of the wooden bed.... His feet were tied with a neck tie and then tied by a shirt to the foot of the bed.” Besides such graphic descriptions, readers also learned about witnesses who saw Hines in the hours before his murder. John Bradley, a waiter at the hotel, told police he brought beers to Hines’s room at four in the morning, where “perhaps two or three” men were with Hines. The police also interviewed neighboring guests, though “none of them had heard any sounds of struggle.”

The press offered readers clues from the room itself. In one corner a gray suit was “laid neatly on a chair” with “brown shoes placed beneath it.” There was a “half-pint bottle of Tuxedo whisky, about one third full” left on a table, and in the bathroom “four empty Schlitz beer bottles” along with a glass “which had contained whisky, another which had contained beer, and. a third which apparently had been used only for water.” While the room was in order and the furniture was not disturbed, police believed there was a fierce struggle, as “blood had splattered on the ceiling” and on the venetian window blinds, which were “about eight feet away from the bed.” One of the more revealing details concerned the ashtrays. “About a dozen cigarette butts were found in the room,” the article noted, adding, “none of them bore traces of lipstick, indicating Hines had had no women visitors.”

Two days after Hines’s body was found, police arrested Crispin Barrera Perez for the murder. News reports described Perez as “a twenty-nine-year old bartender” and “a swarthy and impassive student.” The Washington Evening Star, which often avoided local crime stories on its front pages, opting instead to focus on politics and foreign affairs, reported that police had “a signed confession from swarthy Crispin Barrera Perez,” and that he was “a well known figure in midtown bars.” A photograph of Perez in police custody showed him wearing a dark sweater and tie and light-colored pants. The Washington Post noted that Perez had a common-law wife, who told police that he was of “Spanish or Mexican descent” and came to Washington from Texas. She also stated that Perez was known to get “crazy drunk.”

In his own statement to the police, Perez detailed how he met Hines in front of Playland, an amusement hall on New York Avenue, before heading to a local tavern where the two met 28

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

“another man and two girls.” After they all had dinner, Hines and Perez went to the Ambassador Hotel. There the two got into a fight because Perez stopped drinking. “Hines became angry,” the newspaper reported, “and the fight began in which he struck Hines with a blackjack.” Perez confessed that “‘he couldn’t remember’ how many times he hit Hines.”

The story of Hines’s murder remained on the front page for a few weeks. When a grand jury indicted Perez for first-degree murder in January 1949, it determined the motive “was robbery of a $300 finger ring” that Hines wore. While the ring, described in earlier reports as worth $1,000, and Perez’s drunken state pointed to the motive for the crime, many readers would have wondered how Hines came to be so sadistically tied up, with a bedsheet stuffed down his throat, if the crime was a simple robbery.

In May 1949, after doctors at St. Elizabeths Hospital examined Perez and declared him sane for trial, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder. In these later reports, there was no mention of Perez’s common-law wife or the expensive ring. Instead, a different story emerged of the killer’s motivation, of what led him to his encounter with Hines. The Washington Post related that Perez was a hapless victim of a “promiscuous” girlfriend. As he went out “hunting for her in the taverns and dives,” he met Hines. These later reports said little about robbery as a motive, pointing instead to the mental state of Perez. The Green Bay Press-Gazette in Hines’ home state reported the judge accepted Perez’s plea of second-degree murder “because the prosecution admitted Perez’s mentality was perhaps too low to permit him to form a premeditation necessary for first degree murder.” Did Perez’s examination at St. Elizabeths, well-known at the time for its experiments and treatments of homosexuality, account for the shift in the press reports to the killer’s “low mentality,” often associated with sexual perversion in criminology at the time? The mysteries of the crime would linger even with this new interpretation of Perez.

Days later, the Washington Post reported, “[E]vidence that the murder was committed in the perpetration of a robbery was scant.” The judge, the article noted, “believed the Hines family might be subjected to some ‘embarrassment’ if the first-degree trial were held.” Such coded language hinted at the sexual nature of the encounter between Hines and Perez, even as it left uncertain Perez’s real motives in torturing and killing the older man. Instead of a trial, the judge accepted the plea deal and sentenced Perez to fifteen years to life. As had happened before in such crime stories, the family’s fear of public testimony would continue the mystery of what transpired in room 604 of the Ambassador Hotel, as well as the motives for such a brutal and deadly crime.

The same year Hines body was found in the Ambassador Hotel, the country had been embroiled in a discussion about the sex habits of men prompted by one disquieting book: Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Commonly known as the Kinsey Report, the study prompted a national conversation about male sexual practices unprecedented in American history.

While the study revealed widespread occurrence of homosexual practices across all segments of society upending older notions of homosexuals as a small minority of mentally ill individuals, it also fostered fears of the pervasive presence of queer people on the home front. Similar to Cold War fears about the Communist living next door, homosexuals were increasingly understood as a vast, undecipherable network of individuals who had insinuated themselves at all levels of society. The stories of Hines’ murder was just one of many mysterious crimes that simmered with

queer undertones in the post-war years, playing out the dire threats homosexuals posed and amplifying one of the most pressing fears of postwar America.

nice ones for their kindness, I loved the crazies for their stories, and sure, I hated the racist pieces of shit but if nothing else I got to feel like I had the pulse of this racist piece of shit

By Venus Thrash country. But a decade is an awfully Indecent Advances: A Hidden long time and whatever shine I’d History of True Crime and Prejudice You’re not surprised you died so inelegantly found on the shit that is hitchhiking in your own home your own bed faced down Before Stonewall, first published had long since faded. Still, it got me in June 2019, is available online at on bended knee as if in raptured prayer. where I wanted to go.

Politics and Prose and Amazon. For Your brown bottom jutted upwards slippery The town’s welcome sign had more information on James Polchin, from the night before. Your linen outdoor fresh been painted over. Don’t know what after drying on the line all afternoon under visit www.jamespolchin.com. it used to say, but now, in clean that legendary Jamaican sun. Its promise stenciled letters, it said, Freedom, of warmth unbowed. No other way to love Iowa. City Limits. Unincorporated. you insisted. No other way to hold and be held.

An entire town, abandoned by a dead To sip salty sweat from the lobe of his ear. economy and occupied by squatters To submit be breached broken succulent and activists and anarchists.It was as sugar cane snapped off at the root sweetness the last place Clay had lived, the last gnawed from the stalk leaving the chewed place he’d spent much time before pulp. No other way to fuck than to offer he’d found his way west and his hand as sacrifice your dusky body on this holy altar had shown his razor the way to his of cotton sheets the subtle scent of cedar trees throat. No warning signs, no cries and hibiscus growing in the yard. No other way for help. to soil and be soiled. Murder like making love I had a lot of questions. If there

By Margaret Killjoy is always messy. You dreamed this troubled were answers, I might find them in ending the moment you proclaimed I exist Freedom, Iowa.

OMETIMES YOU HAVE dazzling in cutoff tops and purple glitter painted I shouldered my pack and clipped to pull a knife. It’s NOT a nails. Still even stars that sparkle brightest fall. the waist belt shut. It had been Clay’s good thing. I don’t enjoy it.

What mad god formed you batty bwoy pack. I had his suicide note folded up But sometimes you just have to get then led you to your slaughter? in the smallest pocket. The road into a knife in your hands and make it town was two lanes that led away clear which way the stabby end is For more information on Venus Thrash, from the highway, paved with pale, pointing. visit www.venusthrash.wixsite.com/venusthrash. patched asphalt. The trees beside it “Let me out here,” I’d said, climbed toward the sky, and I walked before the knife got involved. It hadn’t been a question. Men always assume that declarative on the double yellow with something of a spring to my step.

After a hundred yards and a couple turns, when the trees statements like that are questions.

