UTAH PRIDE CENTER • LGBTQ+ VISITOR CENTER • DRAG HOUR BOMB THREAT
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Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 353 | November, 2023
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news The top national and world news since last issue you should know BY CRAIG OGAN
DADT discharges examined The U.S. Department of Defense took the 12th anniversary of the repeal of the Clinton era, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy to announce a review of the 35,000 service members dishonorably discharged under anti-homosexual policies. If no non-homo issues are involved, the “dishonorable discharge” will be changed to “honorable.” The status change will allow these veterans to access veteran services currently unavailable, such as health care and tuition assistance. There has been a process to remove the “dishonorable” tag, but less than 1,500 veterans have used it. A class action lawsuit was filed, claiming the process was cumbersome and difficult.
Waters’ star shines Legendary film director and gay and lesbian favorite, John Waters, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Waters said. “I’m so grateful that I have always had an audience, and I’m lucky that that audience lets me get away with the things I do, and that they have allowed me to do the things I do for so long.” The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures also opened an exhibit of his work, “The Pope of Trash,” to run through August 2024. Museum co-curators Jenny He and Dara Jaffe, called Waters, “A massive inspiration to other artists who rebelled against the mainstream.”
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Waters reveals the ins and outs of Divine The John Waters exhibit at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures includes many artifacts from his longtime friend Glenn Milstead. Known as “Divine,” Milstead appeared in Waters’ movies, “Roman Candles,” “Pink Flamingos,” “Polyester,“ and “Hairspray.” “Divine was such a good friend and partner. He was big and loud, and never afraid to take on these crazy storylines with me.” Waters notes that, “Divine was not trans or walked around in women’s clothes. In fact, he always wore high-priced men’s suits. He told me that he wanted to be a cross between Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla, and that pretty much described him.”
Don’t even whisper “gay” The Charlotte County Schools Superintendent ordered the removal of all books and material containing LGBTQ characters and themes from its Florida classrooms and campus libraries. The “super” claimed his order was to comply with the law critics have dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.” After a dust-up with the “Florida Freedom to Read Project,” a group opposing the law, the district allowed some exceptions for high school libraries. Books featuring LGBTQ characters can be had at the media center by grades 9–12. The books are prohibited from classroom instruction. Even with the climb-down, Charlotte CS policy remains one of the strictest enforcements among Florida’s 67 school districts.
Sen. Diane Feinstein, RIP If she did nothing else in her life, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, dead at age 90, has a big place in gay and lesbian history as a political ally and close friend of Harvey Milk. They both served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was Feinstein who found Milk’s body
and announced his death, as well as SF Mayor George Moscone’s, by an assassin in 1978. Her calm and compassionate presence on television and her leadership as SF mayor gave her a place in the hall of gay and lesbian heroes. Her tenure was marked by the beginning of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, which hit her city especially hard. In the mid-1980s, San Francisco spent more to combat HIV/AIDS than the federal government. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, where she advocated for gay and lesbian rights: opposing, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policies and the “Defense of Marriage Act.” She was a gradualist for marriage equality, but strongly opposed the anti-marriage equality California Proposition 8, and supported civil unions from the time of her election to Obergefell Ruling. She supported nondiscrimination legislation, strong hate crime legislation, and opposed bans on transgender persons serving in the military. She may have hung on a little longer than some would like, but she was worth it.
Feinstein replacement Laphonza Butler will be the first Black lesbian to serve in the U. S. Congress. California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed the current Maryland resident to replace deceased Senator Feinstein. Butler was a policy advisor to then-Senator, now Vice President, Kamala Harris. She was appointed president of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that is one of the largest donors to Democratic Party candidates. The pro-choice group’s mission is to support women candidates for elective office. She had served as the executive of the largest labor union in California, the SEIU. Butler can run for the office at the end of term. This disappointed U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, who was touted by many to fulfill Newsom’s promise to only consider a Black woman to succeed Feinstein.
Pronouns in school A survey of 20,000 adults living in the U.S. shows Americans do not believe teachers should use a student’s chosen name that aligns with their current gender identity without informing the student’s parents. In aggregate, 60% want parents in the loop. Adults aged 18 to 34 score 51 percent, 64 percent of adults aged 35 to 64 want parent involvement, and 60 percent of those aged 65 and above want parents to know.
HRC dinner features the president and his Dr. For the fourth time, the current U.S. president will be the keynote speaker at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual national dinner. His Dr.-wife and current first lady will also offer remarks. HRC lauded the president for supporting nondiscrimination, lifting the blanket ban on gay and bisexual men donating blood, and signing the Respect for Marriage Act. As vice-president he pushed the president he served at the time to support marriage equality before that president was ready to do so. “He (Joe) probably got out a little bit over his skis,” was that president’s admission that he supported marriage equality, just not yet. HRC will award television writer and producer Shonda Rhimes with the National Equality Award; actor, writer, and producer Lena Waithe will receive the Visibility Award; and actor Matt Bomer will receive the Impact Award. The four transgender young people who organized a Trans Youth Prom will receive special recognition as forces for transgender justice.
Philly journalist killed, person of interest sought Speculation on the murder of Josh Kruger, a writer for The Advocate and its sister publication, Plus who was killed in Philadelphia, ran from a hate crime to
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crime of passion to political hit. Philly Police identified a suspect in the killing who seems to have had a complex relationship with the gay journalist. The suspect’s family claims he met Kruger at a homeless youth service provider where Kruger worked. They suggest a drug and sex relationship between the two turned sour. Police initially said Kruger, “was just trying to help him (the suspect) get through life.” Police have since revealed there is evidence in Kruger’s home and on his phone they called, “disturbing.”
Conversion therapy You may have thought that conversion therapy is out of favor, but you would be wrong. A study of mental health care providers’ published articles, reports, and studies in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Colombia, South Korea, and the U.K., shows conversion therapy is still used among adults. The bad kind of conversion therapy designed to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity through “talk therapy,” not to be confused with gender-affirming care, which uses drugs, hormone therapies, and surgery to change a person’s sexual and/or gender identity in a good way, has been condemned by major medical and mental health groups. It also has been banned for minors by many governments in the United States and Europe. The study was published in the journal “PLOS One,” and says overall, 4 percent of gay and lesbian people were subjects of conversion therapy. Twelve percent of transgender people were subjected to the bad kind of conversion therapy. The median of 13 percent of gay, lesbian, and transgender patients in the U.S. reported having experienced the therapy. More males than females are subject to therapy, with young adults being the most prevalent subjects of therapy. Q
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Utah Pride Center releases response to the community, promises better. To reopen with limited hours Oct. 24 After QSaltLake Magazine publisher Michael Aaron’s news commentary on the Utah Pride Center‘s public relations failings through its recent staff dismissals and announcement of temporary closure, the organization responded with a statement on their social media:
In the last year, Utah Pride Center has been misaligned with our community-centric mission and lacking in focus and accountability. All of this led to inexcusable mismanagement of UPC’s programs — and this year’s Pride Festival not reflecting what our greater LGBTQIA+ community wanted or expected. These mistakes were unacceptable and unsustainable. However, we are committed to doing better. With organizational adjustments, layoffs and furloughs, upcoming leadership announcements, and a more focused board of directors, we promise significant change. Our new leadership pledges to be open, honest, and accountable to our community, stakeholders, and donors in ways that have been lacking for far too long. Specifically, we aim to put to rest rumors and speculation while charting a path to much more open, equitable, and effective programming that is affordable and inclusive. We pledge radical transparency in our financial matters, increased funding oversight, and to adhere to nonprofit best prac-
TH YEAR
tices, ethics, and accountability. In August, our Board of Directors dismissed the Co-CEO responsible for 2023 Pride. UPC relied on interim leadership while outside candidates were sought to lead and rebuild our work. In September, we paused programming while we continued to gather information and ideas from our community, staff, donors, and board. In late September, the newly reorganized board made the painful but necessary decision to significantly reduce staff. This decision was made after careful consideration, recognizing that like all organizations, including nonprofits, we cannot sustain a large staff without a clear strategic vision. We have also brought in a new, experienced nonprofit executive to work with a leaner and more agile team to get UPC back on track, with an official announcement coming soon. We plan to reopen in October for limited programming, with a new strategic plan and vision set to be unveiled in November. For now, we are committed to thoroughly and deliberately refocusing the Utah Pride Center, with a renewed focus on the promise that Utah Pride — the Parade and Festival — continues in 2024 and beyond. We are additionally committed to listening, rebuilding goodwill, and re-establishing programs that are responsive to the diversity of community needs. With humility, we ask for patience
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and understanding from our entire community as we work to refine and refocus our work. We eagerly anticipate engaging with the public, partner organizations, and the media to outline our path forward. We are committed to correcting past mistakes and delivering on our mission for everyone in our greater LGBTQIA+ community. Center leaders announced to program managers that the Center will open for limited hours starting October 24.
UPC IS RE-OPENING Oct. 24th! The Utah Pride Center is currently operating with an incredibly small team and incredibly limited resources. We are also deep in the strategic planning process and working tirelessly to find a solid path forward for the center and the people we serve. That being said, we also know how vital your programs are to the community. From HIV testing to Free Legal Advice to Health Insurance to Support Groups — you have played an important role in our mission to provide Utah’s LGBTQ+ community with space, resources, and community. Keeping those things in mind, we are planning to re-open for LIMITED hours beginning Tuesday, October 24th. We will be open 4pm-8pm Tuesday thru Thursday. We understand that some of your programs may have been happening on other days or at different times. But at least for the foreseeable future, this is what we have the capacity for. There are a few things we’d prefer to keep the same if possible: SLCo HIV Testing, 1st Wednesday of each month 4:30–6pm Rainbow Law, 2nd Wednesday of each month 6–7:30pm Gay Men’s Support Group, Tuesdays 6:30–8pm The Pastor is In... 1st and 3rd Tuesdays 6–8pm Pride Center leaders have promised a face-to-face interview with the publisher in early November to discuss their plans and introduced the new executive director. Q
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Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber unveils plans for LGBTQ+ visitors center in downtown SLC In a move aimed at boosting LGBTQ+ tourism revenue and showcasing the vibrant local queer and allied business scene, the Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce announced an ambitious project to establish an LGBTQ+ visitors center in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City. The anticipated launch is set for May 2026. Taking inspiration from the successful San Diego LGBTQ+ Visitors Center, the Salt Lake City Center will serve as a hub for visitors to connect with local businesses, discover exciting events, and access essential resources for LGBTQ+ individuals looking to relocate to Utah or start and expand their businesses in the state. The visitors center will also feature queer arts and historical exhibitions, host Chamber and SafeZone Utah events, and provide cost-effective retail space for local Utah artists and creators. With LGBTQ+ travel expenditures
accounting for a substantial seven to ten percent of the total U.S. tourism revenue, the Chamber is embarking on this venture to connect LGBTQ+ travelers with the rich tapestry of experiences that Utah and its communities have to offer, thus contributing to the strengthening of the local economy. Small business owner Ed Turner, the Chamber Board Secretary, who himself relocated to Utah in 2017, expressed his delight with the state’s livability and the vibrancy of the local queer community. “Utah’s LGBTQ+ community has played a major role in the economic growth and development of our state, with Salt Lake City consistently listed as having one of the largest queer communities in the US,” Turner said. “The Chamber celebrates the state’s major tourism draws, regardless of the season, and our local queer and allied business impact. The visitor center will only add to the uniqueness of Utah while
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supporting the state’s world-class visitor attractions and unique cultural history. The Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber wants everyone to visit the country’s best-kept secret.” Over the first half of 2024, Chamber leaders, in conjunction with a community-based advisory committee, will meticulously evaluate the feasibility of the project and finalize the timeline. Fundraising and planning activities will span through the end of 2025, with the ultimate goal of inaugurating the Visitors Center in May 2026. Those interested in learning more about the project or becoming part of the Chamber’s LGBTQ+ Tourism Committee are encouraged to reach out to Liz Pitts, president and CEO of the Chamber. The Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce, devoted to fostering enduring partnerships between key organizations and businesses, is committed to promoting growth and visibility for LGBTQ+ communities and their allies throughout Utah. Q For more information, visit: utahlgbtqchamber.org or connect with the Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at @utahlgbtqchamber.
Sing We a Merry Christmas for the 40th Time December 8th & 9th at 7:30pm December 10th at 4pm First Baptist Church, 777 S 1300 East
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Salt Lake bookstore closed, drag storytime canceled after bomb threat Police were called to the scene of an all-ages drag reading Sunday after a bomb threat was received. The King’s English Bookshop in the 15th and 15th neighborhood of Salt Lake City was scheduled to host Drag Queen Storytime with Tara Lipsyncki today at 11 a.m. At 10:23 a.m. Sunday, bookshop owners posted on their Facebook page that “Today’s Drag Queen Story time has been canceled due to a bomb threat.” At 10:50 a.m., Salt Lake City Police tweeted, “We are investigating a suspicious circumstance at The King’s English Bookstore. We have closed 1500 East from Emerson Ave. to Kensington St. as a K9 Unit from our Airport Division checks the area. Twenty minutes later, police gave an “all clear” after searching the interior and exterior of the building. Bookshop owners decided to close for the day in an abundance of safety. “For the safety of our booksellers and loyal readers, we have decided to close today,” a sign on the door read. “Thanks for the love, everyone; we’ll see you tomorrow. May be a good day to read a banned book,” the bookshop posted on Facebook. Organizer Tara Lipsyncki-Munro released a statement with the headline, “When will these threats stop? When will enough be enough?” Lipsynki called the bomb threat “an act of domestic terrorism.” “This is not the first threat of violence I have had the last nine months,” Lipsynki said. “With Proud Boys showing up at one of my events in January, to push back and threats from events in Vernal and St. George, and now this. I have been the target of a lot of hate. But I will make one thing very clear; | inherited my late mother’s fighting spirit, stubbornness, and tenacity, and I will not back down from cowardly bullies.” “In the face of hate and threats, you have two options — to fight back or to back down. I Will always fight and stand my ground when I am able to do so. The community needs events like story time to provide a safe space and visibility
for anyone, especially youth, who feels marginalized and unseen. It has been my mission to provide those space spaces, and it will continue to be my mission to provide those space spaces,” Lipsynki said. “I will not back down; I will not succumb to these threats,” Lipsynki continued. “And I will not stop fighting for a society where we are truly safe.” “I cannot say this strongly enough, EVERYONE belongs in Salt Lake City,” tweeted Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall. “The actions today to cause fear at @KingsEnglish around a drag story time event are not welcome here. We’re looking forward to working with King’s English so this event can happen at a future date for all those who wanted to be there today.” Salt Lake City Councilman Dan Dugan, who represents the area The Kings English is in, said he is saddened by the bomb threat. “It’s disheartening that our community and our city have been threatened by such hateful actions, and as leaders — government leaders and business leaders — we all need to take a strong stance against this hatred of others,” Dugan said. “We should have open hearts and open minds to multiple perspectives and beliefs and not be ruled by hate and narrow-mindedness. So my heart goes out to the King’s English staff and ownership and the local community for having to deal with this threat to their freedoms.” Rep. Jennifer Plumb happened on the scene. “Stopped by The King’s English to grab a birthday read for Margo and Me today…have been going there since I was a kid walking from my elementary
school. They were closed. …they were shut down by a threat of violence over a story hour,” Plumb tweeted. “Can we please talk about actual threats?!” Utah Democrats Communications Director Ben Anderson tweeted, “I want to be as clear as possible here: these kinds of threats are a direct result of the hateful and extreme rhetoric coming from Republicans in Utah and across the country. Fear-mongering for political gain has real-world consequences.” Salt Lake City Councilman Alexander Puy tweeted, “Today, (& not the 1st) a bomb threat was falsely called on the @
KingsEnglish at the same time Drag Story Time was about to start. Don’t terrorize us, hurt the livelihood of a local store, and draw police resources. If you try to scare us, we will shine even brighter.” The event has happened on the last Sunday of each month since June, which organizers say “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” Depending on the actual threat made, “Making a false alarm” can be a 2nd-degree felony, with a potential 15 years and a fine of up to $10,000, or down to a class-b misdemeanor, with up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Q
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YO U R LO CAL G AY B O R H O O D R E A LT O R D ED ICATED TO EM POWERING THE LGBTQ+ COM M U NIT Y ON THEIR PATH TOWARDS HOM EOWNERSHIP.