“This is a ghost town,” he said. I hadn’t caught his name. were getting thick enough to cast the whole of the road into He’d been nice enough to pick me up hitchhiking in the middle shadow, I saw a deer on the shoulder ahead, rooting at someof nowhere Iowa, but he wasn’t nice enough to let me out where thing on the pavement. The beast was crimson red. Bloodred. I didn’t know deer even came in that color.

I wanted.

I crossed to the far side of the street so I wouldn’t disturb it, “That’s alright,” I said. “Just let me out.”

“There’ll be someplace better. A Walmart or something. I’ll but I couldn’t help but stare. A rabbit was dead on the ground beneath it, its belly up, its rib cage splayed open. The deer looked let you out there.” up at me then, its red muzzle dripping red blood.

“Let me out here.”

On the right side of its head, it bore an antler. On the left side “I can’t just let you out in the middle of nowhere, not by yourself. It isn’t safe.” He said it without a trace of irony. He locked of its head, it bore two.

“Jesus,” I said. the doors.

I kept walking, because what else do you do? It watched me That’s when the knife got involved. I slid it out from my jeans pocket, clicked it open. Pulling a knife means going dou- until I was around the next bend, and I couldn’t help but feel ble-or-nothing. I was either going to get out of the situation, or its gaze on my back. The only sounds in the air were birds and the faint white noise of a nearby river, and wildflowers were in the situation was about to get a lot worse. bloom on the forest floor.

“Jesus,” he said. He pulled over.

Another quarter mile, and I stepped out of the woods and saw I unlocked my door, grabbed my pack, and hit the gravel the town on the far bank of a small, slow-moving river. Half a before he came to a complete stop. hundred houses were set into the hillside along a single winding “Fucking bitch.”

I flipped off his car as he drove away, but at least he was street. A few old cars were parked along the curb and in drivedriving away. The worst of it was, he probably thought he was ways, but I couldn’t get a gauge on whether or not they were in just taking care of me. That he was a nice guy. I hoped bad things use or abandoned. A two-lane bridge spanned the river. Clay had talked about the place like it was paradise. were going to happen to him, and soon.

I crossed over, pausing to look down over the guardrail at the Ten years of putting up with shit like that from drivers. It was getting old. Hell, at twenty-eight, I was getting old. Ten years ago water thirty feet below, as it tumbled and tore its way over river I’d talk to drivers about anything and love them for it. I loved the rock. Just at the other end of the bridge, a boarded-up gas sta-

Jamaican Gay Activist Found Slain

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion

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tion was covered in street art as good as any I’d seen in Oakland.

It was a quarter mile farther up the hill to the first houses, and most were overgrown, more than a few with caved-in roofs.

Others looked haphazardly maintained.

I walked into town, but I didn’t see any signs of life. No smoke or lights or motion. No one was out on the street or sitting on their porches. Maybe everyone had left when Clay had. Maybe the water was poisoned the same as it seemed to be in half of middle America, and seeing shit like that fucked-up mutated deer with three antlers made everyone realize it wasn’t safe to stick around.

The first five or six houses I passed were split levels, set into the hill. Welded-rebar statues populated one front lawn — a three-horned deer amongst other woodland and farmyard animals. Even the statue seemed to bore into me with its stare, and the damn thing didn’t even have eyes.

The next house, alone on its block, was an old colonial. It was handsome, its wood siding painted dark. Its circular attic window was an eye casting its longing gaze out over the river and Iowa. I walked up the cement steps to a large wooden patio on the side of the house and peered in through the sliding door, but it was darker inside than outside and I saw only my own straggly short hair reflected in a silhouette in the glass. I sat down on the porch chair and leaned back to ponder the empty town and my lack of luck.

I had no idea how to find what I wanted to find. I’d come here because I needed motion. Without motion, there was nothing.

Without motion, I was probably as dead as Clay.

I kicked back in the chair, put my feet up on the table, and looked out over the town. I’d make it my kingdom for the day, I decided, and hit the road again tomorrow. I had canned food enough to see me through at least three meals, and if I got desperate I had a jar of peanut butter somewhere in my bag that would keep me alive for days. I took out my phone and headphones, put on black metal, and dozed off. *** I like the tiny little dreams I get when I sleep in the afternoon. That day, I was a very young goblin, riding this brontosaurus-like thing, and I was in love with a human boy and I was afraid he’d find out I was a goblin.

When I’m awake I’m happy sometimes, but I don’t know that I’m ever as happy awake as I am when I’m dreaming. Awake, I’ve got all this nostalgia, this feeling that I’m separated from something I can smell but can’t touch. I get these sudden, unbearable realizations that I should have been more present during all those moments in my life, that I should have taken the time to be like, “Oh shit man, this is my life, and it’s fucking awesome sometimes.” Dreaming, I just swim in the joy and the intensity and the now-ness of life.

Late in the afternoon, I heard rustling and opened my eyes halfway. On the railing in front of me, a rabbit cleaned its paws.

I watched it, drowsy. It turned toward me, and its chest was a raw red wound, its rib cage and organs gone. It smelled like death and blood, and I don’t usually smell much in my dreams.

It hopped away, and I presumed it a nightmare and fell back asleep.

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion (Danielle Cain #1), first published in August 2017, is available online at Politics and Prose and Amazon. For more information on Margaret Killjoy, visit www. birdsbeforethestorm.net.

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I’m Unarmed An excerpt from Night Beast

By Ruth Joffre

W

E SETTLED INTO A RHYTHM. ANDIE HAD softball practice every other day, and we would meet out by the bleachers to head to the park. Our school team was the Lady Cougars. While they practiced, I sat in the grass near third base, catching foul balls with the glove Andie let me borrow. I have to say: they weren’t very good, the Lady Cougars. They could catch the ball, and they could throw, but Lord knows they couldn’t hit. Nearly every pitch wound up being a grounder, a pop. Once, Andie sliced the ball and smacked a girl on the thigh. Then, on an otherwise ordinary day, Andie cracked a clean, long drive across the ballpark, and I realized: she wanted me to join the team. Her coach even called the house to suggest it.

My uncle was home that day. He stood in the kitchen making a fresh pot of coffee, while my mother sat through a long lecture about the benefits of team sports: the character building, the exercise. When it was over, he leaned back against the counter and said, “That Silvan girl’s a bad influence.” There had been rumors about us. All of them circumstantial. When I said it was innocent — we were just friends — he shook his head. He said, “You can find better friends,” as if it were obvious. “This town is full of good, hardworking people and nice, God-fearing children who would help you if you let them. I don’t know why you’re afraid to talk to people.” He started bending over to wipe up a coffee spill and scowled horribly when my mother told him to give me a break.

"It isn’t easy going to a new school. She just needs some time to adjust.”

“She’s had time, and she’s wasted it. She can barely say hi to me.”

My mother threw up her hands. “It’s just a softball team. She doesn’t have to join.”

“Well.” He squeezed the sponge with an air of finality, taking the time to rinse it clean.

My mother told him she wouldn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do, but it didn’t matter. Their conversation was already over. He went down to Medford, and my mother put on her uniform, pulling her hair back in a ponytail as she told me she was going to deep clean the pizza ovens that day. “I’m so excited.”

When my mother was gone, I headed straight to Andie’s, where the daphne was in bloom and the bumblebees were humming. We spent the day at our spot: an old, abandoned shack with a rusted pickup in front, rotten boards inside, and what used to be a tire swing before the animals chewed through the rope. Some days, after a particularly hard practice, we’d sit with our backs to the door, chucking pebbles into the tire. She’d bring sandwiches, pilfered beer. It was nice. “My uncle doesn’t want me to see you anymore,” I said.

Andie paused, trying to be brave. “What did he say about me?”

I dug my face into her shirt, telling her they were fighting, my mother and him. There had been several fights — all of them secret and terse, conducted when they thought my back was turned, though I always heard. “I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

She stroked my hand hopefully. “What do you want?”

“I want my friend,” I cried, but even then I knew this wasn’t

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what Andie wanted to hear. When she handed me a beer, later, I saw the hurt in her face and the care she took in hiding it. “It just makes me so mad. It’s like he thinks he owns me.”

Her solution was to say the hell with him. “Here,” she said, standing up and offering me a hand. “I’m going to teach you how to shoot this gun.” Not the BB gun, but a real pistol — a hand-medown her uncle had given her when he saw how good her aim was getting. She lined up all the empty bottles she could find on the hood of the pickup, then settled in behind me, steering the gun into my hands. “Spread your legs, or the recoil will knock you back.” That made Andie taller than me, giving her space to bend her knees between my thighs. I could feel her legs under mine, feel her chin resting on my shoulder, her hands, the way they let go just as I was about to pull the trigger. I missed, but I did it on my own, shooting again and again until finally I hit one bottle.

I walked over to survey the damage. My misses had been wide misses, bullets ricocheting into the woods, but my hit had been solid, sure; the bullet broke the neck off the bottle, shattering it into long, jagged pieces I pinched between my fingers, wondering if they’d cut. Andie took the gun away, pleased with my performance, and lay back on the ground, sighing blissfully.

I saw no reason not to join her then. It was late afternoon, light pouring through the trees. My sweatshirt, a gift from Andie, glowed crimson in the sun, its letters spelling DePaul, where her mother went to college. Andie was rubbing a stone with her fingers — a flat, smooth stone like the kind she might skip. “I snuck down to the Peninsula last night,” she said.

I turned my head to the side, but she was staring at her hands, their slow, steady motion.

“I thought I might wake you,” she said, then pressed the stone to her lips and told me she ran into the Hayward boy. Just him.

None of his friends. “We kissed.” There was a quiet then, like she was trying to tell me something else. After a long moment, she turned on her side, her face thin and serious. “Have you ever kissed a boy?”

“Yes.” “What was it like?”

I couldn’t answer. I stared at the leaves falling around us.

At how their crinkled points got lost in the strands of her hair.

There was dirt on her cheek, a smear just below the bone, so I wiped it away with my thumb. This moved her, and she leaned in, fitting her lips to mine, asking nothing of me, except that I understand. I closed my eyes in order to ground myself, feeling a light blow through me, feeling blood rush to my wrist and to my ears, where Andie put her hands in my hair and stroked. I let her kiss me for a long time.

When she broke away, I said, “You’re a liar.”

I sat up, hissing at the pebble in my back, then kicked at a beetle moseying its way across a mossed-over tire. She didn’t restrain me. When I heard her breathing behind me, I stood.

I knew I wasn’t going back to my uncle’s — I knew that — but I kept walking in that direction, and when I came to the roots of a tree I didn’t know what to do, so I started to climb. Andie followed after a time, settling farther down on the opposite side.

She shut her eyes, leaning her head against the trunk. “Are you going to be mad at me forever?”

“I’m not mad,” I said, realizing for the first time that I never had been. “I just don’t know where to go from here.”

Night Beast, first published in May 2018, is available online at Politics and Prose and Amazon. For more information on Ruth Joffre, visit www.ruthjoffre.org.

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Disease

By Hans M. Hirschi

When journalist Hunter MacIntyre is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, he realizes that his life is about to change, not to mention that he’s been handed a certain death sentence. Alzheimer’s is a disease affecting the patient’s loved ones as much, if not more, than the patient themselves. In Hunter’s case, that’s his partner Ethan and their five-year-old daughter Amy. How will they react to, and deal with, Hunter’s changing behavior, his memory lapses, and the consequences for their everyday lives? Disease is a story of Alzheimer’s, seen through the eyes of one affected family.

September 28th Lost in Crowds

I

’M TIRED. WE WENT TO A RECITAL OF AMY’S TODAY, at her school, and it was hard. Hard to concentrate, hard to be in tune with Ethan... Yes, his name is Ethan, not Shane.

OMG, how embarrassing to confuse him with an old college fling.

How? Why? Anyway, I must not lose the thread. Amy is playing the piano; we pay for lessons, and they had a recital today. And I wanted to be there for her, I wanted to see her play, I really did.

Above all, I wanted to be there for my girl, my beautiful Amy. But it was hard, not only the music — listening to it makes me so tired — but all the people, talking, talking, talking. And I look at them and they are all strangers, I do not know these people. I always stick close to Ethan at such events, walking a step or two behind him, focusing, concentrating on his voice, so soothing, calming, listening to what he says, how he greets them by name. I can tell he’s protecting me, shielding me from embarrassment, but even Ethan can’t protect me from everyone. “Hunter, how good to see you. I haven’t seen you in town for a while. How have you been?” Suddenly, a stranger who seems to know me grabs me by the shoulder, I turn around, away from Ethan, who’s talking to someone else, and I face a face as blank as a virgin sheet of paper.

“Hi, uh, I, uh, I’m fine. Thank you. How are you?” Or something along those lines. I say very little to strangers these days. Don’t want to embarrass myself. Instinctively, my hand reaches back, finds Ethan, pulls at him, and I figure my yank must’ve been indicative of my emotional state, as I hear, “Excuse me for a moment,” behind me, and a strong arm finds its way around the small of my back. “Gerald! What a surprise to see you here.

Jerry was superb tonight. His grasp of the violin is amazing.

How old is he now? Hunter, you do remember Jerry from last year’s recital, the way he mastered the Allegro of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik? He’s quite the musical genius. What was it he played today? I recognized the score but can’t remember the name of it. I’m getting old, Gerald, you’ll have to forgive me.”

And just like that, my amazing husband has not only saved me but taken any and all focus away from me and turned it onto the man’s pride and joy: his musical prodigy of a son. I don’t remember what he answered. Beethoven? Shostakovich? Brahms? That was just one example I recall. It was frightening enough to have stuck with me. The rest of the evening is a blur — I have the worst headache and my shoulders are so incredibly tight from focusing and being stressed out. This is why I rarely go out these days. It’s just too frightening, too stressful. And the more I’m stressed, the more I forget. I just re-read the first two words at the beginning here, I’m tired. I am. Not just physically tired; this goes far beyond being in desperate need of a good night’s sleep, which I rarely have anymore. I have these weird dreams all

the time, and I have difficulties falling asleep.

Charles has prescribed some sleeping pills for me, and I’m allowed to take one, every night. I

By Rasha Abdulhadi think, at this stage, they figure since I’m dying anyway, why not make it easier on me? But I’m not entirely sure it would be healthy for sing to me now, sisters of my sittisomeone my age to be munching 365 sleepwomen i will never meet even in pictures or stories ing pills per year, year after year. If I wasn’t my aunts and girl-cousins who would teach me the dances before weddings demented already, I’d probably end up a basket case before long... Yeah, tired, tired of life, at the party of the brides, women dancing together, cheering on women, you know? I can’t write anymore, I mean, not the memory sweet and fresh like a date in the desert of my mind. in the sense of really good writing, capturing here i am parched. writing, witty writing, writing that brings home a refugee's talent is to make friends wherever she goes. dough, writing that pays bills. Nope. Just me, the couch, and Netflix, for all it’s worth. Yet a refugee's fate is to keep wandering always, always making new friends, at the same time, I do cherish seeing Amy on always finding herself in someone else's home. stage, hearing her play, seeing her perform. I do i apologize, i try to watch closely for the rules, look forward to Halloween, and Thanksgiving, Christmas. I have such fond memories of each house a new regime, each cohort of friends a new camp to survive.

Holidays past, why wouldn’t Holidays future be providing me with entertainment and love, An excerpt from Nabka Day Dance, first published in issue three of |tap| magatoo, even as fleeting as the moment I live in? I zine. For more information on Rasha Abdulhadi, visit www.splitthisrock.org. may not remember them, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t good moments. Amy keeps telling me how great Halloween was last year. I have no reason to doubt news clippings trumpeting Dalton’s success on courts, ski slopes, her. Melissa called about Christmas. They want to go to Florida and ice rinks. I greeted him with a hearty, “Good morning, sir!”