Gay, disabled Westminster alum to speak on redefining possible
Internationally known Westminster University alum Spencer West returns to his alma mater for an inspiring and thought-provoking conversation. After losing both legs due to a genetic disease, West tackled challenge after challenge, learning to navigate a world set against those with disabilities. West is a global keynote speaker, disabled gay content creator, and activist. His work has reached millions of people through his Tiktok account and countless media appearances. West will speak on Wednesday, October 25, at the annual Bastian Foundation Diversity Lecture, hosted by the Office of Diversity, Equity and inclusion. “I am so excited to visit Westminster University and see all the changes to the campus and spend time with faculty, staff, and students,” said West. “Not only did Westminster provide invaluable knowledge for my education, but more importantly, I learned so much about myself, who I was, and who I wanted to become.” West has more than 4 million TikTok followers and is known for summiting Mount Kilimanjaro on his hands and wheelchair. He has opened for Demi Lovato on a world tour, starred in the documentary “Redefine Possible: The Story of Spencer West,” and
authored the best-selling book “Standing Tall: My Journey.” As a Westminster student from 1999 to 2003, Spencer studied communication and theater, gaining a passion for performing on stage. “Westminster helped build a foundation of knowledge that I could take and make my own out in the world. Getting my Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication, along with time spent in the theater department, came in handy for what would become my life’s work as a motivational speaker, content creator, and actor,” said West. West has headlined corporate conferences, addressed university/college students, educators, members of non-profits/associations, and mesmerized audiences in 20,000-seat stadiums. His words and life have encouraged millions to stand up, face challenges, and embrace change, while instilling hope and empowering leaders to motivate others to create positive change. West’s speech is titled, “Redefine Possible: Lessons for Tackling Mountains in the Personal and Professional World.”
EVENT DETAILS Date: Wednesday, October 25 Time: 6–7:30 p.m. Keynote; Place: Westminster University, Dolores Doré Eccles Health Wellness and Athletics Center Behnken Field House Q
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Seniors Out and Proud expands to Southern Utah
In the heart of Southern Utah, a new chapter of Seniors Out and Proud, or SOAP, has emerged, offering a ray of hope to LGBTQ seniors seeking to combat isolation and find a supportive community. This dedicated group, led by executive director Deb Hall, recognizes the unique challenges faced by older LGBTQ individuals and strives to provide them with the companionship and care they deserve. Hall, a passionate advocate for seniors, brings a wealth of experience to the table. Her journey in senior care has taken her through various roles, from her involvement with the Alzheimer’s Association to serving on boards for seniors, such as the Utah Commission on Aging Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias Coordinating Council, and the Utah Department of Aging and Adult Services. Hall’s expertise extends to hospice care, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living, and memory care neighborhoods. Her initial involvement with the national organization SAGE, which catered to gay and lesbian elders, inspired her to create Seniors Loud and Proud when SAGE disbanded its local chapters. The mission of the group is clear: to reduce social isolation and loneliness, and improve the overall health and well-being of LGBTQ older adults, empowering them to lead fulfilling lives in their communities. Historical discrimination, the inability to form public partnerships, and the necessity of concealing their true selves for much of their lives have left many LGBTQ seniors grappling with profound loneliness. Hall emphasizes that this social isolation not only affects their emotional well-being but also increases the risk of cognitive decline and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ seniors. The
unique challenges faced by this generation are further compounded by the fact that the Baby Boomer generation is the only one predominantly aging alone. SOAP has a holistic approach to aging, guided by five pillars: Cherish the Journey Encourage the Body Inspire the Mind Nurture the Spirit Empower the Future These pillars represent a commitment to embracing aging fully, promoting physical health, stimulating mental faculties, nurturing spiritual well-being, and empowering seniors to plan for their futures. Staying active is a key component of this holistic approach. The organization offers a variety of activities, from kayaking and E-bike rides to walking groups and movie outings. Exercise, healthy diets, and social interaction are essential for reducing the risk of cognitive decline and ensuring seniors lead vibrant lives. Recognizing that spirituality takes various forms, Seniors Out and Proud
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encourages members to explore their own spiritual journeys. This can include attending church services if desired but also venturing into the tranquility of nature. The group sends out newsletters that may list local church services but emphasize the therapeutic benefits of connecting with nature. In addition to addressing social and physical needs, Seniors Out and Proud aims to provide guidance to LGBTQ seniors navigating the complex process of moving into assisted living. Hall has developed cultural competency training to educate healthcare professionals on working with LGBTQ seniors. Many LGBTQ seniors may fear returning to the closet when entering assisted living facilities due to past trauma, such as family rejection, conversion therapy, or discrimination in their careers and military service. Seniors Out and Proud seeks to ensure that these individuals are supported and respected as they age. Seniors Out and Proud has chapters in St. George, Ogden, and Salt Lake City, offering a lifeline of support and a vibrant community for LGBTQ seniors across Utah. For more information, you can visit their website at seniorsoutandproudutah. org or follow them on Facebook at fb.me/SOAPUtah, as they continue to make a positive impact in the lives of LGBTQ seniors, celebrating the journey of aging with dignity and pride. Q
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Johnny Hebda, Utah’s first Mr. Gay America contestant, lands in top ten BY BLAIR HOWELL
Utah was represented at the widely respected national Mr. Gay America pageant — the first time in its 40 years. The organizers of the event, the country’s oldest gay male entertainment competition, indicated they could not recall a previous entrant from the Beehive State. And it was a very admirable representation. Utahn Johnny Hebda qualified to advance at the very competitive California regional pageant, one of many nationwide with hundreds of competitors. At the Las Vegas national event on Oct. 4–5, he was recognized in the top ten within 19 vying for the national crown. The achievement is even more notable, considering it was his first pageant. Nearly all of Hebda’s competitors had the experience of being judged at several pageants, with many winning similar titles in the process. “Making top 10 in nationals on my first try for Mr. Gay America and first at the first night’s Red Carpet Fashion division is something I can be proud of,” he said. “I have a lot to learn still, but it has been a growing experience. My performing abilities, my confidence, my stage presence, my personal branding and fashion, my ability to communicate, interview, think on my feet, and creativity have all improved. “I will be back with more knowledge, better prepared, and ready to move those scores up when I return to compete in 2024.” His category-winning red-carpet suit was designed by Sebastian Cruz Couture with a nod to “The Great
Gatsby” era in royal blue colors to invoke authority, trust and confidence. For the talent portion, Hebda sang portions of five Elvis hits with trans dancer Mia Beverly Hillz and drag dancer Hoe Shi Minh, in glittery period-suggested costumes, and Hebda in detailed Elvis outfits. The message the trio conveyed was protecting trans rights in the current divisive political climate. The final song in the medley was “If I Can Dream,” adapting lyrics from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. When Colonel Tom Parker heard the demo of the protest song, he said, “This ain’t Elvis’ kind of song,” and there were other naysayers. Famous lines are “If I can dream of a better land / Where all my brothers walk hand in hand / Tell me why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true?” To perform this song, Hebda was outfitted in a custom design of Elvis’ iconic white jumpsuit, but with large rhinestones in the colors of the trans flag and “Trans Lives Matter” emblazoned on the back of the cape in large pink and blue letters. “Elvis was frequently targeted by politicians for his threat to racial integration,” Hebda explained. “I feel politicians and conservatives are unfairly using the trans community as a target as well right now to raise fears and rally their base.” Kevin Carlson, the first runner-up in Las Vegas, said, “the exceptionally diverse group of contestants made the event a complete joy. There was no shade, no shenanigans, no cutthroat behavior; only a complete
bond over spirit and helpfulness.” It required several months of rehearsals — with a large cash investment — and coaching sessions in several categories for Hebda to be competition-ready. “It has been an absolutely incredible experience being mentored by Salt Lake showgirl Gia Bianca Stephens,” he said. Gia previously competed at Mr. Gay America’s sister competition, Miss Gay America, and has been crowned Miss Fire Island, Miss Gay New York America, and Utah’s Miss Great Beehive State. “She has been an amazing coach and mentor, helping me navigate this journey for the very first time,” he added. She is a true inspiration and a captivating beacon, not only for me but for countless other leaders within the LGBTQ+ community in Salt Lake City.” Gia responded: “Johnny, making the top ten at your first national pageant is a major accomplishment.” Additional talents assisting him in his quest were choreographer Julie Rasmussen Nygard, music director Anne Puzey, costume designer M’Lady Wood, and hair and makeup designer Kate Loveland, he said. In total, Hebda drafted a team of 15 to help him prepare. Hebda is no stranger to the Salt Lake City queer community. Along with raising funds for the state’s gay non-profit groups, he initiated the popular Skyfall Circuit Nights and Loud & Queer nights, presenting Todrick Hall and Thelma Houston. He was the founding artistic director of Utah Repertory Theater Company, which boldly produced several infrequently staged gay-themed shows such as “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Angels in America,” “Afterglow,” “Bare: A Pop Opera,” and “Straight.” Five Husbands Vodka sponsored Hebda Q.
14 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | NEWS
Qsaltlake.com |
St George candidate signs defaced over drag shows A citywide vandalism spree in St. George, Utah, is under investigation as investigators aim to identify the culprits responsible for damaging and altering campaign signs belonging to incumbent City Council member Dannielle Larkin. The series of incidents, which targeted Larkin’s campaign materials, occurred at various locations throughout the city. St. George police are now reviewing surveillance footage from nearby businesses to gather information on the vandals. According to St. George police officer Tiffany Mitchell, ten of Larkin’s campaign signs were defaced, with smaller signs affixed to the larger placards accusing the incumbent of supporting ‘all-ages’ drag shows in public spaces. Post-It notes saying Larkin supports all-ages drag shows were also affixed to over 100 cars in a parking lot. Larkin, who received the most votes in the September 5 primary and is seeking re-election for a second term,
expressed her bewilderment regarding the vandalism of her campaign materials and the dissemination of false information. She highlighted the inaccuracy and offensiveness of the accusations. “They are basically saying that because I support the LGBTQ community, I support drag shows being held in front of children in our parks,” Larkin told The Salt Lake Tribune. “The reality is [elected officials] in St. George have never voted on whether or not to allow drag shows in our parks. We don’t choose the content of events that can be in our parks, but we do vote on whether or not to apply our city codes [governing events] evenly.” The issue of drag shows in city spaces has been a contentious topic in southern Utah over the past year and a half. In October 2022, city manager Adam Lenhard was dismissed for refusing to cancel the HBO “We’re Here” drag show at a municipal park, which resulted in a confidential $625,000 settlement to
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avoid a wrongful termination suit. The latest chapter in the ongoing cultural debate occurred when the city council upheld the denial of Southern Utah Drag Stars’ application to hold a drag show at a municipal park. This decision was based on an advertising restriction that bans applicants from promoting special events until receiving final approval and a permit from the city. Larkin opposed this move, believing it was discriminatory. Larking believes the vandalism is an extension of the ongoing controversies surrounding cultural issues in the city. St. George Planning Commissioner Steve Kemp, who is also running for a seat on the City Council, agrees, describing the campaign as “uglier” than previous ones due to the “level of dysfunction” within the council. St. George Mayor Michele Randall, meanwhile, condemned the vandalism and dissemination of false information on her Facebook page, stating, “These kinds of campaign tactics don’t belong in our community. We are better than this.” Officer Tiffany Mitchell pointed out that removing, altering, defacing, or vandalizing campaign signs is a class B misdemeanor. The investigation into the vandalism is ongoing as the city seeks to bring the culprits to justice. Q
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NEWS | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | 15
Reach out to a friend about their mental health. Find more ways to help at SeizeTheAwkward.org
16 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | VIEWS
views
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 353 | November, 2023
quotes ““Lauren Boebert is a disgrace to this country! Forget the politics. She’s in a t*tty dress. She’s with some dude. Looks like she’s obviously vaping, but also looks like she might be grabbing his penis. She is a disgrace!” —Howard Stern
“We hold Congresswoman Boebert to a far lower standard than every other elected Republican and Democrat in Colorado. Otherwise we would be here near nightly chronicling the cruel, false, and bigoted things that Boebert says for attention and fundraising.” — Kyle Clark, 9News Denver
“I figure if I take up vaping and grabbing the hog during a live musical, they’ll make me a folk hero.” — Sen. John Fetterman.
“When Elon forces us to all register and pay I’m outta here faster than Lauren Boebert’s latest boyfriend.” — Liam Nissan
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Qsaltlake.com
creep of the month
Rep. Scott Allen BY D’ANNE WITKOWSKI
I am gutted
by the fighting between Israelis and Palestinians right now. I’m no foreign policy expert, but I do know that nothing good can come from one group of people not seeing another group of people as human. Needless to say, the routine dehumanizing of transgender people by right-wing extremists in the United States is alarming. Attacking this tiny minority of already marginalized people has become a major priority for the Republican Party, even while the party seems to be falling apart. The party can’t keep a Speaker of the House on the job, but Republicans across the country seem to have all the time in the world to make life harder for trans people. In Wisconsin, Republicans are laser-focused on anti-trans legislation. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, has promised to veto all anti-trans bills. According to The Advocate, Evers wrote on social media, “My message to LGBTQ folks — especially our trans kids — is this: you are welcome, you are wanted, and you belong here. And I’ll veto any bill that makes Wisconsin a less welcoming, less inclusive, and less safe place for you to be who you are.” Evers made this comment “while legislators were hearing testimony on anti-trans bills — one to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth and two that would bar trans girls from competing in girls’ school sports,” The Advocate reports. Rep. Scott Allen is a co-sponsor of the bill to ban trans-affirming care for young people. “To any transgender individual who may be listening today,” Allen said at a hearing on the bill, according to the Wisconsin Examiner, “I want to say you matter, and you contribute to the state of Wisconsin.” Oh, hell no. He’s giving some real “love the sinner, hate the sin” energy, and I am not here for it. You absolutely do not get to co-sponsor an
anti-trans bill and tell the people you’re hurting that you care about them. Allen then went on to describe the type of care that he’s trying to ban as “experiments,” even though gender-affirming care is far from experimental. He said he wanted young people to “consider the long-term consequences of gender transition and make an appropriate choice for them when they become a legal adult.” Tell me you know nothing about gender-affirming care works without telling me you know nothing about how gender-affirming care works. Actually, he did tell us. He made it very clear. It’s wild that the people who are pushing these kinds of bills through legislatures nationwide seem to think that kids decide to be transgender on a whim. “It’s not like it’s something where kids just one day decide that they’re trans and the next day they suddenly have surgery,” Stephanie Budge, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the UW-Madison, told the Wisconsin Examiner. “That’s not how it works. There’s a big process that happens for youth and how they discuss their identity and the kind of work that they do with their therapy team, their pediatricians or endocrinologists. There are a lot of people who are involved in this process, and it’s not easy or quick decision-making.” But wait, I thought kids became transgender because their woke schools had the graphic novel Gender Queer in their libraries, and their woke teachers told them how cool and awesome being transgender is? But this “professor of
counseling psychology” is trying to tell us that it’s more complicated than this? How could that possibly be? I’ll take my medical advice from a random state rep in Wisconsin, thank you very much. Obviously, I’m kidding. A favored argument against gender-affirming care is that people grow
up to regret it. But such regret is rare, Budge tells the Examiner, calling the difference for clients who have access to care “night and day.” “I’ve seen people go from me, like feeling like this person probably will not live for another six months, to having that person become completely joyful and be able to be themselves, to actually be a kid and to be a person,” Budge said. Gender-affirming care saves lives. Republicans want you to think that doctors are slicing and dicing kids’ private parts, but that is not the case. What is the case is that trans kids deserve to “be a kid and to be a person.” Dedicating yourself and your power as an elected lawmaker to deny them of such a thing is sick. Q D’Anne Witkowski is a writer living with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBTQ+ politics for nearly two decades. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.