“Your tie,” he replied. this year and see Dad — wondered if we might tag along. I told I looked down. My polyester tie had slipped a half-inch from her to ask Ethan. I don’t care where I celebrate. I won’t remember, anyway. Am I wrapping up my life? Is that what I’m doing? my collar. I yanked it back up, so it choked my neck.

Between classes, I wandered the halls, getting lost while Am I done? Can I steer this? Can I turn off the lights myself?

Willingly? I’m not sure. Would I even want to? What I really looking for the Commons Room, The Quad, The Chapel, and want is to go back in time and get rid of the day I got sick. Erase the ominous-sounding Dixon House. When I sought out help, I it and all else would be fine. But I can’t. Those memories are all stammered like an idiot.

“Are you an exchange student?” one girl asked me. gone. Gone for good, and there is no way back. Only forward, At lunchtime, we filed into the Dining Hall, where all meals forward into the undiscovered country, Oblivion, my future. were eaten with a fork and knife, even burgers and tacos. Today Disease: When Life Takes an Unexpected Turn, first published in for lunch, we were served decidedly non-kosher cheeseburgers.

I’d never tasted a cheeseburger, but I’d always been curious October 2017, is available online at Politics and Prose and Amazon. about them. At first, I considered peeling the melted cheese off For more information on Hans M. Hirschi, visit www.hirschi.se. my meat. Finally, I just bit into it. It was delicious, the gooey cheese melting over the seared brown patty, and the juices running into the bun. I finished it in a minute.

Why would God make something so wonderful and forbid

By Aaron Hamburger us to eat it? *** The book’s protagonist is a Medieval historian named Ari Silverman. Nirvana Is Here begins in Ari’s present. An openly In art class, we could take off our jackets and cover our gay professor, he’s about to meet a high school classmate, Justin, shirts and ties with pale blue smocks. After outfitting myself in a whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. The prospect sets off bittersweet smock, I chose a piece of good paper and sat at one of the tables memories of the early 1990s, when a teenaged Ari — white, Jewish, to draw. Our teacher, Ms. Hunter, had brought in her old stereo suburban, and recovering from the attack — met Justin, a black to inspire us, and one of the boys put on an Ice-T tape. Another scholarship student from Detroit. This excerpt takes place after Ari boy said, “Hey, faggot, turn off that rap crap.” was assaulted by a classmate at a Jewish school. His parents have “Who you calling faggot, faggot?” transferred him to a private secular school and are also taking him “You, faggot.” to karate lessons so he’ll learn to defend himself. It begins on his I fixed my eyes on my drawing. My pen had torn a small hole first day at this new school. in the paper.

“Hey, hey, hey...” Ms. Hunter scooted over, stopped the steT WAS MY FIRST MORNING AT THE DALTON reo. “Watch the language, guys. And no more music for today.”

Preparatory School of Metropolitan Detroit.

“Aw, come on, please...” both boys begged, almost in chorus.

Outfitted in my own tight, new uniform, I entered the “Alright, but don’t let me catch you talking that way again.” front doors alone, my feet damp inside slippery dress shoes. No Ms. Hunter, the only female teacher in school who wore one returned my anxious smile. pants, gave little instruction beyond how to work the projector, Dean Demuth stood beside a glass trophy case filled with so we could trace images directly onto paper or canvas. “No one

Nakba Day Dance

Nirvana Is Here

I

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draws freehand anymore,” she said, winding her long hair into a bun that inevitably came loose. “You think Andy Warhol drew freehand?”

Despite Andy Warhol, I stuck to the old-fashioned way, drawing a multi-panel cartoon of Dean Demuth choking several students lining up for uniform check. “Cool beans,” said Ms. Hunter, peering over my shoulder.

Cool beans? I thought. Was that something people said?

“Your faces are good,” she added. “But the bodies are out of proportion. You might want to spend some time looking at yourself naked.” *** In French, Justin Jackson sat on the edge of my desk. “What’s your name?”

I’d had my eye on Justin for a while, though he hadn’t paid much attention my way. I overheard him laughing with his friends, “Everyone thinks I’m on scholarship for basketball.” In fact, he played tennis, and his scholarship was academic, not athletic. He’d won some kind of trophy in math. Socially, he wasn’t a jock or a nerd, but belonged to another, mysterious crowd of ironic, smirking kids whose circle I couldn’t place because it hadn’t existed at my old school.

“What kind of name’s Ari?” he asked. “Is it French? Is that why you’re so good at French?”

I loved speaking French. It made me feel more sophisticated, all-knowing, confident, and less Jewish. Also, in French class I didn’t have to invent interesting things to say to people. The dialogue was already printed for me to memorize.

“No, it’s Hebrew for lion,” I explained.

Justin stared at me. “Lion, huh? You seem more like a dove.

I’ll just call you Brain. Did you do that workbook assignment last night? Can I take a look?”

I took this as a command. “Okay.”

While copying my answers, Justin asked why I’d transferred to Dalton. I recited my standard excuse: My parents felt my old school didn’t offer enough “enrichment.”

“I love the suburbs. The land of enrichment.” He resumed copying my work in swift lacy writing, with the bored efficiency of a British lord signing a check. “Thanks, Brain,” Justin said in his slow, careful baritone, handing me back my workbook when he was done. He got up to sit with another black kid in the back of the room. “You’re cool.”

I was so startled to hear it that I almost dropped the workbook on the floor.

Was I really? Why did he think so? I wanted to know more. *** “Who died?”

Not understanding the question, I looked up blankly at Justin from my seat on the bench by the school entrance.

“Why do you look so down in the mouth?” he asked.

I said I was waiting for my mother to take me to karate, and then, maybe because I’d suppressed the thought for so long, I admitted, “I hate it.”

“Then don’t go.”

“But my mom is coming to take me.”

Justin winked. “Follow me,” he said.

Flattered by the invitation, I went with him to the art room, shut up for the evening. Justin calmly unlocked the door. How did he have the key? “Ms. Hunter likes football players. My buddy Marlin made us all copies.”

Inside, we sat with the lights out, swiveling on the metal 34

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stools and staring at the paint-speckled floor, like a Jackson Pollock painting. “Just hide out here until your karate class is over,” said Justin.

“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked, but I didn’t want him to go.

“It can wait.” He had a lean, hungry look that I liked. I felt uncomfortable on my hard stool, but I didn’t dare move, or do anything to disturb the moment.

“Want to listen to something?” He pulled a tape out of his briefcase. The tape was marked on the front: MIX. “This is Nirvana.”

The band’s name, Nirvana, made me think the music would be soothing, New Agey, like Enya. But the song began with a guitar snarl, followed by a fury of driving drumbeats and metal. I didn’t usually like loud metal music — it sounded too much like violence — but this song didn’t qualify exactly as heavy metal, with all the sounds fitting together in a pattern. It was more like separate noises, each with its own direction, like the paint splatters on the art room floor.

Just as I got used to it, the noisy part died down, and Kurt Cobain began to sing.

What first caught my attention was the ache in his voice. He’d mumble an unintelligible line or two, then fling out the next few words in a trembling, cracked yelp edged with a nervous resentment, drawing out words with a strange sarcasm. He held a sarcastic yowl for strained seconds that felt like ages, giving them an eerie emphasis. His voice sounded both tired and anxious, as if he’d been ignored all his life and was sick of it. Why would no one listen?

Justin drummed his silver pen against one of the tables to the beat. I wanted to tell him to stop so I could hear everything. I didn't want to miss a note.

When Justin shut off the tape, I was perched on the edge of my chair, my brain tingling. I’d never heard a pop song like this, complex like a work of art, with a deep emotional pull like a novel or a movie. By comparison, everything else on the radio sounded candy-coated and fake.

Justin was staring, waiting for me to speak. He must have felt as I did about the song, and I wanted desperately to say something meaningful, important.