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positive thoughts
Sharing a life, a diagnosis, and a future BY POZ STAFF
Writer
and long-term HIV survivor Mark S. King has never shied away from sharing his opinion. His thoughtful essays about surviving with the virus — and living life fully in the here and now — are emotional, funny, challenging and always bracingly honest. Many of those essays, written over the course of four decades, have been collected in his new book, “My Fabulous Disease: Chronicles of a Gay Survivor.” They have been culled from King’s GLAAD Award-winning blog, My Fabulous Disease, as well as from his newspaper columns and magazine pieces, including work published in POZ. The book also includes a couple of fictional essays. “My Fabulous Disease” depicts people
There was a time when we knew all the intensive care nurses by name, when a phone call late at night always meant someone had died. And just who, exactly, was anyone’s guess living with HIV as much more than their diagnosis. In his essays, King muses on everything from his survival during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles to his present-day life as a married man living in the Atlanta suburbs. In between, he reflects on lust and love, drug addiction and recovery, loneliness and community, and more. In the book’s foreword, Olympic gold medalist Greg Louganis writes that King “presents people living with HIV as the multi-dimensional people we are, who fall in love, crack jokes, have sexual misadventures, and are funny and thoughtful — and sometimes not so thoughtful. Because, after all, we are human.” Following are some excerpts: On surviving AIDS in the 1980s, from ‘Once, When We Were Heroes’ “There was a time when we knew
all the intensive care nurses by name, when a phone call late at night always meant someone had died. And just who, exactly, was anyone’s guess.” On recreational sex in general, from ‘My Gonorrhea Nostalgia’ “During my early years of recreational sex in the busy gay mecca of West Hollywood, I caught The Clap so many times I called it The Applause.” On a one-night stand with Rock Hudson, from ‘Revisiting My Sad and Trivial Night With Rock Hudson’ “Magazines and television news stories were talking to me specifically,” he writes. “‘ROCK HUDSON HAS AIDS,’ the headlines screamed, ‘AND MARK KING WILL DIE AS WELL.’” On stigma and ignorance, from ‘Will HIV Ever Be Safe Enough for You?’ “The greater threat, folks, isn’t positive guys who think they are undetectable but are not. It’s men who think they are HIV negative and are not. But we’d rather stay focused on the positive person being at fault because, well, people with HIV lie a lot. We miss doses constantly because we have a death wish or we’re too busy finding our next victim….” “If you still have the arrogance to believe that you could win the HIV Powerball Lottery and be the one person who gets infected in ways that science has disproven, you’re perfectly entitled to that point of view.” “Here are some helpful suggestions, however. Carefully step away from the computer and don’t touch the cords because 50 people die of product-related electrocutions each year. Walk slowly to your bedroom, being mindful of debris in your path because slip-and-falls kill 55 people every single day. Now slip into your bed of willful ignorance and try to make yourself comfortable.” On shopping with Larry Kramer, from the fictional ‘Shopping at the Mall with Larry Kramer’ “It was hard enough getting him to the mall at all. I had arrived at
his place just in time to break up an altercation between Larry and the mother of a Girl Scout from whom he had ordered 80 boxes of Thin Mints, which were presently scattered across his front porch and had suffered the wrath of Larry’s ACT UP boots.” “Larry had no intention of paying for the cookies, as it turned out. He was ferociously screaming that his non-payment was to help bankrupt the corporate pimps EXPLOITING THAT LITTLE GIRL! Both the mother and the girl in question had taken refuge in their car, the girl crying hys-terically about not wanting to be exploited, while I managed to hold Larry back from beating their Honda with a lawn sprinkler until they made their eventual escape.” On seeking community at the expense of maintaining ties to his biological family, from ‘Did I Abandon Family for Gay Community?’ “Maybe I kept a distance, geographically and otherwise, out of some deep shame, as if it would simply be better for all concerned if I stayed away. Or perhaps it was pre-emptive. I’ll leave be-fore you tell me to leave. Through the years I collected a patchwork of close friends, and I even adopted gay catch phrases like ‘we chose our own families’ because maybe it’s true. And then again, maybe I was comforting myself with substitutes.” “When I tested positive in the 1980s,
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the stretches between visits home grew even longer. I couldn’t bear the thought of household dilemmas — Would they watch which drinking glass I used? Should I hold the baby? — so I decided to sit out those years by visiting less, even if it meant the chance of dying 1,000 miles from my nearest relative.” On hitting rock-bottom, from ‘The Terrifying Crystal Meth Story I Have Never Told’ “He is sitting across from me. Seconds earlier, we had both injected ourselves with meth.... But even in my delirium, I have the feeling that something is off. I am blinking through watery eyes and have begun to focus on him. He is staring at me, his gaze fixed with an intense and com-pletely unexpected contempt.” “And there is a gun in his hand. A gun a gun a gun a gun.” “‘You’re not who you say you are,’ he says, softly and suspiciously. He trembles from the impact of the meth. I have no response. I don’t know what he is capable of, or if the gun is loaded, if he will pull the trigger, if this is a sadistic sex game. I met the man maybe an hour ago. I wonder if you can die of fright.” On his relationship with his now husband, Michael, from “The Odds of Love” “You would think that after many years writing about living joyfully with HIV that my own happiness would be a given. That’s hardly been the case. After several false starts and some com-plete misfires—primarily due to my own deficiencies — I had stopped believing I’d ever get the whole relationship thing right. What are the odds of getting another chance, after so many wast-ed ones?” “‘I am not a very good boyfriend,’ I told Michael early on. ‘I’ve either been terribly immature or in active drug addiction. I’ve never been faithful, or even very thoughtful.’” “‘That doesn’t mean you can’t be,’ he replied, as if it were the simplest response in the world, as if none of my past faults had any bearing in the here and now. Suddenly it clicked, a switch in my head I had been grappling with my whole adult life, and Michael’s statement made perfect sense.” Q This column is a project of TheBody, Plus, Positively Aware, POZ, Q Syndicate, and QSaltLake Magazine.
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who’s your daddy
Double the dads, double the fun BY CHRISTOPHER KATIS
If television
and movies are to be believed, dads are basically taller, hairier friends of their kids. It would seem that fathers are just big goofballs out for some laughs. The message is clear: dads are more fun than moms. In a crazy case of art imitating life, these portrayals are seemingly accurate. A study cited in Today’s Parent indicates that there are a several variables that cause this phenomenon. First are lingering gender norms. Moms still do most of the heaving lifting when it comes to raising kids – including the discipling – which means they have less time for silliness and fun. Another factor is how society views what makes a “good” mom versus what makes a “good” dad. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any research examining whether doubling the dads in a family doubles the fun. But if our household is any indication, the answer to that hypothesis is a resounding YES! One afternoon while I was at the office, Kelly spent his day making a ramp for our then three-year-old son to launch his little bike off of. Then there was the time the boys came home from school to discover a large bowl filled with water-gorged balloons and a note telling them I was hiding somewhere in the backyard – and armed. Their shrieks of laughter when I jumped out from behind a bush, nailing them both squarely in the chest, was well worth getting drenched when they ganged up on me. I think this type of silliness and fun
flows into other activities, like Halloween. Look, I’m the first to admit I was a weird kid – especially around Halloween. I couldn’t care less about the candy. As a matter of fact, if my older siblings (or my mom) didn’t get into it, I’d have leftovers well into February. No, for me it was all about how clever my costume was. Candy was the price strangers paid for the privilege of gazing upon my creativity. And if I do say so myself, when we put in some effort, Kelly and I can still wow on Halloween – once we were the talk of a party dressed as Mormon missionaries! So naturally, when the boys came along, their two dads went into overdrive. For his first Halloween, we decked a two-year-old Gus in the white tux he’d worn after his baptism, accented with a bedazzled cape courtesy of his Tante Sabine. As one dad held his hand, the other held the toddler sized toy grand piano. Gus would ring the bell and say, “Trick treat, I Liberace.” Between the guffaws, whoever answered the door tossed extra candy into the bag. That was it for us getting to choose
costumes. By the next year, Gus wanted to mimic the scary costumes his buddies wore. And when Niko came along, he wore something similar to what his big brother had chosen. We had lost creative control. At least for them. We still enjoyed free will to select our own costumes if we wanted…any costume. Meaning one year, the grim reaper and a ninja were escorted door to door by Dr. Seuss’s Thing 1 and Thing 2! Look, gay dads don’t have a monopoly on making childhood memorable. Nor do I believe that gender norms and society’s expectations are the sole reasons fathers get to be the “fun” parents. I think that most guys are so overjoyed about being a dad that all that love bursts forth in the only way too many of men can show emotions – silliness, laughter, and fun. So, logically, when you double the dads, you double the fun. And when you double the fun, you double the love.
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DAMN THESE HEELS | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | 21
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22 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | TRANSGENDER AWARENESS
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BY DAVE MARTIN — LEVI’S FATHER.
Levi’ s death by suicide had many reasons — a major one was his terror over how society treated
transgender people. The recent actions of several states to ban transgender care for minors validates the fear he felt. Unless you have proximity, you have no understanding of how awful these bans are and how many precious lives will be lost. Kimi and I share Levi’s story, (he was too afraid to come out in his mortal life), in the hope that those without proximity to transgender people might gain understanding, and thus, compassion. Our call as humans is to learn to love better, not judge better. Here is Levi’s story as given in his eulogy:
I want to tell you a story.
‘Levi is our intersex, transgender, gay son who was assigned female at birth. While he was raised as a girl, we didn’t know that his DNA was male.’
A love story. And nothing to do with a Taylor Swift song about Romeo and Juliet, but about our son Levi. Like any good love story, it begins with love and in the middle, there is difficulty, hard times, and even tragedy. But like any good love story, it ends in love. With a love that doesn’t end but keeps growing and moving forward. We hoped we were done after six kids. We were pretty sure. Not totally sure. Surely God would agree that six completed our family. We were tired, busy, and old (in our 40’s). However, the thought our family was not complete was constant, even though Kimi did her best to ignore it. We had to pray about it. And we did. And then we weren’t sure. So we decided to move forward with faith. Well into Kimi’s pregnancy, we had a very bad week and all got sick. Following the admonition of James, we sent for the elders, in this case our friend, Quinn Millington. to receive a blessing by the laying on of hands. He gave each family member a blessing. Then he began to bless Dave, and part way through the blessing, he fell silent, a silence that went on and on. When he concluded
the blessing, he explained that he had been overcome by a feeling, that it was almost like a massive wall or building that descended on him, that it was so large he couldn’t put it into words for a long, long time. Quinn shared with us what he could at that time, and recently shared even more. He said, “There was a sense of deep gratitude and love that burned in my heart. I believe the Lord wanted to express His deep trust, gratitude and love for you and Kimi for your willingness to bring another of his precious children to earth. I also believe he wanted you to know of his deep love for Levi.” ON MARCH 19, 2005, IN MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, THIS CHILD WAS BORN. We named the child Emma. Because we didn’t know. Our son Garrett had older sisters and one younger sister, and he desperately wanted a brother. He and our newest bonded quickly. The child was different from the first day. Most babies are loose, relaxed, uncoordinated, and need a lot of support. This baby was tense and triggered by stimuli. As early as the second day of life, he could tense up so thoroughly that holding him
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was like holding a stiff board. He showed early signs of anxiety, even as a newborn. If Kimi held him facing out while walking down the stairs, his little body would tense up until his arms were raised above his head. He was so loved. His siblings fought over who got to hold him. We weren’t sure he would ever learn to walk. When Levi was eighteen months, we moved to Massachusetts. Our surroundings are information, and too much happens in them for us to take it all in. But this child seemed to take in far more than average. He would not wear jeans nor new clothes — everything had to be used, broken in, smooth. We later learned that one of Levi’s challenges was Sensory Modulation Disorder which basically means a condition in which non-painful stimuli such as types of touch or certain sounds or volume are perceived as abnormally irritating, unpleasant, or even painful. WE LIVED IN A HOUSE WITH AN IN-GROUND POOL, AND HE LOVED THE POOL, loved swimming, loved the feel of cool water against hot skin on a steamy summer day. He wrote these words at age 13: “Swimming, to me, is very peaceful. When you go fully submerged underwater, you feel warm and comforted from all the pressure around you. Most of the time it is very quiet underwater, if not completely silent, and you can make sounds that nobody can hear. Because I love music so much, I sing songs and vocalize songs from shows and movies and games. Whenever I get out of the pool, all that I want to do is go back into the peaceful water. It is almost like nothing exists.” As he grew older and his
body began to change, he did not like swimming in front of other people—he was self-conscious and felt the eyes of other people on him. HE LEARNED TO READ AT A YOUNG AGE — not sight words and picture books. Kimi recognized that he was ready, she had taught his siblings to read, but with Levi’s independent nature, he didn’t want any help. She set him up on a computer program and he was reading within a matter of hours, prior to starting kindergarten. He learned to read deeply, and it became critical to how he processed the world. In fourth grade, he read Huckleberry Finn. In Sunday School, his teachers gave each child chances to read. He grew impatient with those who could not read big words, struggled to sound out words, measured their words awkwardly. His mind raced and chased ideas in circles and spirals. We could not name a topic on which he hadn’t researched and for which he had no opinion. He took piano lessons from various teachers, and he gained a sound early mastery, but he came to hate performing. In time, he asked to be able to stop taking lessons even though he loved to play. His social anxiety made them too difficult. When he gave up piano lessons, he continued to teach himself piano on his own. Sometimes, we would leave the house and come back to find him playing beautifully on his own. We hated to announce our presence because he would stop — he did not perform. Yet, for all his reluctance to perform and to be seen, in school and elsewhere, he was a constant chatterbox, and one with no filter. The words he inhaled from reading books
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and articles online had to find their outlet, and he spoke them without regard to the audience. In school, he talked constantly to whoever was seated next to him, and frequently, the two of them got into trouble. Further, even at the earliest ages, he challenged everyone on everything if he was convinced he was right. He pushed teachers with incisive questions, argued with points he believed to be false, almost never backed down. In third and fourth grades, it was too much, and we home schooled him. Academically, he soared, and he was relieved without the social strain, but keeping pace with him and giving him social opportunities to develop generated new challenges in the family, and eventually, he returned to public school. Whether at home or at school, his grades were impeccable: straight A’s. But socially, everything was a strain. His constant chattering ultimately led to people shutting him down and out. It hurt, and he withdrew and became more suspicious of people. AND THEN, SEVENTH GRADE. We did not know, and we could not see the big picture. When you live with someone, changes creep up on you, and you amalgamate them into your understanding of a person without necessarily seeing how dramatically something has shifted. In seventh grade, he began to struggle to complete homework. He appeared uninterested and unmotivated even though the work was intellectually easy for him. One would not think that B’s would signify much — they typically don’t. But what did was the apparent lack of effort, the tendency to have assignments slide by with no recognition that
finishing them was important. What do we think now? Based on what we now know, what should be happening in puberty was not, and the disconnects in identity were probably starting to create foundational strains. In Church, he remained talkative and challenging. One of his Sunday School teachers described him as “savagely smart” and “the smartest kid I’ve ever taught” (to the chagrin of his siblings whom this teacher also taught). This teacher emphasized that students must try to stay ahead of him, and he sometimes sent home subjects to research. He needn’t have bothered — our child had been researching everything all along, and Levi didn’t bother with these. IN EIGHTH GRADE, WE WERE FINALLY ABLE TO FIND HIM A THERAPIST. After a few months, the therapist indicated that he might be a threat to himself. We had him admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and he enjoyed it — played Phase 10, talked openly, did outdoor activities. He came home with a series of medical appointments and diagnoses. He was ADHD, prone to severe depression and anxiety, capable of dissociation. He went back to school, took on medicine and therapies and disliked all of it. He spent much of his time in the counselor’s office, completing school work there. Kimi also spent a lot of time there, working with the counselor to determine which classes could be dropped, and which needed to be continued to avoid a failing grade. He was convinced he would die young. He read up on all his diagnoses and added his own — he became convinced he was on the autism spectrum. Later, another doctor
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would diagnose him with borderline personality disorder. One day, a friend’s mother called to tell us that he had been cutting and had drunk a small amount of nail polish remover. We explained to him that he had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital again. This time, the experience was a slog in a drab building with lots of boredom. No, he told them, he wasn’t suicidal. Yes, the program was helping. No, he was not a threat to himself. No, he would never cut again. Yes, he would seek out therapy and ask for help and take his medicine and talk to his parents and do stress relief and exercise and meditate and journal and relax. Could he go home now and not come back? Of course. His ninth-grade year started out well. Because of his poor grades in the spring, the school wanted to lower the rigor a bit, but he argued with the school to let him take honors classes, showing that he was impossibly bored in standard classes, and that he could manage honors classes. He wanted to handle it himself, seeking out the guidance counselor without letting Kimi know what he was doing. He had to argue hard and long for honors classes. He prevailed. And then, he didn’t or couldn’t keep pace. We did not understand. We wondered if it was lack of willpower, failure to manage
mental illness, lack of desire. Meanwhile, his ever-bright brain burned hot, and he researched and researched, endlessly chasing ideas. There were no definitive answers to the questions he asked because there were always more questions beyond them. When he was in tenth grade and just as the pandemic was developing, a friend of ours had a son come out publicly as gay. This friend stepped away from Church leadership positions. On Sunday one day, this friend went to the pulpit and gave his witness of the love of God and the need to love all our brothers and sisters. He affirmed the dignity of LGBTQ+ people. As our friend walked away from the pulpit, our youngest looked at him with a huge smile and made two huge thumbs up. We should have known something. But changes creep on us. We fail to connect details to the narratives of our lives. Or we shape the details to fit the narrative we have formed. “EMMA” SHOULD HAVE STARTED HAVING HER PERIOD BUT HADN’T. So doctors resorted to hormone therapy to help trigger them. Sure enough, we found our youngest wasn’t taking the medicine. Kimi challenged him and insisted that the medicines had to be taken because failure to do so could be dangerous. The performative non-performer looked at Kimi
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and said, “Well, the thing is, ha ha, I’m trans.” Kimi was unmoved. “Throwing something like that at me isn’t going to change the fact that you have to take the medicine.” This time he was more serious, “Mom, really, I’m trans.” Kimi accepted him. He didn’t want Dave to know. Dave had been a Latter-day Saint bishop and a member of stake presidencies. He followed rules and obeyed Church authority. Dave proved to be surprising. He accepted our youngest as he was, and he began to read and research. He was a Sunday School teacher, and soon he was giving lessons on what the Bible had to say about helping the marginalized. A few months later, when developmental changes were still not happening, our youngest underwent a battery of tests, and soon, much greater information emerged. Through genetic testing, we gained an understanding we never had. All of us are both profoundly similar to each other and all of life, and yet, we are also completely unique. This is a duality, and dualities exist everywhere. OUR YOUNGEST HAD SWYER SYNDROME. Swyer Syndrome describes a series of genetic mutations that cause an individual to express female anatomy, while the person is genetically male. In other words, our youngest had all the body parts associated with females except he wasn’t female. He had XY chromosomes—if he were to die and have to be identified via DNA, a medical examiner would say he was male. In our youngest’s case, he was his own special brand of unique: doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital had never seen his
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particular mutation in the portfolio of Swyer cases they had dealt with. Ours was literally a sample size of 1. Levi reacted by doing what he always did — he researched. In short order, he was more expert on intersex conditions than most medical professionals. Doctors would begin to discuss something with him at a simpler level, then say, “Wait. I forget that you are you,” and they would switch and begin to speak with him as a peer, as if he were a medical resident. DNA is what makes us both unique and similar. It should not be a surprise that it is a duality of sorts, itself. In 1953, Dr. James Watson struggled to understand DNA’s shape until he had a dream in which he saw intertwining snakes with
Swyer Syndrome describes a series of genetic mutations that cause an individual to express female anatomy, while the person is genetically male. In other words, our youngest had all the body parts associated with females except he wasn’t female. heads at opposite ends (other accounts indicate he also saw a double-sided staircase). We asked our youngest how he identified himself, and he said that he was “intersex, leaning toward male, and gay.” We asked what name he should go by, and he originally selected “Twine.” We didn’t understand and thought it a curious choice. He never explained, and in short order, he came to dislike the name and would eventually discard it. Intersex individuals with Swyer often select the direction they wish to go, and many choose to honor the
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anatomical presentation and proceed with female-related hormone therapy. Our youngest did not feel female and did not believe he had ever been meant to be female. He began early steps toward transition. We asked if he might wish to cut his hair, and he declined. We asked if he might wish to discard his dresses, and he said, “No, I might still wear them.” The duality was powerful and also almost entirely misunderstood by everyone. When we are born, we begin to die. And most faiths view death as a birth into a new life. These, too, are dualities. When we felt that there must be another child, we accepted, as well, that we were birthing a child into both life and death. ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2022, WE HAD FINISHED PREPARING DINNER AND WE CALLED TO OUR YOUNGEST, OUR ONLY CHILD AT HOME. NO RESPONSE. Dave went to the basement. The door was closed tightly, and a note had been placed there. It began, “Don’t open Door. Call Police.” It was a small act of grace that preceded the pouring out of the years of pain and fears that he had experienced. He apologized and expressed his love. He feared turning eighteen and trying to navigate as an adult. He explained that he could not get himself to do anything and couldn’t see being able to do so. He couldn’t live as a woman but be a man; he couldn’t bear to come out even to some family members, though he knew he was loved. In his words, “I … can’t take living like a girl, being the way I am, yet I am too much of a coward to come out to my siblings, or to do anything to make my body match my mind more. I
am terrified of how society treats transgender persons.” He made clear that the decision was his and no one was at fault; he indicated that the media and what he read or saw should not be blamed. His final sentences state that “This is not the fault of any of you. My brain is just faulty. I’m excited to finally be free.” Ultimately, he signed his letter. His signature is clear, certain, and confident. For it, he used a name he had recently come up with and had asked his parents to use. Its origins are Hebrew, and in the same way that twine’s first dictionary definition is “a strong string of two or more strands twisted together,” his new name means, “united, joined, adhered to, joined together, or joined in harmony.” We don’t know if he chose it deliberately, but Levi is the perfect name. WE ARE HERE TODAY TO CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF LEVI. He was spunky, sassy, feisty, and confident, until he wasn’t. He was funny, intelligent, quirky, argumentative, loving, stubborn, and kind, always. We are here to mourn Levi. This is a tremendous loss in so many ways, not just for our family or for all those who knew him, but for the world. He had so much potential. His future contributions, whatever they would have been, are lost to us now. We are here to acknowledge Levi’s pain. Being transgender in this world was too heavy a burden for him to bear. He suffered tremendously until he just couldn’t suffer any longer. We like to think of him as happy now, something that we haven’t seen in a very long time. Q If you or someone you love is experiencing thoughts of suicide, please dial 988.
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Say Their Names
Transgender Day of Remembrance
We list
here 65 transgender victims of violence documented in the United States in the past 12 months. It is very likely that many more have happened that are not reported to organizations to become part of a list such as this. Many news stories of anti-transgender violence use “dead names” — the names given at birth no longer used by the victims — making it difficult to glean whether an act of violence was transgender-related. Worldwide, local transgender researcher Dallas Rivas, who provided this list, has documented over 325 reports of anti-transgender murders between October 2022 and October 1 of this year. In past years, Brazil has been the leading nation in transgender violence. This year, however, no data is being released from the country. While the details of these cases differ, it is clear that fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color — particularly Black transgender women — and that the intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and unchecked access to guns conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare, and more. TIFFANY BANKS, 25, Miami Fla. Tiffany was shot and killed on Saturday, October 1. Four days later, a man was arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder. Tiffany loved to sing and dance. Her family described her a “the light that would brighten up anyone’s darkest day.” MYLES FITZPATRICK, 17, Manville N.J. Myles died by suicide after enduring bullying and harassment at school. After his death, his (supportive) family
filed a lawsuit against his school, alleging that they had failed to prevent or act on the treatment he had received from other students. Myles had been transitioning since December 2020. ADALYN ANDERSON, 24, Oklahoma City, Okla. Adalyn died by suicide. Her family said she was a private, witty, and loving daughter and sister who survived numerous trials in her life until she reached a moment when she felt she could no longer go on. In the past two years, she became confident in who she was and was not afraid to show it. The family asked for donations to the Trevor Project in her obituary.
KELLY LOVING, 40, Colorado Springs, Colo. Kelly was one of five people shot and killed in the Club Q shooting. Friends described Loving as a person who wanted her friends to shine and helped them shine. Loving’s sister said she used her body as a shield to help save a young man’s life during the shooting.
DANIEL DAVIS ASTON, 28, Colorado Springs, Colo. Daniel was one of five people shot and killed in the Club Q shooting. He moved to Colorado Springs two years before his murder and worked as a bartender and entertainer at Club Q. His parents would join in the cheer at his shows. His mother said his shows were great. “Everybody needs to go see him. He lit up a room, always smiling, always happy and silly,” she said. DIAMOND JACKSON MCDONALD, 27, Philadelphia, Penn. Diamond was found shot to death inside her mother’s apartment. Investigators said the door to the apartment was open, and there were no obvious signs of forced entry. Media sources say
she may have known her killer. “I just want the world to know that Diamond was my rock, my shoulder, my child whom I love with every inch of me of what I have left to give,” her mother, said DAY RODUS, 27, Malibu, Calif. A passer-by found Rodus unresponsive on a roadside in the Santa Monica area. Preliminary information indicated that Rodas had overdosed, and her body was brought to the location. The incident is being investigated as a homicide, but the exact cause of death has not been determined. Rodus worked for the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s community health program. MORGAN DEE, 32, Fort Wayne, Ind. Dee died by suicide. She was reportedly anxious about how trans people were treated by society. DESTINY HOWARD, 23, Macon, Ga. Destiny’s body was found in a parking lot. Jaleel Parker, who was said to be in a relationship with Howard, was arrested two days later. “Her greatest passion was fashion,”
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her obituary said. “She loved to dress in the latest style.” MAR’QUIS JACKSON, 33, Philadelphia, Penn. MJ’s body was found in a backyard two days after he died from being beaten and left shoeless outside on a winter day while celebrating his birthday. Jackson was a supporter of the William Way LGBTQ+ community center in Philadelphia; the Free Ky Project, which seeks to free Ky Peterson, a young Black trans man who was convicted of killing an alleged attacker in 2011; and the Transgender Legal Defense Fund. HENRY BERGBROUSSEAU, 24, Louisville, Ky. Henry died by suicide. His mother, a Kentucky state senator, said Henry was a trans rights advocate on whom “a lack of acceptance took a toll.” She said Henry had just received a big promotion working for the Human Rights Campaign, and, while he finally found a community, “that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.” CAELEE LOVELIGHT, 27, Phoenix, Ariz. Caelee was found shot dead in a car along with a 40-year-old man who was later pronounced dead from knife wounds. Caelee loved to read and enjoyed learning something new every day. She was also a religious and spiritual person who “passionately defended nonbinary and trans folks
LEVI MARTIN, 17, Lakeville, Mass. Levi died by suicide, fueled by terror over how society treated transgender people. He was described by family as their “intersex, transgender, gay son who was assigned female at birth. While he was raised as a girl, we didn’t know that his DNA was male.” He had a condition called Swyer’s Syndrome, a disorder where the sex glands (i.e., testicles or ovaries) fail to develop. “He was spunky, sassy, feisty, and confident, until he wasn’t. He was funny, intelligent, quirky, argumentative, loving, stubborn, and kind, always.” GWEN GATEWOOD, 22, Kalamazoo, Mich. Gwen died by suicide. Diagnosed with a debilitating chronic disease at 14, Gwen went through constant surgeries, months-long stays in the hospital, and having a colostomy bag as a freshman in high school. Her sister said she was always had an endearing personality and welcoming heart, and was brave, witty, compassionate, and strong JASMINE ‘STAR’ MACK, 36, Washington, D.C. Jasmine was found dead from a stab wound to the thigh by police. “She loved everybody,” Mack’s sister, Pamela Witherspoon, said. “Most of all, I’m going to miss her saying, ‘I love you sister, I love you.’ I’m going to do right.”
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KC JOHNSON, 27, Wilmington, N.C. KC was found dead in the Savannah River. She had been reported missing by her partner after she did not return from going out on a date. KC loved playing video games, vibing, and relaxing to music, she loved playing Magic the Gathering (trading card game.) Her social media is filled with manga and anime images. A 26-year-old was charged with the murder and awaits a trial. MANUEL “TORTUGUITA” TERAN, 26, Atlanta Ga. While defending Atlanta’s South River Forest from the construction of a law enforcement training village, queer community organizer Tortuguita, was shot 57 times and killed by police. The medical examiner called the killing a murder, as an autopsy showed they had their hands up. “They were a trained medic, a loving partner, a dear friend, a brave soul, and so much more,” Atlanta Press Collective reported. OLIVIA SNOW, 47, New York City, N.Y. Olivia was a freelance makeup artist. She was found deceased in a hotel room by staff, and her death is under investigation by the NYPD.
MARIA JOSE RIVERA RIVERA, 23, Houston, Texas Maria was one of two adults found dead in an apparent murder-suicide in an apartment complex. Her supervisor said, “I always looked forward to speaking with her. She was lively, funny, and dynamic. Transgender people who are immigrants suffer two levels of oppression and marginalization from society. This makes them especially vulnerable to harm. The transgender immigrant community deserves respect and safety.” UNIQUE BANKS, 20, Chicago, Ill. Unique and her mother were fatally shot during a home invasion in Chicago. Two other trans women and her mother’s boyfriend were also critically injured in the mass shooting. A 19-year-old suspect who lives in the same apartment complex was questioned and released. IVORY NICOLE SMITH, 27, San Fransisco, Calif. Ivory, a well-known Black transgender activist and entrepreneur, was found dead in her apartment. A San Francisco native and Tenderloin resident, she had served as a program associate in the Transgender District and as a member of the Trans Advisory Committee with the city’s Office of Transgender Initiatives.
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IMANITWITAHO ZACHEE, Louisville, Ky. Zachee was shot outside her place of employment. The shooter — a man who worked for the same company — has been arrested. “She was always happy. Always walking down the hallways smiling,” a coworker said. “Even when she knew they were talking about her, she didn’t care. She was always happy.” CASHAY HENDERSON, Milwaukee, Wisc. Cashay’s body was found in an apartment by firefighters investigating a fire. She had been shot dead before the fire was started. “She was a bubbly spirit with a downto-earth, tell-it-like-it-is personality. Cashay was a transgender female and was as beautiful as can be, inside and out. Cashay didn’t deserve what happened to her,” wrote friend Veronica Beck. A suspect pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and awaits trial. KAYLEIGH SCOTT, 25, Denver, Colo. Kayleigh died by suicide. She worked as a flight attendant and shared her story for a 2020 Trans Day of Visibility video made by United. She ended it with “So here’s to all the pain Kyle went through, so that Kayleigh could live today. Two years later, she explained in an Instagram post she was planning to take her life. “As I take my final breaths and exit this living
earth, I would like to apologize to everyone I let down,” she posted. TASIYAH WOODLAND, 18, Mechanicsville, Va. Tasiyah was shot and killed outside the Big Dogs Paradise Bar in Mechanicsville on Friday, March 24. Police arrested Darryl Carlton Parks Jr., 29, in connection with her death. Woodland’s aunt described her as a “powerful spirit” who was “protective of those she loved.” “She loved to have a good time, smile and laugh and spend time with her family,” she wrote. “She was never too far when you needed her.” ASHLEY BURTON, 37, Atlanta, Ga. Ashley was shot outside her apartment building after running outside crying for help from neighbors. A convicted felon was charged with her murder and awaits trial. Burton’s family said she was a hairstylist who was loved “from South Carolina to Atlanta,” “The way my sibling moved in life, it was…take it or leave it. ‘This is how I am.’ You can respect it or neglect it.” MOE MOORE, 18, Louiseville, Ky. Moe’s body was found in the Ohio River two days after a team found their submerged vehicle.
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RASHEEDA “KOKO DA DOLL” WILLIAMS, 35, Atlanta Ga. Rasheeda was shot in the face in downtown Atlanta. She was one of the four subjects of the D. Smith documentary “Kokomo City,” which won a Next Innovator Award and an audience award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. In it, she discussed her life as a sex worker and a rapper. Police arrested a 17-yearold suspect. BANKO PASO/ BROWN, 24, San Francisco, Calif. Banko was shot and killed by an armed security officer at a Walgreens in San Francisco. He was 24 years old and had been involved with the nonprofit Young Women’s Freedom Centre since he was 12. Police arrested the security guard before releasing him without charge. When the video of the confrontation in which Banko died was released, the refusal to bring charges caused a public outcry. OME GHANDI, 16, Salt Lake City, Utah The bodies of Ome Ghandi and her father, Parth Gandhi, were found inside Parth’s neuropsychology clinic at 2936 S. Highland Drive. Police say Gandhi shot and killed Ome and then killed himself. Ome’s mother claims she tried to protect her from the abuse of her father for 15 years, but the system failed her.