“Uh, are they British?” I asked.

“No, they’re American. But not commercial.” He said the word “commercial” with a pained look.

All I could think of was, “Neat.”

“Neat?” he said.

My stomach sank. I’d messed this up. “Why? Was that wrong?”

“No. You never get anything wrong. You’re an intelligent young man.” He ejected the tape from the stereo.

“Wait,” I said. “What did I do?”

“That’s all I got. I didn’t bring any Julie Andrews for you,” he said, and left.

I sat alone and replayed the conversation. What else could I have said? Cool. Cool beans? No, just cool. Or I could have said nice, good, great — anything but neat.

Maybe I could run after him, or find him tomorrow and say I’d been taking some medication that had messed with my head.

“Neat,” I’d say. “Can you believe I said that?” And then we’d laugh together about it. Yes, that might work.

Nirvana Is Here, first published in May 2019, is available online at Politics and Prose and Amazon. For more information on Aaron Hamburger, visit www.aaronhamburger.com.

COURTESY OF JANUS FILMS

Movies

To Be Real

Relive the bravery, the bitchery, and the history as Paris Is Burning returns to the big screen. By André Hereford

P

ARIS IS BURNING CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT IT TO BE: COMEDY, tragedy, pageant, time capsule, or all of the above. Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary about the black and Latino queer underground ballroom scene of ’80s New York still fascinates as a revealing glimpse at a culture that would be irrevocably changed by this very film.

The queens featured in Paris Is Burning (HHHHH) bare their wounds and failures generously, offering much to learn from their lived experience outside the mainstream.

Some bask in the glow of their ballroom successes, imparting insight into the competitive world of gay houses that battle for trophies and status. And nearly everyone profiled — from ballroom legends Dorian Corey and Pepper LaBeija, to baby queen

Freddie Pendavis — takes their respective turns scattering gems of wisdom and wit throughout the film. So the vibrancy of this community is never in question, despite the intrusions of AIDS, crime, inequality, and homophobia.

The film, digitally remastered for its 30th Anniversary re-release, notes just such an intrusion in one opening shot of the digital news ticker high above Times Square. Across the ticker scrolls a report about a white supremacist church holding its national convention. To watch Paris Is Burning in 2019, is to observe wistfully how much hasn’t changed in the ensuing 30 years since the film was released, and to marvel at just what progress has been made.

The once-obscure lexicon of ballroom

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and drag lingo introduced in the movie has since become ubiquitous, and the cast’s multitude of quotable quips have entered queer canon. (“We’re not going to be shady, just fierce.”) But many of the film’s stars, including Corey and LaBeija, and house mothers Octavia Saint Laurent and Angie Xtravaganza, passed away before being able to fully witness the fruits of their influence on gay and pop culture, before RuPaul’s Drag Race and Pose and countless Housewives ensured that every passably hip grandma could speak the ballroom lingo of “reading” and “throwing shade.”

Many of the pier kids and pioneers onscreen never got to see the world after Paris and Madonna and Malcolm McLaren had brought voguing to the masses, and brought the masses out to vogue. They didn’t get to see the Berlin Wall come down, or the first black president, or marriage equality, or PrEP, or trans men and women elected to public office. They likely didn’t conceive that Livingston’s little 16-mm indie doc might inspire future generations to stomp a runway, or find the family that will love and accept them as much as a House of LaBeija or Duprée.

We can bet, however, that Dorian Corey must have anticipated that he’d be gone and buried before anyone discovered the mummified corpse — reportedly either an abusive lover or a burglar — he had hidden inside a garment bag in his closet.

Corey delivers some of the film’s best zingers and narration seated at his makeup table, with that dead body presumably nearby off-camera, waiting to be discovered after Corey’s death in 1993.

The post-mortem bombshell now adds a shiny layer of badass to Corey’s serene aura throughout the film.

Paris Is Burning preserves in cinematic amber a pre-’90s,

pre-Giuliani New York City that looks and feels more hard and hostile, and yet seems more innocent. There is innocence, and a frustrating naiveté, in the way Saint Laurent and ill-fated Venus Xtravaganza share their most cherished dreams of becoming rich and famous and perfectly contented, like the gorgeous supermodels they idolize. It takes courage to be so unguarded on-camera, in front of a crew of mostly strangers. Livingston and her fellow filmmakers shot footage over several years, and their commitment to conveying the truth of their subjects comes through in the cast’s comfort level.

The mutual determination on behalf of cast and crew to record this moment in history also comes through powerfully in the dancing and the movie’s amazing soundtrack of house and club classics, and in the camerawork and editing. Watch the moment that Pepper LaBeija, in closeup, preaches the benefits of found family and motherly love, as the camera shifts focus to one of her children in the background nodding along sincerely to LaBeija’s every word.

Paris Is Burning didn’t change everything, but it changed queer culture — and therefore, pop culture — almost instantly with the stories, characters, and language it portrayed. Although the movie invites a measure of pity for its subjects that they don’t seem to demand for themselves, it transmits an empathy for them, and for their aspirations of love and fortune, that defines optimism as a form of power. We can see that power of positive thinking won’t be surrendered lightly, in life or in death. As Corey sums up while seated at his vanity, “You’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name.” l

Paris Is Burning is rated R, and opens Friday, August 2 at Landmark’s E Street Cinemas.

Visit www.landmarktheatres.com/washington-d-c.

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AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

MEREDITH TRUAX

Music

Making Changes

Dropping the folk from folk-pop yields mixed results on the newest album from Of Monsters and Men. By Sean Maunier

A

RUNAWAY HIT SINGLE IS OFTEN A MIXED BLESSING, ESPECIALLY dangerous early in a band’s career. Trying to reproduce its success rarely pays off, but going too far in the other direction carries its own risks, not to mention the potential for alienating legions of overnight fans. Of Monsters and Men was always going to be haunted by the success of 2011’s “Little Talks” and its follow-up, “Mountain Sound.” After spending two albums turning out echoing, anthemic folk-adjacent stadium-fillers, they have opted to take their chances. Fever Dream (HHHHH) goes in a markedly different direction, trading acoustics for synths and intimacy for polish.

Of Monsters and Men has a distinct sound, thanks largely to lead vocals sup-

plied by Nanna Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson. These two are the band’s most recognizable asset and as a result are one of the few elements tying Fever Dream to their previous output. Although it would be impossible to mistake Fever Dream for the work of another band, it is clear from the first single that we are in for a very different album here. “Alligator” trades orchestral elements for buzzing electric guitars and thumping bass lines for a stadium audience to stomp along to.

The sound is definitely new, but it trades on the band’s strengths, retaining a soaring, belted-out chorus line and a triumphant, expansive quality.

Unfortunately, the energy and bombast

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of the opener is lost as subsequent tracks fail to live up to its promise. Fever Dream is heavy on synthy ballads like “Ahay” and “Róróró,” which bleed into each other and offer little to distinguish them from one another. There is some emotional punch on display, but on the slower ballads, it often feels forced, while in the would-be dance bangers such as “Wars,” it is buried behind too many flourishes. “Under a Dome” is dragged out almost from its very beginning to its long lead-out, eventually collapsing into synthy, auto-tuned entropy by the end of the track.

Some of the magic is recaptured later in the album as they recover some of their energy. “Vulture, Vulture” hearkens back somewhat to their earlier work, although it fails to match “Alligator” in intensity. Fever Dream does end on a surprisingly strong note with “Soothsayer,” a tense and intimate closing track that brings back the electric guitars to great effect and lends a solid bookend to an otherwise uneven album.

Unsurprisingly, the vocals are one of the great redeeming features of the album. Both Hilmarsdóttir and Þórhallsson deserve credit for exploring the full range of their impressive vocal registers, which have in the past remained within a well-defined comfort zone. Despite the somewhat muddled instrumentals, “Sleepwalker” is a haunting and affecting duet between the two vocalists that shows off their willingness to push their own boundaries. “Wild Roses” sees Hilmarsdóttir show off a vocal versatility that we have not heard before, starting in a near-whis-

per that underscores the vulnerability of the lyrics before building towards a bombastic conclusion.