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NOVA DUNNE, 14, Manchester, N.H. Nova left his school, climbed the 6′ chain-link fence and lept into traffic. Sources alleged that bullying and transphobia factored into his death of the teen. ASHIA DAVIS, 34, Highland Park, Mich. Davis was found dead in a hotel room in a suburb of Detroit. Police are investigating her death as a homicide and have released video of a man walking and running from the hotel as a possible suspect. She was described as full of joy, devoted to her faith, and a loving dog owner to a Yorkie named Clyde. CHANELL PEREZ ORTIZ, 29, Carolina, P.R. Chanell’s bullet-ridden body was found at about 5:25 in the morning along a highway behind a university campus in Puerto Rico. Perez Ortiz worked as a cosmetologist and was keenly interested in fashion, often posting quotes from the famed fashion designer Coco Chanel on social media. “Chanell shared a lot of playful, fun content, and clearly had strong friendships with people who are grieving her deeply.”
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MICHELLE DIONNE PEACOCK, 59, Richmond, Ind. Michelle was a cisgender woman who had survived cancer. She was stabbed to death by a neighbor because her alleged killer believed she was transgender. According to police, 67-yearold Tommy W. Earl approached Peacock – who was in a gazebo south of the apartment building – and slit her throat with a straight razor. He told investigators Peacock was a “male acting like a woman,” and that he’d “do it again.” JACOB WILLIAMSON, 18, Pageland, S.C. Williamson was found dead only a month and a half after he started living as a man. Investigators say the transgender teen met a man online and planned to go to an amusement park with him. The two ended up traveling several hours to the man’s home, where investigators say Jacob was killed. The man was charged with first-degree murder and obstruction of justice, and his live-in girlfriend was charged as an accessory. COLIN SMITH, 32, Portland, Ore. Colin was killed while defending a transgender co-worker from a verbal attack. He was the second cisgender person killed in the US in a transphobic attack within a week. Smith and his co-workers were outside a bar when the man began targeting
Smith’s transgender friend. Smith intervened to defend them and was allegedly stabbed multiple times by Rahnique Jackson, who was arrested five days later. FERNIELLE MARY MORA, 26, New York City Mora, who graduated from Harvey Milk High School and had in the past been a member of the Hetrick-Martin Institute Youth, was found dead at her home in the Bronx under suspicious circumstances. One report said she’d received recent threats to her life. Mora had a “larger-than-life personality who was wonderful, empathic, and silly.” CAMDYN RIDER, 21, Winter Haven, Fla. Rider was eight months pregnant when his partner allegedly fatally shot him outside their central Florida home. Riley Groover, 26, of Winter Haven, Florida, allegedly shot and killed himself after shooting his pregnant fiancé “multiple” times in front of witnesses outside of their home. The victim’s unborn baby was “unable to be saved.” DÉVONNIE J’RAE JOHNSON, 28, Los Angeles, Calif. Johnson, a Black trans woman who was experiencing homelessness, was fatally shot by a security guard at a Ralphs grocery store in Los Angeles. Johnson was an artist who had moved to Los Angeles from Tulsa, Okla., in
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2020 to proceed with her transition. Friends said she “loved music, comedies, hanging with friends, and giving back to her community.” LUIS ÁNGEL DIAZ CASTRO, 22, San Juan, P.R. Luis’ body was found gagged at his home and his ex-partner, who Luis had reported on domestic violence charges, is the main suspect. Luis is remembered by his family for his love of Latino music, noting Hector Maysonet and Chema y JohnD as his favorite musicians. CATHERINE WHEELER, 35, North Canton, Ohio Catherine died by suicide. Friends said she was “an immensely smart kid with a love of AC/ DC,” who loved to “beat your Grandma at card games.” BRE’ASIA BANKZ, 27, Casa Grande, Ariz. Bre’Asia was reportedly murdered by her boyfriend. Bre’Asia identified as nonbinary and used she/her pronouns. She loved to dance, spend time with her siblings and cousins, and filled her social media with fashion, hair, makeup, and celebrity posts. She singled out the movies ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Love & Basketball’ as her favorites.
SHAINAH TURNER, 42, Augusta, Ga. Turner’s body was found without clothing on her bedroom floor. An autopsy is pending. She had posted several times through Aug. 24 before they suddenly stopped. She was a frequent traveler and lived in Allen Homes inside an apartment on New Savannah Road in Augusta. MECHELE LEE JONES, 53, Sparks, Nev. Mechele was found behind a commercial establishment. Authorities are searching for next of kin. SHERLYN MARJORIE, 35, Albuquerque, N.M. Sherlyn was killed by a man she was involved with. Reportedly he killed her because he did not want her to reveal their relationship to his family. Jose Juan Mendoza Espinoza reportedly “admitted to being in a clandestine sexual relationship with Ms. Marjorie,” and he allegedly paid her to stay quiet about it. DACODA ‘CODII’ LAWRENCE, 25, Steubenville, WV Codii was struck and killed by a vehicle. Born in Port Huron, Michigan, before moving to Winterville, Ohio, Codii grew up with three siblings and his par-
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ents. He most recently worked as a cook at a Steubenville restaurant. Codii had multiple social media accounts filled with the typical content of a 20-something young adult – music, tv shows, books, and games he enjoyed. And his friends. KYLIE MONALI, 41, Riverside, Calif. Kylie Monali was killed in prison by her cellmate. Kylie’s parents are suing the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, alleging the department acted negligently by allowing Kylie to be housed in a cell with a convicted sex offender who had a history of violent behavior. The suit states Kylie was vulnerable because she was transgender and HIV-positive. THOMAS “TOM TOM” ROBINSON, 28, Calumet, Ind. Tom-Tom was a Black gender nonconforming person who was the victim of a fatal gunshot injury, They died at the scene. They were working as a cook at a local IHOP and frequently changed their hairstyle and color, posting many online photos of his artistry CHARM WILSON, 32, Cleveland, Ohio Charm Wilson was a Black trans woman who was struck and killed by a car in her hometown. The driver was taken into police custody, but there is no word on charges being filed. Charm showed interest in photography and art, followed
several prominent Black public figures, and liked the musician Dishikiii. Her friends speak of her vibrancy and enthusiasm, her tendency to embrace life with intensity. A balloon release was held by her family ALEXA SOKOVA, 30, Palm Bay, FL Alexa’s body was found in an undeveloped area of Palm Bay known as “The Compound.” The undeveloped area has been a hot spot for homicides in Palm Bay. It is also where citizens frequent for off-road recreational activities. She had been reported missing for weeks. Her car was pulled over in another state and the occupants reportedly confessed to the murder and the location of the body. YOKO, 30, New Orleans, LA New Orleans-based nonbinary artist YOKO was killed in a hit and run accident on September 19. They were 30 years old. YOKO, an acronym for You Only Know One, was a visual artist and DJ. Yoko worked as a tattoo artist at Slangin’ Dat Ink. Born and raised in New Orleans, YOKO used they/them pronouns. YOKO’s socials are filled with beautiful images of their own creation and others. Further, their creativity transcended genres. TREE CRANE, Salt Lake City, Utah Tree Crane went to sleep in their dorm bed in Greely, Colorado and never woke up. Tree was extremely intelligent, dili-
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gent, artistic, spirited, generous, funny, kind, brave, protective, wise beyond their years and “the best child anyone could ask for.” They had a great sense of humor, a beautiful voice for singing, and a loud and proud voice for individuality and human rights. JAYCEE CROSTLAND, 15, Liberty Hill, Texas Jaycee died of suicide at the age of 15. They had a soft spot in their heart for old muscle vehicles and rods, especially hot rods. Jaycee was already examining vehicles at the age of two, and could identify the brand and model of every vehicle they observed. AGGIE JEAN LIVINGSTON, A oneof-a-kind human who brought so much joy and love to everyone around them. Tragically lost to suicide in August 2023. Gone but never ever forgotten. TABITHA MURRAY, 26, Roxbury, Mass. Tabitha died from a drug overdose in a South Boston public housing complex and occasionally is listed as homeless in court documents. Boston Police and other city officials were refusing to identify the deceased prior to this on account of their gender identity.
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TYLER SVETICH, 22, Salt Lake City, UT Tyler’s body was found in a surplus canal in the Jordan River on Saturday, June 10. Svetich was first reported missing by the Unified Police Department in May, saying they had not been to their Millcreek apartment in nearly a month. EMONI ‘NICOLE WRIGHT’ XCHANGE, 26, Detroit, Mich. According to her obituary, Emoni was the light of every room she walked in. Emoni put a smile on everyone’s face without having to say a word. As a child, she always walked to the beat of her own drum in spite of what anyone thought of her. Emoni’s love of fashion, dance and just being THAT GIRL was the flame that lit the fire she needed to soar. TYLER BARCLAY, 19, Kissimmee, Fla. KENZIE WEBLER, 27, Olympia, Wash. FISHER JONES, 24, Salt Lake City, Utah ANONYMOUS, 61, not publicly out, Salt Lake City, Utah ELIJAH, Boston, Mass. MERCEDES SANTANA, 28, Chicago, IL ELENA ESTHER ADEM, Dallas, Texas Elena’s body was found in July. No details are publicly available. UNKNOWN, Eugene, Ore. The annual Transgender Day of Remembrance will take place Nov. 20 at the Salt Lake City and County Building, west side. A display of flags with information on the worldwide victims of anti-transgender violence will take place Nov. 11 through 21.
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L G B T Q +
HISTORY MONTH October is LGBTQ+ History Month, and we celebrate with a series of article, collected by our sister publication, Philadelphia Gay News. Our first story is by founder and editor Mark Segal, who was at Stonewall the fatefull night of June 28, 1969.
Putting an end to the myths of Stonewall BY MARK SEGAL
For years,
people have debated what actually happened that night in June 1969 when Stonewall was raided, and a new, more militant struggle for equality was born. Due to the debates, and the insistence of some who claim they knew all aspects of what had actually happened, an incredible void opened up where people could invent, imagine, or distort Stonewall and our history to their own objectives. The myths of Stonewall are endless, but they’re easily dispelled when you look at the material proof and plain logic.
FACT 1: Judy Garland’s death and funeral Did Not cause Stonewall The myth of Judy Garland’s death being the impetus for Stonewall is the most belittling myth to those of us who participated. It’s stereotypical and self-loathing, and with this article, we add new infor-
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mation that finally ends this silly tale. One clue is where the idea originated: from a conservative, straight columnist at the Village Voice named Howard Smith, who actually was a friend of the police captain who led the raid. Simple logic says it’s just not so. People of my age, late teens and early twenties at the time, were not dancing to Judy Garland in the Stonewall. We were dancing to Diana Ross, the Beatles, and Barbara Streisand. My best memory is dancing to the Fifth Dimension song “Let The Sunshine In,” which is from the musical “HAIR.” Judy Garland was of an older generation. We wanted to dance our asses off when we were in Stonewall, and that you didn’t do to Garland’s music. But the final nails in the Judy Garland myth are articles about the funeral at Campbell’s Funeral Home. If you look at the photos and reports in the New York Times, as well as other newspaper reports, you’ll note that the subjects in the photos, as well as the majority of quotes, are from housewives. When you look more closely at the very few men in the photos, they’re in suits and ties. We all know that is not the kind of person who fought at Stonewall. Men who wore suits and ties ran from the police for fear of losing their good-paying jobs or their families finding out about them. They were not the ones who resisted. It’s time to bury the Judy Garland myth for good. The myth makes Stonewall sound like the only riot in U.S. history where its participants fought for a silly cause. The truth is that we were fighting the hate and oppression of the police that night. We were not empowered by a dead singer. Let’s put that coffin into the ground already.
Fact 2: Nobody knows exactly how many people were at Stonewall I was recently filming a BBC television show in front of the Stonewall when a tour group came by. The guide stated, “There were 105 people in the bar that night.” But nobody can possibly know how many people were there. Some people paid for entry, and some were regulars who were let in without the door charge. But that number does give an idea of the average size of the crowd inside.
Then, as we all know, once police began letting people outside, those with any standing in society ran for the hills as soon as they could. Those of us who remained — street kids, drag queens (later to be called trans), people of color, and the verging radical gay youth of the day — gathered around the door in a semi-circle There were hundreds of passersby and even more who craned their necks from a distance. That night went on for hours, so anyone who was within a few blocks could say they were at Stonewall that night. But actually participating is another matter. Anyone who says they know how many people were there must not have actually been there, since it occurred in various areas of Christopher Street and around Christopher Street. You don’t take a roll call in the middle of a riot. Those people who tossed stones or cans of soda, or those who wrote on the streets and walls “Tomorrow Night Stonewall” as I did, went on to be a part of Gay Liberation Front which arose from the ashes of Stonewall. Some GLF members were there during the first night. Other GLF members stood and spoke from the doors of the closed stonewall the second night. More GLF members began leafleting the following nights. So who can we say was there? Well, anyone who had family in the area or a decent job ran for the subway or a cab as soon as they were let out of the bar. Who was left? Drag queens, stereotypical gay men and women, street kids like me who were homeless or living at the YMCA, and young activists like Marty Robinson. Since the riot created the urgency for change, Gay Liberation Front picked up that mantle and ran with it; Stonewall and GLF are synonymous. When asked who was there at Stonewall, my answer is: Who was there the following night and the night after that? Who carried out that change through that first turbulent year? We have pictures and written accounts. This is no myth. There are facts in plain sight.
Fact 3: Stonewall lasted several days, and then an entire year There have been numerous suggestions about how long Stonewall lasted. At one museum I was speaking at during
the opening of their Stonewall Rising exhibit, they had a sign that stated one number. Then, someone else wrote about the exhibit and put another number. When I’m asked that question, I say confidently that Stonewall went on for 365 days, from the first night until the first Pride one year later. That spirit in June 1969 carried on with the changes that Gay Liberation brought from it. We were self-identifying ourselves for the first time in history. We were out, loud, and proud rather than in the closet. We took back our streets from the police. We organized legal and medical alerts. We had social and political meetings. All of that threatened the police since much of it was illegal for “homosexuals,” and we did it in plain sight and even advertised it. We dared the police to stop us. One last thing: we were diversified and inclusive. It took 365 days to create that change.
Fact 4: There was no brick It is often stated that my fellow GLF member, Sylvia Rivera, threw the “first brick” at Stonewall. Although it’s flashy and bombastic, that myth actually does not give her her rightful place in history. Both Sylvia and her GLF sister Marsha P. Johnson have spoken about where they were during Stonewall, and people today have either ignored their words or distorted them. But what cannot be disputed is that Sylvia and Marsha did something much more important than throwing an imaginary brick: they created the world’s first trans organization, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. STAR gave visibility and pride to the Trans community for the first time in history. STAR was not one night but an entire movement. Sylvia is more of a historical figure for co-creating that first Trans organization than for being just one of a crowd at Stonewall. That cannot be disputed. And if you’re still hung up on the brick idea, the New York Times did a video dispelling it in 2019.
Fact 5: The mother of Pride was not who is credited for it Here is an answer that is well documented and known by each of us who lived this history. The two people who actually came up with the idea of Pride
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were Craig Rodwell and Ellen Broidy. They were having dinner in Rodwell’s apartment with their partners at the time, and they began putting down a resolution that would be read at the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations meeting in Philadelphia. That resolution created the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day committee, which went on to organize that first Pride one year after Stonewall. It is often reported that the “mother” of Gay Pride is Brenda Howard. That is absolutely false. There are numerous members of Gay Liberation Front or Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day committee who are alive today. We know, because we were there when it took shape, who created Pride. If anyone is going to be deemed “mother of Pride” it’s Ellen Broidy. Brenda Howard was a member of GLF, but she was not in any way associated with the formation of that first Pride other than to march in it. She may have someone editing Wikipedia on her behalf, but that doesn’t make that falsehood any less false.
Fact 6: The most accurate history of Stonewall is a collective one There are many views of Stonewall, but the majority of its participants went on to form GLF. They — we — are the spirit of Stonewall. Each GLF member who was there relies on their personal memories, and those memories
collectively weave a fuller picture. Numerous books on the subject have been written. There are two books that stand out. The first book written on the subject was Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants in 1971. The other is David Carter’s Stonewall, published in 2010. While Carter’s version has some flaws, it comes closer to any version before or after. He wrote at a time when our community was beginning to realize the importance of Stonewall historically, and at a time that many different viewpoints took hold. He literally had to duck to keep out of the way of warring parties on the subject, which can be seen in other books. Carter continued to research the issue and had a passion to find the missing points and bring facts forward until his death in 2020. Others (who were not at Stonewall, mind you) unfortunately write with their bias at the forefront. Many of us who were there continue to pass on lost information or leads. We feel that our personal battle that night has been used to reinforce people’s own misconceptions and political objectives. It wasn’t that single night that changed and built our community. It was from the ashes of that night that Gay Liberation Front created self-identity, community, and pride. Change doesn’t happen overnight. In this case, the seeds of equality took 365 days to take root. It was that first magical year of gay liberation. Q Mark Segal is an award-winning journalist, author, and Stonewall pioneer. More information on his 50-plus years of continuous activism can be found at marksegalstonewall.com.