While the more daring vocals are an undeniable strength of the album, they are often hard to notice, crowded out by excessive production and in a couple instances even inexplicably distorted with autotune that adds little to the track. There is plenty of energy and pathos on display, but these moments are too often walked back, or simply buried. The album’s major flaw is that having developed a new sound, Of Monsters and Men seem unsure exactly what to do with it. As a result, Fever Dream is more timid than it needed to be, or indeed than it seems to want to be.

For any band, veering away from a previously successful approach will always pose risks. For whatever reason, the transition from an acoustically driven folk approach to a synthesized pop sound is often particularly fraught, either soaring or flopping. Despite a handful of highlights, Fever Dream is laden with signs of growing pains, although Of Monsters and Men deserve credit for shaking off what had become a somewhat formulaic sound in favor of artistic growth. While their approach does not quite land this time, the album contains enough interesting moments to suggest that they have a strong foundation to build upon here. Their willingness to experiment is a promising sign, and if they continue to embrace it, their best work may be yet to come. l

Fever Dream can be purchased at www.Amazon.com and iTunes, and is available on most major streaming services.

Follow the band on Twitter at @monstersandmen.

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AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

NightLife Photography by Ward Morrison

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Scene

Otter Happy Hour at Trade - Friday, July 26 - Photography by Ward Morrison See and purchase more photos from this event at www.metroweekly.com/scene

DrinksDragDJsEtc...

Thursday, August 1 A LEAGUE OF HER OWN Open 5pm-2am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Live televised sports

of Bud Products all night • Sports Leagues Night NUMBER NINE Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 5-9pm • No Cover

GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4-9pm • Shirtless Thursday, 10-11pm • Men in Underwear Drink Free, 12-12:30am • DJs BacK2bACk

PITCHERS Open 5pm-2am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Foosball • Live televised sports • Full dining menu till 9pm • Special Late Night menu till 11pm • Thirst Trap Thursdays, hosted by Venus Valhalla, 11pm-12:30am • Featuring a Rotating Cast of Drag Performers • Dancing until 1:30am

NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR Beat the Clock Happy Hour — $2 (5-6pm), $3 (6-7pm), $4 (7-8pm) • $15 Buckets

SHAW’S TAVERN Happy Hour, 4-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail

FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • Karaoke, 9pm

Destinations A LEAGUE OF HER OWN 2317 18th St. NW 202-733-2568 www.facebook.com/alohodc

Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers • Half-Priced Bottles of Wine, 5pm-close TRADE Doors open 5pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL glass for the same price, 5-10pm • Beer and wine only $5 ZIEGFELD’S/SECRETS All male, nude dancers, 9pm-close • “New Meat” Open Dancers Audition • Music by DJ Don T. • Cover 21+

Friday, August 2 A LEAGUE OF HER OWN Open 5pm-3am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything

FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • Drag Show, featuring Sutton Lee Seymour, 8-11pm • Tickets: $8 standing room only, $10 reserved bar seat, $30 Table for 2, $60 Table for 4 • Tickets available via www.eventbrite. com • Karaoke after the show GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4-9pm • $3 Rail and Domestic • $5 Svedka, all flavors all night long • Davon Hamilton Events presents District First Friday: Independence Jock Party, 10pm-close • Featuring DJ Tryfe • Four Male Dancers • $10 Cover (includes clothes check) • $5 Margaritas and $8 Long Islands

FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR 555 23rd St. S. Arlington, Va. 703-685-0555 www.freddiesbeachbar.com

AVALON SATURDAYS Soundcheck 1420 K St. NW 202-789-5429 www.facebook.com/ AvalonSaturdaysDC 40

until 9pm • Video Games • Live televised sports

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

GREEN LANTERN 1335 Green Ct. NW 202-347-4533 www.greenlanterndc.com

NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR Open 3pm • Beat the Clock Happy Hour — $2 (5-6pm), $3 (6-7pm), $4 (7-8pm) • Buckets of Beer, $15 • Weekend Kickoff Dance Party, with Nellie’s DJs spinning bubbly pop music all night NUMBER NINE Open 5pm • Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 5-9pm • No Cover • Friday Night Piano with Chris, 7:30pm • Rotating DJs, 9:30pm PITCHERS Open 5pm-3am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Foosball • Live televised sports • Full dining menu till 9pm • Special Late Night menu till 2am

Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers • Special Friday Edition of Piano Bar/Karaoke, 9pm TRADE Doors open 5pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL glass for the same price, 5-10pm • Beer and wine only $5 • Otter Happy Hour with guest DJs, 5-11pm ZIEGFELD’S/SECRETS Men of Secrets, 9pm • Guest dancers • Rotating DJs • Kristina Kelly’s Diva Fev-ah Drag Show • Doors at 9pm, Shows at 11:45pm • Music by DJ Jeff Eletto • Cover 21+

SHAW’S TAVERN Happy Hour, 4-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail

NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR 900 U St. NW 202-332-6355 www.nelliessportsbar.com NUMBER NINE 1435 P St. NW 202-986-0999 www.numberninedc.com PITCHERS 2317 18th St. NW 202-733-2568 www.pitchersbardc.com

NIGHTLIFE HIGHLIGHTS Compiled by Doug Rule B OW IE V S QUEEN

This Sa t u r d a y , A u g . 3 , s t a r t i n g a t 9 p . m. , t h e B l a c k C a t o f f e r s a n o t h e r t hem ed d a n c e p a r t y w i t h i n h e r e n t a p p e a l t o L G B T Q p o p mu s i c f a n s w i t h a t r ibut e t o t h e mu s i c o f t w o l a t e , ’ 7 0 s - mi n t e d q u e e r i c o n s a n d p o p pr ov oc a t e u r s . O n t h e o n e h a n d , y o u ’ v e g o t t h e n o t o r i o u s g e n d e r - b e nd e r Da v id Bo w i e , w h o d u r i n g h i s p o p p e a k h a d r e f e r r e d t o h i ms e l f a s b i se xua l. O n t h e o t h e r , t h e n o t o r i o u s s a me - s e x - l o v i n g F r e d d i e Me r c u r y , f ro n t m a n of Qu e e n . I n b e t w e e n c o me s “ e r a r e l e v a n t h i t s ” a t a p a r t y p r e se n ted by t he L i g h t s & Mu s i c C o l l e c t i v e . B l a c k C a t i s a t 1 8 1 1 1 4 t h S t . N W. Tic k et s a r e $ 1 0 t o $ 1 5 . C a l l 2 0 2 - 6 6 7 - 4 4 9 0 o r v i s i t w w w . b l a c k c a t d c . c o m .