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L G B T Q +
HISTORY MONTH
The evolution of LGBTQ+ online dating BY MICHELE ZIPKIN
From
casual hookups to friendships to meeting the love of your life, LGBTQ+ online dating was created out of a need for community. When I first messaged my wife of six years on OkCupid in 2014, I didn’t realize I was taking part in an online LGBTQ+ culture that first manifested in the early 1990s. I turned to dating apps specifically to find a romantic partner and to take the guesswork out of flirting with women in real life. But little did I know that the world of queer online dating and connection was born in part out of the need for solidarity between gay men during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Andy Cramer, currently the CEO of Caregiving Network, launched the bulletin board system Gay.Net in December 1993. Bulletin board systems (BBSs) were the major online spaces. They were “local or regional dial-up networks –– often running on a single computer or a handful of them –– operated mostly by
hobbyists or enthusiasts,” writer and software engineer David Auerbach wrote in the Slate article, “When AOL was GayOL.” A lot of BBSs for gay men developed in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the Backroom and Gay.Net. Cramer came up with the idea for Gay.Net after he had been operating several Headlines stores on Castro and Polk streets in San Francisco, which were “the epicenters of gay life,” he said. When HIV/ AIDS hit the U.S. in 1981, Cramer and his employees across ten stores became frontline workers over the next 14 years. “We had fundraisers, we sold condoms for a penny,” Cramer said. “We did everything that we could do.” Cramer thought about the thousands of people he helped over the course of a decade and a half, how he lost so many friends to AIDS, and how lonely that was for gay men who felt disconnected from the community. “I went out and I bought a bulletin board system because, at the time, there was
nothing online,” Cramer said. Cramer launched Gay.Net using a BBS software with graphical overlays and mailed out diskettes that allowed members to install the software. In the first year of its existence, 10,000 gay and bisexual men paid $10 a month to access Gay.Net, which was initially run on just 16 modems. “We had Prodigy, we had AOL and Compuserve,” Cramer said. “They were all heavily censored. I wanted to open up a site where people could be who they were. People first put on fake pictures, then they put on avatars, and then they put on real pictures, but the real pictures contained all kinds of things.” Cramer even met his husband of 27 years, Al Farmer, through Gay.Net. Farmer initially couldn’t log onto the platform for a month because it was so popular and its modems were always tied up. After Cramer eventually took Gay.Net onto the web, Farmer, a technology expert who worked for IBM at the time, would sign on
every day and help Cramer improve aspects of the site. Cramer later merged Gay. Net with Gay.Com, which grew from 1 million to 4 million users in 1999. He left the company later that year, and it went public in 2004. The site went through numerous leadership changes before it was eventually sold to the Los Angeles LGBT Center. “I’m proud of it to this day,” Cramer said. “We created the first site where people can go who were lonely and unsure of themselves to be able to go meet each other. Some people met each other in many different ways, but it really was the first dating site. Even to this day, I get people walking up to me saying ‘thank you, I got married because of you.’ And ‘thank you, I got my first boyfriend.’ I was very happy to bring four to six million people together.”
LESBIAN LISTS Even though Cramer had lesbian friends at the time, he didn’t know how to foster the same sense of online com-
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munity for queer women, he said. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t digital spaces for lesbians in the early to mid-1990s. Even before email became mainstream, email lists became very popular for the lesbian community. Jean Marie Diaz created Sappho in the U.S. in 1987, which was ground zero for lesbian lists at the time, Auerbach reported in Slate. However, lists that were designated as solely for lesbians sparked “debates” regarding whether users felt comfortable with bisexual and trans women taking part, Amy Goodloe told Slate. Goodloe ran numerous LGBTQ+ lists and created lesbian.org in the mid-1990s, one of the first big lesbian websites. In a NetCafe video interview housed on archive.org, Goodloe said she built the site “for women to be able to find each other; to be able to communicate with other women going through similar issues that they might be going through; to find other lesbians in their area, or women just struggling with their identity.” She made the site for “people who want information about coming out; people who want information about support groups in their area; what is it like to be a lesbian mom?” She added, “I wanted it to be, more than anything, a place for a group of people who [don’t] have much visibility in the culture to come together and find each other and know that they’re not alone.”
GAY CHAT ROOMS Despite the existence of some online spaces and a variety of email lists for queer women, spaces for queer men continued to go full-steam
ahead in the ’90s. Services like Compuserve and AOL made it easier to get online by providing community forums and chat rooms, according to Auerbach. Later in the decade, AOL became rife with gay-centric chat rooms. The website Gaydar, which launched in 1999, was another early mainstream gay dating site. It provided a space for queer men to talk to each other in chat rooms and one on one. “Gaydar was made to broadly appeal to guys wanting dates, relationships and just sex,” according to PinkNews. Gary Frisch and his partner Henry Badenhorst, two South African men who have since passed away, founded Gaydar. Although more queer-specific dating apps popped up in the 2000s as the internet became more sophisticated, one of the early Web 2.0-era dating apps that attracted LGBTQ+ users was OkCupid, which came out in 2004. OkCupid matches people based on in-app questions, which are tailored for queer users and even vary for different sub-identities within the LGBTQ+ umbrella, said Michael Kaye, director of brand marketing and communications for OkCupid. “I think LGBTQ+ people were always really early adopters to online dating,” Kaye said. “Speaking from experience, we are limited to the safe spaces that we have available. However, when we first launched [OkCupid] and still to this day, we’ve always positioned ourselves as a dating app for everyone — no matter how you identify, no matter what you’re looking for.” OkCupid was the first dat-
ing app to expand gender and sexual orientation identifiers, which they fleshed out to 60 identifiers in 2021, thanks to a partnership with the Human Rights Campaign. The OkCupid team also works with GLAAD to expand pronoun options for users. “We are seeing that with each generation, they’re becoming more and more fluid,” Kaye added. “They’re becoming more open with sharing their identity. Almost 20% of daters in the United States on OkCupid identify as LGBTQ+. This was up from 18% in 2022 and 17% in 2021.” Dr. Timaree, sexologist, professor, writer, and human sexuality consultant, said she thinks it’s helpful for people to have as many options as possible when it comes to making connections. “Whether you’re queer, poly, a parent, trans, have specific political beliefs, a positive STI status, a religious affiliation –– whatever –– there are advantages to putting these parts of your life front and center, even as they narrow your potential targets,” she said in an email. “An early example of this was when OkCupid let users choose to only be visible to other queer folks. If you’re a lesbian who doesn’t want to hear from a bunch of straight men, for example, that kind of option makes the experience of the site much better.”
geolocation dating app and one of the first third-party apps for the iPhone. It was created “as a casual dating app for the queer community,” said Grindr’s Chief Product Officer AJ Balance. “Grindr is a community that welcomes anyone who wants to use the app,” Balance said. “We have users of all genders and sexualities who use the app. Queer men are the largest segment, but over time, we’ve seen more user segments adopt the app and then find value in it. Over time, Grindr has become really important to a lot of folks in the community. Many users do use it for casual dating, and users also find dates and longterm partners from the app.” As its usership grew over the years, Grindr started to provide sexual health resources to its user base, including a blueprint for trans and nonbinary sexual health. The blueprint includes info on general sexual health concerns, the social determinants of health, sex work, and other topics. Grindr also provides resources like free HIV/STI home tests, information about DoxyPEP and vaccinations, and other connections to resources. This effort is part of the social justice program Grindr for Equality, which centers on “LGBTQ+ safety, health, and human rights worldwide,” according to its website.
GRINDR
GRINDR TOXICITY
The landscape of queer dating seemed to change again when Grindr came out in 2009, a men who have sex with men-centric dating app that probably needs no introduction. Co-launched by tech entrepreneur Joel Simkhai, Grindr was the first
However, Simkhai left Grindr in 2017 after spending years as its CEO, during a time when issues of transphobia, racism, and fatphobia permeated some of the app’s usership, NBC News reported in 2022. That year, Simkhai launched the dating app Motto, which
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he created to try to stave off the culture of “toxicity and discrimination” that has pervaded queer dating apps, according to NBC News. Balance, Grindr’s chief product officer, said that the team takes safety and privacy very seriously and takes measures to ensure that users’ experiences are safe and confidential. “We have both technology and operational processes to ensure user safety and privacy, including both proactive and reactive components,” Balance said. “For example, we have very robust moderation capabilities where users can report incidents and our team responds quickly to help address them. We also take proactive steps to help identify and prevent any negative experiences that users could face on the platform.”
HER Like Simkhai’s Motto, some queer dating app creators who have launched products a little more recently are making concerted efforts to be more inclusive of trans and nonbinary users. One such app is HER, which describes itself as a “FLINTA [female, lesbian, intersex, trans and agender] community and dating app.” “At HER, we aim to create a secure space for queer folks to unapologetically be themselves and build meaningful connections,” HER founder Robyn Exton said in an email. “We have vigorous verification processes and community guidelines, all with user safety in mind.” This year, the HER team upped the ante on its “no TERFs” policy, sent out user notifications, and publicly
conveyed an anti-TERF position on Lesbian Visibility Day, Exton said. Before launching HER in 2015, dating for LGBTQ+ women had its challenges, Exton said. “All of the online platforms for women were just reskins of sites built for gay men but turned pink, asking you how much body hair you had, or straight sites that were filled with guys asking you for a threesome. It felt crazy to me, at the time, that no one had truly made a dating product for women.” Before rebranding the app to HER, Exton first released it as Dattch, which was solely a dating and hookup app designed for women seeking women. Exton found that Grindr was the first dating app that she thought created “an incredible experience for its users.” “It was a huge inspiration for starting HER,” Exton said. “When we first came out, we were very similar to Grindr — very hookup-focused, and it didn’t really work for our community. We learned that the experience on so many dating apps was designed to serve men, including all the straight apps. There was just nothing out there that displayed the information women wanted to see, that connected the community, that resonated with the young queer women I knew.” Currently, HER provides users with more content, events, and opportunities to connect with friends. “We listened really carefully to what people were asking for, and as we realized so many people were using the
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app to make friends,” Exton said. “We realized their needs sat so much further outside of dating, and we wanted to be a part of the total experience.”
TRANS-INCLUSIVE APPS Other dating apps exist that say they’re designed specifically for the trans community. One such app is Tser, “a trans dating app for transgender people and their allies to meet online,” according to its website. It also brands itself as a social community where trans folks can go to find friendship and support. The app website says that trans people created Tser. However, Tser received mixed reviews on appfollow.com. One user said that despite the app not sending them notifications, “I’ve been pretty happy with this app so far. I can actually message people and see who messaged me for free, unlike other apps.” Another user wrote on Appfollow that they found Tser to contain “highly transphobic language everywhere, both from users and creators. Putting cis people in as ‘men’ and ‘women’ invalidates trans women and trans men as women and men. ‘Transsexual’ is an outdated term that many trans people find quite offensive and dehumanizing.” Mary Richardson, who created the label-free LGBTQ+ dating app Bindr in 2022 with her business partner Brandon Teller, said they came up with the idea for it when “we felt like there wasn’t anywhere that we personally belonged in the dating scene.” Bindr doesn’t prompt users to share their sexual orientation or gender identity, but they’re welcome to include
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those details in their profiles. Richardson said that trans women approached her table at Pride events and told her that they don’t typically feel safe on dating apps, but they would feel safe using Bindr because they know she’s in charge of it. Richardson reads every user support ticket herself, she said. “My main goal is for transgender, nonbinary, everybody in between, all of these [lesser] known sexualities and gender orientations to have somewhere they can go and feel safe and not discriminated against,” Richardson said.
ABUNDANCE OF APPS More of every kind of niche dating app exists these days, and because more and more people identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, there are more queer-specific dating sites and apps in recent years, Dr. Timaree said. “Whether it’s better or easier now is a matter of personal opinion,” she said. “More choices mean more opportunities, but it also means a dilemma of too much choice. Dating apps create a marketplace-like dynamic where we’re more prone to see each other as products. We try to optimize what we get and we treat each as more disposable. “For most of history, we met people at work, friends or family. There was an obligation to be baseline polite to each other, [with] some accountability. Now you can talk to someone for weeks and then stop communicating suddenly without warning. It’s harder to be open to real connections when we’re guarding ourselves from that.”
A Help Button Should Go Where You Go!
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From left, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kisner (sometimes misidentified as Arlene Kushner), and Ellen Broidy participate in the “Lavender Menace” action at the Second Congress to Unite Women, in Chelsea on May 1, 1970. (Photo by Diana Davies. Image source: Manuscript and Archives Division, The New York Public Library)
When NOW Purged Lesbians BY VICTORIA A. BROWNWORTH
The website
of The National Women’s History Museum describes Betty Friedan as “co-founder of the National Organization for Women” and “one of the early leaders of the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her 1963 best-selling book, “The Feminine Mystique,” gave voice to millions of American women’s frustrations with their limited gender roles and helped spark widespread public activism for gender equality.” The 1964 Civil Rights Act had banned sex discrimination in employment, yet the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the government agency that had been established to enforce workplace equality, did not acknowledge the sex-discrimination clause, effectively nullifying the Civil Rights Act’s addition of gender.
As NWHM details, Freidan’s groundbreaking book “helped transform public awareness” of such discrimination and propelled Friedan into the leadership of the nascent women’s liberation movement, where she was often referred to as the “mother” of second-wave feminism. In 1966, Friedan, Pauli Murray, and Aileen Hernandez co-founded NOW. Friedan, as NOW’s first president, authored the organization’s mission statement: “…to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.” Among the objectives of NOW were “securing the enforcement of anti-discrimination law; gaining subsidized child care, abortion rights, and public-accommodations protections; and passing the Equal Rights Amendment.
NOW was able to bring about changes large and small — to hiring policies, to credit-granting rules, to laws — that improved the lives of American women.” NOW was itself a groundbreaking organization, which made Friedan’s purging of lesbians from that organization in 1970 — after calling lesbians the “lavender menace” in an interview with the New York Times magazine — significant on a myriad of levels. That action effectively separated lesbians from mainstream feminism, just as they had been separated by gender from the decidedly male gay liberation movement. NOW’s Susan Brownmiller, whose book “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape” would become another critically important feminist treatise, tried to make a joke of Friedan’s comment by calling it a “lavender herring,” but that just further alienated
lesbians in the organization. Mainstream media had already dismissed the feminist movement as “a bunch of bra-burning lesbians,” so Friedan and other straight feminist leaders were acutely sensitive to this labeling — and dismissal — of all feminists as lesbians. Friedan wanted “feminine feminists” in the movement. Friedan, like many straight feminists, did not want feminism associated with and tainted by “man-hating” and lesbianism. As lesbian activist Karla Jay later wrote in her memoir, “Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation,” “I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement.” The blatant hostility toward lesbians and the move by Friedan and others to disassociate the feminist movement from lesbianism took on its own activism. NOW established policies that were exclusionary of lesbians in the early years of the organization. NOW newsletter editor Rita Mae Brown stated that “lesbianism is the one word which gives the New York NOW Executive Committee a collective heart attack.” The lesbian purge at NOW was momentous and had a ripple effect on lesbian activists. It was also surprising and even ironic as lesbians had been so pivotal in the founding of NOW and in the impact and influence of second-wave feminism. Many of the key figures of that wave of feminism and of NOW itself were lesbians. This included NOW co-founder Pauli Murray; then-lesbian theorist Rita Mae Brown, member of The Furies collective and author of the first mainstream lesbian novel, “Rubyfruit
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Jungle” and editor of the NOW newsletter; and graphic designer Ivy Bottini, who designed NOW’s logo (still used today) and was president of the largest chapter of the organization, New York NOW. Yet the taint of the “lavender menace” was perceived by Friedan and other straight feminists, Shirley Chisholm and Gloria Steinem among them, to be problematic: lesbians were perceived as “man-hating” and mainstream feminism was intent on presenting the movement as pro-woman, not anti-male. Lesbians were still viewed as perverts and even as mentally ill. It would be several more years before the psychiatric community’s DSM would change its view that homosexuality was a mental disease. As Hannah Quayle wrote in a blog post about the purge, “Lesbians were placed within an unnatural category of the ‘third sex.’ This ‘third sex’ was associated with a gross abnormality that violated female anatomy, heterosexual desire, and gender behavior by associating masculine features with the female body. In this sense, lesbians were not considered ‘real women,’ and stood outside the category of ‘woman’ in a physical, sexual, personal and political sense.” Quayle asserted that within the mainstream feminist movement and NOW, “Lesbians had to find an effective way to address the accusation that their masculinity was somehow complicit with men and the patriarchy and that lesbian influence would not in fact dismantle strict heterosexual categories as it was widely believed. Heterosexual feminists excluded lesbians from the feminist movement in the 1960s based on this discom-
fort towards their sexuality.” In 1969, the same year as the Stonewall riots, the president of the New York chapter of NOW, Bottini, broached the subject of lesbianism and the movement in a public forum titled, “Is Lesbianism a Feminist Issue?” Bottini — like Brown, Murray, and others — thought lesbians were leaders of the feminist movement, not background players. It was lesbians like Susan B. Anthony, who had also led the first wave of feminism in the U.S. But Friedan was adamant that lesbians not derail the feminist movement and the work that she and others were doing to establish equity in employment and reproductive rights (Friedan was also co-founder of NARAL). Lesbian visibility, Friedan believed, would allow men to dismiss the feminist movement as fringe and something most women didn’t want to be associated with. Trumpeting her assertions and coining the term “lavender menace” (which a group of New York lesbians would later adopt to form a group of radical activists), NOW president Friedan fired openly lesbian newsletter editor Rita Mae Brown. Friedan then orchestrated the purge of lesbians, including Bottini, from NOW’s New York chapter. That action did not go unremarked. At the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, 400 feminists from NOW and elsewhere were in attendance. Brown, Bottini, Karla Jay, and a dozen other lesbian feminists marched to the front of the auditorium wearing T-shirts that read “Lavender Menace.” One of the women, Charlotte Bunch, who was also a member of The Furies collective with Brown, read
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the Lavender Menace’s manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman.” That paper was considered the first major lesbian feminist statement. That action was among the first to challenge the heterosexism of heterosexual feminists and to present lesbians not as that “lavender menace” or mentally ill perverts, like the DSM defined them, but rather as more feminist than anyone, because they were women independent from and unconnected to men and to compulsory heterosexuality. In the treatise, the “woman-identified woman” defined herself without reference to male-dominated societal structures. She “gained her sense of identity not from the men she related to, but from her internal sense of self and from ideals of nurturing, community, and cooperation that she defined as female.” Later Bunch would write, “It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution,” articulating the principle of the woman-identified woman that would become a cornerstone of lesbian activism in the 1970s in the post-purge feminist movement. Friedan’s action did not end with that Lavender Menace demonstration at the Congress to Unite Women. Pushback from within NOW’s ranks resulted in a near-embrace of lesbians within NOW just two years post-purge. In 1971, NOW passed a resolution declaring “that a woman’s right to her own person includes the right to define and express her own sexuality and to choose her own lifestyle [sic].” There
was also a conference resolution about lesbian mothers that declared it was “unjust” to force lesbians to remain in heterosexual marriages or remain closeted to keep custody of their children. The NOW Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism was established in 1973, and NOW resolved to introduce and support civil rights legislation designed to end discrimination based on sexual orientation. Del Martin was the first open lesbian elected to NOW, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the first lesbian couple to join NOW. Martin and Lyon were co-founders of Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian civil rights organization in the U.S. Over the next 20 years, NOW would go on to support lesbian fights for everything from those custody battles to same-sex marriage and lesbians in the military. NOW supported the right of a lesbian co-parent to seek visitation by filing an amicus brief in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court case T.B. v. L.R.M. That right was upheld “where the child has established strong psychological bonds, with a person who … has … provided care, nurture, and affection, assuming in the child’s eye a stature like that of a parent.” NOW also supported hate crimes legislation that included lesbians and trans women as early as 2002 and came out in support of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expands the 1969 federal hate crimes law to include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability. It all started with a purge. The history of that purge made history — and redefined the feminist movement. Q
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L G B T Q +
HISTORY MONTH
LDS apostle advocated violence against gays in 1976 BY BEN WILLIAMS
On October
2, 1976, LDS Apostle Body K. Packer gave a sermon at the priesthood session of the semi-annual general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints addressed to boys 12 to 18 years of age. In it, he discussed issues of puberty, masturbation, human sexuality, and morality, including situations in which young men are “tempted to handle one another, to have contact with one another in unusual ways.” “I repeat, very plainly, physical mischief with another man is forbidden. It is forbidden by the Lord. There are some men who entice young men to join them in these immoral acts. “If you are ever approached to participate in anything like that, it is time to vigorously resist. While I was in a mission on one occasion, a missionary said he had something to confess. I was very worried because he just could not get himself to tell me what he had done. After patient encouragement, he finally blurted out, “I hit my companion.” “’Oh, is that all,’ I said in great relief.” “’But I floored him,’ he said.” “After learning a little more, my response was, ‘Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn’t be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.’ I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.” This statement is viewed as approval to assault Gay people. Packer, at LDS General Conference, encouraged young men of the Mormon Church to physically assault men, including missionary companions, who showed a sexual interest in them. The First Presidency deleted the sermon from the publication of conference talks in the church’s official magazine, The Ensign. However, the talk was officially printed by the LDS Church in 1976 in the pamphlet “To Young Men Only.”
In it, Packer writes, “Now a warning! I am hesitant to even mention it, for it is not pleasant. It must be labeled as major transgression. But I will speak plainly. There are some circumstances in which young men may be tempted to handle one another, to have contact with one another physically in unusual ways. Latter-day Saint young men are not to do this.” “Sometimes this begins in a moment of idle foolishness, when boys are just playing around. But it is not foolishness. It is remarkably dangerous. Such practices, however tempting, are perversion. When a young man is finding his way into manhood, such experiences can misdirect his normal desires and pervert him not only physically but emotionally and spiritually as well,” the pamphlet continues. “It was intended that we use this power only with our partner in marriage. I repeat, very plainly, physical mischief with another man is forbidden. It is forbidden by the Lord.” Packer goes on to write that homosexuality is not innate. “There is a falsehood that some are born with an attraction to their own kind, with nothing they can do about it. They are just “that way” and can only yield to those desires. That is a malicious and destructive lie. While it is a convincing idea to some, it is of the devil. No one is locked into that kind of life. From our premortal life we were directed into a physical body. There is no mismatching of bodies and spirits. Boys are to become men—masculine, manly men—ultimately to become husbands and fathers. No one is predestined to a perverted use of these powers.” Packer’s talk may have been a response to publicity at the University of Utah, Utah State University, and in a Mormon independent journal, “Gays and Lesbians in Mormon Society and at Brigham Young University.” The church “retired” the pamphlet in 2016, a year after Packer’s death. Q
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live!
That’s Entergaynment Intriguing, upcoming films, theater, and concerts designed for us. BY BLAIR HOWELL
at birth and hatch a plan to reunite their gloriously gay father (Nathan Lane) with their mother, Evelyn (Megan Mullally), who somehow lost her I-also-needed-to-Google punani. Megan Thee Stallion walks men on leashes like dogs. SNL’s Bowen Yang plays a glittery, gay God. Two caged Sewer Boys (just wait) are fed masticated bologna. Methinks the intended audience will love “Dicks.” Broadway and Cinemark Century 16, opening Oct. 20
Based on Thomas Mallon’s novel, “Fellow Travelers” is a love story and political thriller, set during pivotal moments of queer history, such as the Harvey Milk era of the ’70s and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s. The eight-episode series promises to be an unflinching look at gay life, with private lives consumed with intoxicating sex and fluctuating political-power dynamics. Partial evidence: in a released clip, Bomer’s character orders Bailey to sit on his lap and refers to him as his boy. Premieres Oct. 27 on Showtime.
STREAMING BIG SCREEN “THE PERSIAN VERSION” is pedigreed by audience and script awards at the recent Sundance Film Festival. And banned in Iran. Creatively braiding comedy and tragedy, the film centers on the sexually rebellious Lelia, shunned by her Iranian family after bringing her wife to Thanksgiving. A variety of cultures are explored, from traditional Muslim families to queer New Yorkers. Viewers’ attention is grabbed with fourth-wall-breaking monologues, including amid Leila’s faire l’amour. There are lively music and dance sequences with an exuberant spirit of poptimism (Google that). Watch for Lelia’s grandmother singing the praises of anal sex. At the Broadway Centre Cinemas beginning Nov. 3.
BIG SCREEN TOO Another family drama, but with overthe-top, queer-as-hell theatricality, is “Dicks: The Musical.” And a somewhat similar pedigree: the Midnight Madness award at the Toronto Film Festival. Based on the Upright Citizens Brigade’s Off-Broadway sensation “Fucking Identical Twins,” the indie film is described as a grotesque and often grotesquely funny musical about sibs who attempt a Parent Trap. The identical twins (not really, but just go with it) were separated PERSIAN VERSION PHOTO BY YIGET EKEN, DICKS PHOTO BY A24
STAGE While “Dicks” was clearly engineered to be a cult classic, the original How did this movie even get made? midnight movie discovery, “The Rocky Horror Show,” is produced by Pioneer Theatre Company. It’s a richer and rowdy-er experience with live professional actors in the roles. The company scored a major coup when Utah’s Favorite Theater son Will Swenson played Frank-N-Furter at the last staging, but now Broadway and West End performer Jeremiah James is the Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania. However, divine songstress Ginger Bess reprises her role as Magenta. Hot patootie, bless my soul! PTC’s Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre, Oct. 20–31.
LITTLE SCREEN After Amazon Prime’s “Red, White and Royal Blue,” the next blazing sensation is Showtime’s “Fellow Travelers,” starring Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. This magazine is not for you if you haven’t salivated over Bomer and Bailey.
In “Down Low,” a repressed Zachary Quinto hires masseur/sex worker Lukas Gage to give him a handjob and maybe something more. Appears flimsy, with a Hollywood Reporter description as a “zany, frenetic and horny comedy that in trying to go there doesn’t end up anywhere.” But Audra appears as Quinto’s ex-wife. Viewable now on a VOD/digital release.
ARENA Mark your calendar. “Love Loud 2023,” Nov. 3, Delta Center.
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How
Melıssa Not so Etherıdge is healıng
In her new book and on Broadway, the queer icon reflects on the painful loss of her son BY CHRIS AZZOPARDI
quietly, Melissa Etheridge has been grieving. At just 21, Beckett Cypher, the son of Etheridge and her former partner Julie Cypher, died from causes related to opioid addiction. Three years after his death in 2020, Etheridge is doing what she’s done since she showed the world what lesbian women can do on stage in the 1980s — opening the windows to her life through her writing. This time, though, her confessional style is within the pages of a new book, titled “Talking to My Angels.” The title is a reference to the closing song off her 1993 Grammy-winning album “Yes I Am,” which established Etheridge as a rock force to be reckoned with. In the book, which she summarizes in the foreword as “an ode to love,” Etheridge lays a lot on the line, delving into many of the intimate details of her sturdy four-decade music career, her romantic relationships, surviving cancer, losing Beckett and raising four children: Bailey Jean Cypheridge, Miller Steven Etheridge, Johnnie Rose Etheridge and, of course, Beckett. Etheridge called me at the end of September while en route to the Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway, where she was about to launch her “My Window” show, which was co-written by her wife, Linda Wallem-Etheridge, and runs through Nov. 19. In a review by Laura Collins-Hughes for The New York Times, Collins-Hughes wrote about Etheridge’s approach to Beckett’s death, writing that “the most starkly powerful part of the show Off Broadway … works less well on Broadway.” “I cannot fault Etheridge for her stiffness in that delicate section at the performance I saw, or for reaching for words — like her blunt assessment, ‘He was difficult’ — to convey her memories,” she added. “But this is where relying on the script’s gentler, more contextual language could assuage what must be a terrible vulnerability.” When I spoke to Etheridge while in previews for the show, she said, “I don’t know my head from my feet,” as she was entering a car to take her to the
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q&a
theater. Whatever discomposure she was experiencing, on topics such as her initial ambivalence toward being a parent to her opioid research foundation inspired by Beckett, she spoke her truths with the kind of clarity we have come to expect. Before we get into parenting, let’s talk about Broadway. How do you distill your life through music into a Broadway show? We want to get it to two hours. It’s a bit over now. So that’s what we’re doing today is still cutting it down, because man, when I first threw my first idea together, it was like four hours long. I was like, “OK, yeah, that’s not going to fly.” So it’s really choosing the beats that I want to say, and how I want to get from beginning to now, and how to do it. And that’s art. That’s the craft of this. It’s been quite fun and interesting and exhausting. We last connected at the beginning of the pandemic, and if you’re like other creative people I know or have spoken to, then perhaps you needed a project. It sounds like you found that in the show, but also the book. Was the pandemic a reflective time for you? Yeah. My thing was, it just all started happening at once. I had three or four desires that I’ve been trying to do over the last decade, then they all came together at once. I think the pandemic sort of made everybody hungry, so all of a sudden it was the book and the show, and we have a documentary coming out next year about the women’s prison in Kansas, but that’s later. I can’t talk about that now. In the book, you write a lot about your parents and about now being a parent yourself.
How has time shifted your perspective on how you reflect on the way you were raised by your parents? As I grow and change, my memories grow and change. It doesn’t stay the same. You see things differently. I certainly have more of an understanding. I’m older than my father ever lived to be. I can look back and go, “Oh, this is what it’s like to be a parent. This is what it’s like to have lived your life and then have children.” And so, the older I get, the more knowledge I have, and the more understanding I have of my parents and the events that happened in my childhood. How has being a parent yourself helped you better understand your parents? When we’re younger, we tend to blame our parents: “Well, if my mother had loved me more, then I wouldn’t be so sad or depressed.” And at some point in your adulthood, you have to go, “I can either keep looking back and blaming and staying a victim or I can step up and go, ‘Maybe all that happened, but that was the past and I’m not going to have it define me now.’” With my first book, my mother was very mad at me for quite a while. Because when we were growing up, it was, “We don’t air our dirty laundry in front of people.” Fortunately, there are people that have stepped up and go, “Hey, this happened.” And it helps people that are going through it now, and I think that’s the best part. You get to Beckett’s death in the beginning of the book, but you write that you didn’t just want this book to be about his death. Instead, it’s about accepting his
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death and then finding a way forward despite the pain. Why did that seem like the right approach? [His death] had such a great effect on me. I can walk around and go, “All is love. Choose only love. It’s important to be happy.” But then when life happens, when the contrast comes, when it’s things that seem to take you down to the bone, that’s when I say — no, if I truly believe all is love, and we’re going to choose only love here, I have to see this as a temporary existence that we all have, and we all make choices. Some of us are here for a little while, some of us are here for a long while, and all in between, and no one is responsible for anyone else’s happiness. And you can’t save anyone; you can only inspire them. And the way that I can continue to inspire my friends and my family is to be the best I can be, to show what happiness and joy looks like, even when there is loss, which there always is. We are here to experience loss. Your dedication to Beckett in the beginning of the book is so poignant: “For my son Beckett who is with me every day in the nonphysical.” How do you interpret the nonphysical in relation to him? Well, you can look at it a bunch of different ways. We can look at it esoterically, which is, we all really exist in our minds, and we are all just perceiving everything, and we only have the capacity to perceive a certain amount of the energy around us, that which we call the live energy. But if you look at it scientifically, we only perceive 4% of the energy that is in this magnificent energy field. And that’s the scientific way of looking at it. So who are we to say that the 4% is all that there is? There’s nothing in that 96%? No, there’s a whole non-physical energy field that I believe is larger than us and where we come from, and everybody calls it all different sorts of things: God, Spirit, the universe. But I do believe that we came from there, we are all connected to there and we’re all going back there. Do you have a name for it? Do you call it anything? Well, I call it the nonphysical, and the power I call Source. In the book, you acknowledge your initial ambivalence toward being a parent. Do you think that there’s something about being a queer person, specifically a gay woman, that shaped the way that you thought about parenthood? I don’t know
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if it has to do with that, necessarily. Although growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, if you were gay, it just wasn’t an option. It was part of what parents would be so upset about: “You’re never going to have children,” that sort of thing. I think that was my first kind of thought. And the second was, I didn’t exactly have great love and affection for my mother, and so I was kind of like, “Well, what’s being a mother mean?” It seemed like there was a lot that I wanted to do for myself, and I didn’t know if there was any room to take care of anyone else. But then it’s funny, and that’s the whole other
journey in itself — when it happens, or if it happens or if it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no right or wrong to it. It’s just going to be what you’re going to walk in that moment, day to day. And with your music, how has parenthood shaped that aspect of your life? Couldn’t write those naughty love songs anymore. [Laughs.] Not when they were young, right? No. Because I wasn’t planning on children, I could write all those naughty songs and not worry about it, but now my kids are like, “Wow, what’s that?” But I grew up, and just growing up makes a big difference. I don’t know if it’s the kids or anything, but your music changes as you change as a person. What’s important to you, what moves you, what you
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want to write about, what am I thinking, what am I experiencing? It’s just different than it was when I was 25 or 30. Your daughter, Bailey, is queer. What’s it like seeing her grow up now as a queer person compared to your own experiences as a young queer person? I think it’s really different, and for her, growing up with queer parents, she cannot understand any sort of limitations because she didn’t grow up with that. So it makes absolutely no sense to her. She told me when she was an adolescent, “Mom, when you raised me, I actually thought there were at least as many gay people in the world as there were straight people,” because that’s all who she met. So she kind of comes from that equality place as a natural surrounding, but now she works for GLAAD, and she is very, very active and does so much because she does have such a sense of equality that she was raised with. I don’t have to tell you that the opioid crisis in America is devastating. And that hit home for you. Can you talk about what Beckett’s death inspired, which was the Etheridge Foundation? The path I’ve been on has been filled with a lot of understanding of plant medicine and psychedelics and how much it’s helped me, and how much I’ve seen in the research, how much it helps others. It especially does help in opioid use disorder as just a way to get through this and off of this. It doesn’t exist in the pharmaceutical world. And it’s as much of just gathering the research and the data to show folks, because there’s such a misunderstanding of it all. So that’s what the Etheridge Foundation does. It raises funds for research and testing. It’s not very easy because there’s a bunch of laws that are in the way. So it’s trying to change hearts and minds about all that. Has the foundation helped you heal? Oh yeah, hugely, because I wanted to do something. I felt so helpless. And it does make me feel like there’s movement forward on this, and maybe I could help. This can help someone somewhere. Q This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. Chris Azzopardi is the Editorial Director of Pride Source Media Group and Q Syndicate. He has interviewed a multitude of superstars, including Cher, Meryl Streep, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ and Billboard. Reach him via Twitter @chrisazzopardi.