B OW IE B A LL: TH E LA B Y R INTH M A S QUER A D E

Saturday, August 3 A LEAGUE OF HER OWN Open 2pm-3am • Video Games • Live televised sports AVALON SATURDAYS LGBTQ Dance Party, featuring DJ Blacklow, 10pm-4am • $15 Cover, $20 Cover for VIP • Drink specials • Drag Show, 10:30-11:30pm, hosted by Ba’Naka and a rotating cast of drag queens • Open Bar on Tito’s and Jameson, 11pm-midnight FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Saturday Breakfast Buffet, 10am-3pm • $14.99 with one glass of champagne or coffee, soda or juice • Additional champagne $2 per glass • Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • Freddie’s Follies Drag Show, hosted by Miss

Destiny B. Childs, 8-10pm • Karaoke, 10pm-close GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4-9pm • $5 Bacardi, all flavors, all night long • REWIND: Request Line: An ‘80s and ‘90s Dance Party, 9pm-close • Featuring DJ Darryl Strickland • No Cover NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR Drag Brunch, hosted

by Chanel Devereaux, 10:30am-12:30pm and 1-3pm • Tickets on sale at nelliessportsbar.com • House Rail Drinks, Zing Zang Bloody Marys, Nellie Beer and Mimosas, $4, 11am-3am • Buckets of Beer, $15 • Guest DJs playing pop music all night

SHAW’S TAVERN 520 Florida Ave. NW 202-518-4092 www.shawstavern.com TRADE 1410 14th St. NW 202-986-1094 www.tradebardc.com ZIEGFELD’S/SECRETS 1824 Half St. SW 202-863-0670 www.ziegfelds.com

Spea k ing o f B o w i e , t h e C h i c a g o - b a s e d D J H e a v e n Ma l o n e s t a r t e d an a nnua l gl a m a n d d r a g d a n c e p a r t y o v e r a d e c a d e a g o t h a t g o t t o b e so popula r , e v e n t h e T h i n W h i t e D u k e g a v e i t a s h o u t o u t a c o u p l e o f y e ar s bef or e h e p a s s e d i n t o s t a r d u s t i n 2 0 1 6 . E a r l i e r t h i s y e a r , t h e B o w i e Ba ll in t h e W i n d y C i t y w a s f o l l o w e d b y t h e f i r s t - e v e r D . C . e d i t i o n o f t h e pa r t y t hr e e d a y s a f t e r w h a t w o u l d h a v e b e e n t h e g l a m r o c k l e g e n d ’s 72nd bir t h d a y . A me r e s e v e n mo n t h s l a t e r , U S t r e e t Mu s i c H a l l we lc om es ba c k Ma l o n e t o t r a d e o f f s p i n n i n g B o w i e s q u e mu s i c a l s e t s wi t h U Ha ll’ s o w n W i l l E a s t ma n , p l u s a l i v e B o w i e s q u e p e r f o r ma n c e f r o m Max Golds t ein o f Y o k o & T h e O h N o ’ s . T h e s e c o n d D . C . p a r t y , f o r t h o s e a g e d 21 a nd u p , i s f a s h i o n e d a s a ma s q u e r a d e p a r t y w i t h a L a b y r i n t h t h em e , r ef er r ing t o t h e 1 9 8 6 mu s i c a l f a n t a s y f i l m s t a r r i n g B o w i e a s t h e G o b l i n King a lon g s i d e J e n n i f e r C o n n e l l y a n d a b u n c h o f p u p p e t s f r o m Mu p pe t s c r ea t or an d f i l m d i r e c t o r J i m H e n s o n . W h e t h e r t h e y w e a r a t t i r e r e l at e d t o t ha t c u l t c l a s s i c o r n o t , f a n s a r e e n c o u r a g e d t o “ g l a m i t u p , d re ss lik e a da n d y , a n d . . . l o v e t h e a l i e n w i t h s o me g l i t t e r o n t o p , ” a n d t o e n t e r a c ont est f o r t h e b e s t B o w i e - i n s p i r e d o u t f i t — w i t h a s s i s t a n c e i n t h e c a us e c o mi n g f r o m a G l i t t e r a n d G l a m Ma k e u p B o o t h . F r i d a y , A u g . 9 , s t a r t ing at 9 p . m. U S t r e e t Mu s i c H a l l i s a t 1 1 1 5 A U S t . N W . T i c k e t s ar e $8 t o $10 . C a l l 2 0 2 - 5 8 8 - 1 8 8 0 o r v i s i t u s t r e e t mu s i c h a l l . c o m.

T H E W AS H INGTON S C A ND A LS : S EQUINS A ND S C R UM S 2 019

I ns pir ed b y s i mi l a r e f f o r t s f r o m o t h e r r u g b y t e a ms a r o u n d t h e c o u n t r y, t he W a s h i n g t o n S c a n d a l s R u g b y F o o t b a l l C l u b s t a r t e d a n a ma t e u r d r ag benef it t w o y e a r s a g o . Me mb e r s o f t h e g a y a n d i n c l u s i v e me n ’ s t e am don w igs , h e e l s , a n d c o s t u me s t o p e r f o r m a n d c o mp e t e f o r t h e t i t l e o f “Sc r um Q u e e n , ” w i t h t h e c o n t e s t a n t c o l l e c t i n g t h e mo s t t i p s a d v a n ci n g t o t he f in a l r o u n d a l o n g s i d e t w o j u d g e s ' p i c k . P e r a d v a n c e o n l i n e t i p pi n g , t he lea di n g t h r e e o u t o f t h i s y e a r ’ s n i n e c o n t e n d e r s a r e P h y l l i s H o l e , J enny Cr a i g s l i s t , a n d J o i R y d e r . Ma r g o R i t a S w i r l z, A r e o l a G r a n d e , an d la s t y ea r ’ s S c r u m Q u e e n Ms . C h a t t a h o o c h e e C o o c h e e w i l l c o - h o s t t h e t hir d a nn u a l f u n d r a i s e r , s e t f o r t h i s S a t u r d a y , A u g . 3 , s t a r t i n g a t 8 p.m ., a t Red B e a r B r e w i n g . P r o c e e d s g o t o w a r d t h e t e a m’ s t r a v e l e x p e nse s f or t he B i n g h a m C u p , a b i - a n n u a l g a y r u g b y c h a mp i o n s h i p t o u r n a me n t , t o be hel d i n O t t a w a i n 2 0 2 0 . R e d B e a r B r e w i n g i s a t 2 0 9 M S t . N E . Cal l 202- 849- 6 1 3 0 o r v i s i t w w w . s e q u i n s a n d s c r u ms . c o m.

L A D IE S TEA A T H A NK ’S D UPONT

This Sun d a y , A u g . 4 , u s h e r s i n a n o t h e r e d i t i o n i n t h e mo n t h l y s u mm e rt im e pa r t y f o r l e s b i a n s a n d a l l o t h e r s “ u n d e r t h e r a i n b o w ” a t t h e o r i g i n al Dupont lo c a t i o n o f t h e c h a i n o f r e s t a u r a n t s r u n b y J a mi e L e e d s . N e w f o r t he 14t h y e a r o f t h e 2 1 + e v e n t a r e p a r t n e r s h i p s w i t h l o c a l a n d n a t i o n al nonpr of it o r g a n i za t i o n s , w i t h t h e A u g u s t b e n e f i c i a r y t h e W a s h i n g t o n Ar ea W om e n ’ s F o u n d a t i o n , w h i c h w o r k s w i t h a n d f o r a r e a y o u n g w o me n a nd gir ls o f c o l o r . F r o m 3 t o 5 p . m. , L a d i e s T e a h a s t h e r u n o f t h e p l ace , w it h ex c l u s i v e d r i n k a n d f o o d s p e c i a l s a t t h e d o w n s t a i r s b a r , f i n e r li b a t ions in t h e u p s t a i r s s p a c e n o w k n o w n a s H a n k ’ s C o c k t a i l B a r , p l u s t h e v enue’ s g a r d e n p a t i o . H a n k ’ s O y s t e r B a r D u p o n t C i r c l e i s l o c a t e d a t 16 2 4 Q St . NW. C a l l 2 0 2 - 4 6 2 - 4 2 6 5 . V i s i t w w w w . h a n k s o y s t e r b a r . c o m. l AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

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NUMBER NINE Doors open 2pm • Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 2-9pm • $5 Absolut and $5 Bulleit Bourbon, 9pm-close • Time Machine and Power, featuring DJ Jack Rayburn, 9:30pm

TRADE Doors open 2pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL glass for the same price, 2-10pm • Beer and wine only $5

PITCHERS Open Noon-3am • Video Games • Foosball • Live televised sports • Full dining menu till 9pm • Special Late Night menu till 2am

ZIEGFELD’S/SECRETS Men of Secrets upstairs, 9pm-close • Guest dancers • Ladies of Illusion Drag Show with host Ella Fitzgerald in Ziegfeld’s • Doors open at 9pm, Show at 11:45pm • Music by DJs Keith Hoffman and Don T. • Cover 21+

SHAW’S TAVERN Brunch with $15 Bottomless Mimosas, 10am-3pm • Happy Hour, 5-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers

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Sunday, August 4 A LEAGUE OF HER OWN Open 2pm-12am • $4 Smirnoff and Domestic Cans • Video Games • Live televised sports FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Ella’s Sunday Drag Brunch, 10am-3pm • $24.99 with four glasses of champagne or mimosas, 1 Bloody Mary, or coffee, soda or juice • Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • Summer Social for a Good Cause/TJ Flavell’s Birthday, 4:30-6:30pm — In lieu of a card or gift, bring a nonperishable food item for the Arlington Food Assistance Center • Free Cake • Zodiac Monthly Drag Contest, hosted by Ophelia Bottoms, 8-10pm • Karaoke, 10pm-close

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4-9pm • Karaoke with Kevin downstairs, 9:30pm-close NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR Drag Brunch, hosted

by Chanel Devereaux, 10:30am-12:30pm and 1-3pm • Tickets on sale at nelliessportsbar.com • House Rail Drinks, Zing Zang Bloody Marys, Nellie Beer and Mimosas, $4, 11am-1am • Buckets of Beer, $15 • Guest DJs NUMBER NINE Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 2-9pm • $5 Absolut and $5 Bulleit Bourbon, 9pm-close • Multiple TVs showing movies, shows, sports • Expanded craft beer selection • Pop Goes the World with Wes Della Volla at 9:30pm • No Cover

PITCHERS Open Noon-2am • $4 Smirnoff, includes flavored, $4 Coors Light or $4 Miller Lites, 2-9pm • Video Games • Foosball • Live televised sports • Full dining menu till 9pm SHAW’S TAVERN Happy Hour, 5-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers • Dinner and Drag with Miss Kristina Kelly, 8pm • No Cover • For reservations, email shawsdinnerdragshow@gmail.com TRADE Doors open 2pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL glass for the same price, 2-10pm • Beer and wine only $5 • GLAM BOX: A

Monthly Dress-Up Dance Party, 10pm • Come in a look or find one from our house glam boxes • WalkOff Contest at 10:30pm • Music by Joann Fabrixx • Special guest hosts

Monday, August 5 FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • Singles Night • Half-Priced Pasta Dishes • Karaoke, 9pm GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4-9pm • $3 rail cocktails and domestic beers all night long • Singing with the Sisters: Open Mic Karaoke Night with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, 9:30pm-close

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NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR Beat the Clock Happy Hour — $2 (5-6pm), $3 (6-7pm), $4 (7-8pm) • Buckets of Beer, $15 • Half-Priced Burgers • Paint Nite, 7pm • PokerFace Poker, 8pm • Dart Boards • Ping Pong Madness, featuring 2 PingPong Tables NUMBER NINE Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 5-9pm • No Cover SHAW’S TAVERN Happy Hour, 5-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers • Shaw ’Nuff Trivia, with Jeremy, 7:30pm TRADE Doors open 5pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL

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glass for the same price, 5-10pm • Beer and wine only $5

Tuesday, August 6 A LEAGUE OF HER OWN Open 5pm-12am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Live televised sports FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • Taco Tuesday • Karaoke, 9pm GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4-9pm • $3 rail cocktails and domestic beers all night long NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR Beat the Clock Happy Hour — $2 (5-6pm), $3 (6-7pm), $4 (7-8pm) • Buckets of

Beer $15 • Drag Bingo with Sasha Adams and Brooklyn Heights, 7-9pm • Karaoke, 9pm-close NUMBER NINE Open at 5pm • Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 5-9pm • No Cover PITCHERS Open 5pm-12am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Foosball • Live televised sports • Full dining menu till 9pm • Special Late Night menu till 11pm SHAW’S TAVERN Happy Hour, 4-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers • Half-Priced Burgers and Pizzas, 5-10pm

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

TRADE Doors open 5pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL glass for the same price, 5-10pm • Beer and wine only $5

Wednesday, August 7 A LEAGUE OF HER OWN Open 5pm-12am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Live televised sports FREDDIE’S BEACH BAR Crazy Hour, 4-8pm • $6 Burgers • Beach Blanket Drag Bingo Night, hosted

by Ms. Regina Jozet Adams, 8pm • Bingo prizes • Karaoke, 10pm-1am

GREEN LANTERN Happy Hour, 4pm-9pm • Bear Yoga with Greg Leo, 6:30-7:30pm • $10 per class • $3 rail cocktails and domestic beers all night long NELLIE’S SPORTS BAR SmartAss Trivia Night, 8-10pm • Prizes include bar tabs and tickets to shows at the 9:30 Club • $15 Buckets of Beer for SmartAss Teams only • Absolutely Snatched Drag Show, hosted by Brooklyn Heights, 9pm • Tickets available at www.nelliessportsbar.com NUMBER NINE Happy Hour: 2 for 1 on any drink, 5-9pm • No Cover

PITCHERS Open 5pm-12am • Happy Hour: $2 off everything until 9pm • Video Games • Foosball • Live televised sports • Full dining menu till 9pm • Special Late Night menu till 11pm SHAW’S TAVERN Happy Hour, 4-7pm • $3 Miller Lite, $4 Blue Moon, $5 House Wines, $5 Rail Drinks • Half-Priced Pizzas and Select Appetizers • Piano Bar with Jill, 8pm TRADE Doors open 5pm • XL Happy Hour: Any drink normally served in a cocktail glass is served in an XL glass for the same price, 5-10pm • Beer and wine only $5 l

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LastWord.

People say the queerest things

“Rather than working with us to engage and serve LGBTI people year round, many have chosen to ‘rainbow wash’.”

— TRIS REID-SMITH AND SCOTT NUNN, founders of LGBTQ publication Gay Star News, announcing that the eight-year-old site will close immediately. Reid-Smith and Nunn said that their problem “has been entirely financial” and blamed brands for supporting the LGBTQ community in “a tokenistic way,” rather than year-round support. “[Companies] have turned their logo rainbow colored for Pride week or month and — at best — made a small donation to an LGBTI good cause,” they said.

“I think it’s just dangerous as a parent to make that determination. ” — MARIO LOPEZ, discussing parents who allow young children to choose their gender identity during an appearance on The Candace Owens Show. Owens called acknowledging gender identity in young children “one of the weirder trends,” and Lopez said allowing children to choose their identity, “[is] sort of alarming and my gosh I just think about the repercussions later on.”

“Gays are created due [to] the anal sex of a straight couple and only if the woman is into it. ” — THE MOST REVEREND METROPOLITAN NEOPHYTOS (MASOURAS) OF MORFOU OF THE CHURCH OF CYPRUS, arguing in a YouTube video — translated by LGBTQ Cypriot group Accept — that women who enjoy anal sex while pregnant give birth to gay children.

“If that happens, the feeling of pleasure the woman feels is transmitted to the unborn child,” he said.

“The way it’s affected my life has been only positive, it’s been so much better.”

— ANDY BRENNAN, Australian soccer player, speaking to The Daily Telegraph about the impact coming out as gay has had on him.

“The reaction has been amazing, I haven’t had one negative comment,” Brennan, who came out in May, said. “That was something I feared a lot with everyone I told, but everyone — team-mates, family, friends — has been amazing.”

“To the LGBTQ+ community, I want to say that I am sorry.”

—JOSHUA HARRIS, best-selling author of Christian relationship guides, in an Instagram post apologizing for his past anti-LGBTQ writings. “I regret standing against marriage equality, for not affirming you and your place in the church, and for any ways that my writing and speaking contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry,” Harris, who also said he has lost his Christian faith, said. “I hope you can forgive me.”

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AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

AUGUST 1, 2019 • METROWEEKLY.COM

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