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AM I OKAY TO DRIVE? BUZZED DRIVING
IS DRUNK DRIVING
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When Sufjan Stevens finally came out, he broke our hearts BY SARAH BRICKER HUNT
For two decades,
curious queer fans of the enigmatic indie singer-songwriter (and Detroit-born and Michigan-raised) Sufjan Stevens have pored over his equally enigmatic lyrics for the red herring that would finally put the question to rest. Is he? He must be... right? Many of his songs reference emotionally intimate relationships and moments with men (and women, too). And then there are the probing articles that ponder what’s up with all the curiosity, like the bluntly titled Vice piece “We Can’t Stop Wondering if Sufjan Stevens Sings About God or Being Gay,” which explores the internet fascination with his sexual orientation. At a high level, the speculation is fraught with inappropriateness — it would absolutely not be OK to engage in this kind of intense investigation about PHOTO: SUFJAN STEVENS
the LGBTQ+ status of someone in your real life. And yet, there’s a unique earnestness here. The queer community who loves Sufjan simply wants to invite him into the fold, to make sure he knows how loved he is, whoever he is. Frankly, he’s so often singing from the aching, bludgeoned hollow of his broken heart that we just want him to be happy and whole. Given Sufjan’s intimate relationship with sorrow, it’s maybe not surprising that when he did lay the speculation to rest last week, it was in a post honoring his “beloved partner,” who died in April. Next to a photo of said beautiful partner, Evans, he wrote, “This album is dedicated to the light of my life, my beloved partner and best friend Evans Richardson, who passed away in April. He was an absolute gem of a person, full of life, love, laughter, curiosity, integrity, and joy. He was one of those rare and beautiful ones you find only once in a
lifetime — precious, impeccable, and absolutely exceptional in every way.” “I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between,” Sufjan continued. “If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love, with gratitude and joy. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Such a Sufjan way to gently shock our senses while publicly coming out as part of the LGBTQ+ community, oh so casually. It’s doubtful we’ll see a dramatic shift in the way he writes his
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music or lives his life. The theories will continue filling the pages of the Sufjan subreddit, and he’ll keep giving those theories little mind — hopefully, he’ll simply continue pouring himself into music and sharing it with the world. In the meantime, we can now take a fresh look at some of Sufjan’s potentially queer-coded songs without it feeling quite as much like wishful thinking. Some of the tracks below have frequently been cited as part of the “evidence.” Still, like any good songwriting, there’s much left to listener interpretation in his always honest, sometimes autobiographical writing. Sometimes, it really is about God, and maybe sometimes, it’s about a man or woman he has loved romantically or platonically. Sometimes, the protagonist isn’t even him. Perhaps that’s what’s always made Sufjan’s music so widely resonant and why, ultimately, it doesn’t actually matter if he’s been explicitly or implicitly singing about his sexuality for the past two decades. At its center, Sufjan’s body of work is a testimonial to the human experience in all the joyful, sorrowful, redemptive, regretful ways every one of us holds at different moments.
‘Futile Devices’
me off guard.” In a 2015 interview with Uncut, he confirmed that the abusive relationships described here was his own.
Among the more bitterly debated songs when it comes to clues about Sufjan’s sexual orientation, “Futile Devices” could be about a lot of things. Platonic male friendship. Love between man and dog, according to some internet theories. A queer love story between two men. A heterosexual love song where he calls his female partner his brother because... reasons. All we definitively know is that he sings gorgeous lines like these, and they make us feel stuff: “But you are the life I needed all along / I think of you as my brother / Although that sounds dumb / And words are futile devices.”
‘Mystery of Love’
From “The Age of Adz,” 2010
Sung from the perspective of main character Elio, “Mystery of Love” details the breakdown of Elio’s relationship with Oliver. The track isn’t autobiographical, but the fact that Sufjan was so involved with this seminal queer film, alongside his powerful performance of the song at the 2018 Academy Awards (with partner Evans in the audience), demonstrates some personal importance. It’s trademark Sujfan all the way through, with lyrics like, “Oh, to see without my eyes / The first time that you kissed me / Boundless by the time I cried / I built your walls around me.” The soundtrack also includes a reprisal of “Futile Devices.”
Songs from ‘Javelin,’ 2023
‘The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us’ From “Illinois,” 2005
The speculation here focuses on these lyrics: “Touching his back with my hand I kiss him / I see the wasp on the length of my arm.” Is the wasp a metaphor for the “sting of love,” as one listener wrote on lyric-analysis site genius.com? “The wasp,” the listener continues, “is a metaphor for the church’s anti-homosexuality stance. Seeing it refers to his sudden realization that his feelings are, supposedly, morally wrong. The wasp resting on his arm (rather than hovering around them) shows that his fear of his attraction betraying his faith is very much internalized and could sting at any moment. Like swatting a wasp, attempting to push that fear away threatens to make it worse.”
From the “Call Me By Your Name” soundtrack, 2017
‘Drawn to the Blood’ From “Carrie and Lowell,” 2015
A devastating track off a devastating album centered on Sufjan’s journey through the grief of losing his frequently estranged mother to cancer, “Drawn to the Blood” is primarily seen as a biblical allegory. One stanza stands out as something more personally reflective: “The strength of his arm / My lover caught
Finally, we have “Javelin,” the newly released album Sufjan has publicly dedicated to his partner Evans. We don’t have an official timeline for this relationship, but the two had known one another for years, dating back to as early as 2018. There are many moments that stand out in the track list that could be referencing this love story, including: “So you are tired of us / So rest your head / Turning back fourteen years / Of what I did and said” on “So You Are Tired.” And on “Running Start,” we have the bittersweet memory of a boundless loving moment: “If I align myself with Pisces in a funny way / Can you, my lover, kiss my bracelet, and my shoulder blades? / We’ve always had a running start / I jump between the trampolines / You throw your arms around my heart / As if to say you’re all I need.” Q Sarah Bricker Hunt, a proud Eastern Michigan University alum and the managing editor for Pride Source / Between The Lines, believes in the power of intentional journalism focused on people building their communities through everyday acts of love and service. PHOTO: DAWN MILLER
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November, 2023
David Archuleta at LOVELOUD in DC, coming to SLC Oct. 17, the first LOVELOUD of an expanded three-city tour was held in Washington, D.C. Included in the lineup of the nearly sold-out concert was Utah’s own David Archuleta, who sang three of his new songs, including “Afraid to Love,” which was released in August, and “Up” and “I’m Yours,” released in June. He also sang his most popular hit, “Crush,” released in 2008, 2020 single, “OK, All Right,” and a cover of India Arie’s “I am Light” Prior to the concert, Archuleta interviewed with “INTO” writer Faefyx Collington about his excitement returning to the LOVELOUD stage. “So my first time attending LOVELOUD was actually before I came out. It was the very first one in Provo Utah, and, growing up in Utah in a conservative environment, at first I was really hesitant to go. I thought there was some hidden agenda, and they were going to try and take me away from my safe place and corrupt me or something,” he laughed. “Then, when I went, it taught me what LGBTQ+ people were really like, and why they were how they were.” “Later, it would help me understand to see myself as a person even after years of trying to convince myself I wasn’t part of the LGBTQ+ community myself,” he continued. “So, to be a performer and be out was an emotional, vulnerable but freeing experience. Now I’m excited to celebrate that journey and road with others who may be on similar paths or coming to learn like how I did my first time going.” He said that he was uncomfortable, at first, coming out. “I heard so many times people say, ‘Just keep it to yourself. Why do you have to tell everybody? Don’t shove it in our faces.’ And so I didn’t want to do that and make people feel uncomfortable with me,” he said. “But I realized it never feels good to hide who you are just so other people will accept you and like you. It felt very lonesome, even when I was around a lot of people, because I
felt I was being an imposter, a fraud, and a liar.” He told himself over the years that he wasn’t actually lying if he was continuing to try to change himself to no longer be gay. “When I realized I couldn’t, I was devastated. But then thought, “What if I just was honest?” That’s terrifying, but maybe I will find people going through the same thing if I were to be truthful. And I did, and it’s been beautiful,” he said. In “Up,” his lyrics reflect what he was going through. “I know I gotta let it go / And give up what I can’t control / Close the door / So I can open one more.” Archuleta will also be singing at the LOVELOUD concert in Salt Lake City on November 3. Also on the stage will be LAUV, Mother Mother, Tegan and Sara, LOVELOUD founder Dan Reynold of Imagine Dragons, Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees, Ms. Meredith, and host Kalen Allen. As LOVELOUD 2023 was kicked off, founder Dan Reynolds called it a “transformative journey of love, acceptance, and celebration.” “In 2017, when I founded the LOVELOUD Foundation, my vision was clear: to ignite vital conversations about unconditional love, understanding, support, and acceptance for our LGBTQ+ friends and family. Our mission is to openly talk, share stories, and shed light on the realities LGBTQ+ teens face daily. As we launch the LOVELOUD 2023 tour with this incredible lineup of talent, remember it’s more than just music; it’s about creating a safe space where everyone is seen, heard, and loved for who they are. Together, we show the world that love transcends boundaries and that we can make a difference. So, let’s raise our voices, share our stories, and continue this important mission towards change and acceptance,” he said. As part of the trip to Washington, D.C., members of the LOVELOUD team and various artists on the lineup are set to visit Capitol Hill on Wednesday, October 18, in order to speak to congressional representatives about various LGBTQ+ legislation. Reynolds also noted that the Delta Center donated the Salt Lake City venue for the cause. Q Tickets are available at loveloudfest.org
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the bookworm sez REVIEW BY TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER
‘BAYARD RUSTIN: A LEGACY OF PROTEST AND POLITICS’ EDITED BY MICHAEL G. LONG, FOREWORD BY CLAYBORNE CARSON, C.2023, NYU PRESS, $27.95, 256 PAGES
You will never settle. And why should you? If it’s not right, you make it right. If it can be better, well, then get at it. You find the solution, or you go on to the next thing because good enough is never good enough. As in the new book “Bayard Rustin,” essays edited by Michael G. Long, there’s always work to do and good trouble. Somehow, it seems, in the discussion about Martin Luther King and the
q scopes NOVEMBER BY SAM KELLEY-MILLS
ARIES March 20—April 19 Family and friends are going to be a focus in life right now. It’s okay to set some rules and allow yourself the space you need. But don’t neglect your own needs to feel a sense of belonging and community. The festivities are starting. TAURUS Apr 20—May 20 Whatever you think is going on, there are things you clearly need to figure out. Do what it takes to put things in perspective, whether that means writing it down or sending yourself an email. Be your own best friend and advocate now. GEMINI May 21—June 20 Your dreams aren’t all coming true, but some seem to be manifesting as a reality in forms you weren’t expecting. That is all good because the world needs to make sense to
leadership he brought to the Civil Rights Movement, certain things may be left out. In the case of Bayard Rustin, says Long, the record needs to be altered. Today, now. His mother was still a teenager, and unmarried when Rustin’s grandmother helped deliver him in the spring of 1912. The boy’s father refused to acknowledge him, so his grandparents gave him a family name and raised him in their Quaker faith. Still, alongside the peaceful, gentle mandate of Quakerism, young Rustin experienced Jim Crow segregation. His grandmother left a major impact on him, teaching him compassion, kindness, and generosity — she reared him to do the right thing — but they lived in Pennsylvania, where racism was common, and the Klan maintained a nearby presence. As if that wasn’t difficult enough, Rustin realized he was gay, which was illegal then.
At that point, though, he had seen many wrongs around him, and he became an activist. He also worked for justice as a speaker and organizer; at one time, he’d embraced communism but eventually became a socialist. By his own admission, Rustin was jailed more than 20 times and served on a chain gang for several months — but even then, his nonviolent Quaker beliefs emerged, and he befriended his jailers, gaining their respect. By the time he met a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Rustin was wellversed in civil rights work. He had direction, contacts, and the organizational skills the movement needed. And yet, he was willing to let King take the front stage… Pulled together as a collection of essays, “Bayard Rustin” has one flaw that probably can’t be helped: it’s quite repetitive. Each of the essayists in this book wrote
extensively about Rustin, his work, and his impact, but there just doesn’t seem to be quite enough about Rustin himself — perhaps because, as editor Michael G. Long indicates in his introduction, Rustin left a legacy but history left him more in the background. This means that the nearly two dozen contributors to this book had only what they had to go on, hence, the repetition. Even so, if you look for Rustin, you’ll find abundant tales about him and this book has a good portion of them. Readers will be entertained, confounded, and pleased by what they read here. It’s like finding treasure you never knew you needed. This book needs to sit on the shelf next to everything written about Dr. King. It’s an essential companion to any volume about the Civil Rights Movement. If you need history, find “Bayard Rustin” and settle in. Q
make room for imagination. In the end, satisfaction will come.
LIBRA Sept 23—October 22 You thrive during this season, and it’s a good feeling to be back here again. The temptation to outdo last year is tempting, but sometimes less is better. Keep plans small, and you’ll find the best things come in quaint packages. Have fun!
CAPRICORN Dec 21—Jan 19 You might be wondering when the rest of your life is going to begin. Would it surprise you to find that it is already starting? Embrace the moment and move forward on that big project you’ve been putting off. Your life is one of passion.
CANCER June 21—July 22 Far from home is a place you want to be, but it’s not always possible to get away. Do what you can to bring a sense of that place to you. Buy, create, and let your creative process do the rest. The world is your playground, and so is home. LEO July 23—August 22 The dance you perform when you’re alone could be loved by the world outside. Dare to share and be there for those who see you. If anything, you could work on expanding your horizons by sharing and learning. Throw a party and dance away. VIRGO August 23—Sep 2 What’s going on with you, Virgo? It’s like you don’t even know what you want, and it almost doesn’t matter. That is because you are riding high and living your best life. While this may not be totally true, there’s no reason not to believe.
SCORPIO Oct 23—Nov 21 The last time you were here, it was not easy to figure out where you were. But it’s a new day, and forward-thinking serves you well. Help friends and loved ones see you want to be a strong superhero for them, and save the day with love. SAGITTARIUS Nov 22—December 20 Whoever is trying hard is not really doing the most important work, which is finding balance within. The peace you need is nothing to apologize for. Anyone judging is likely falling shorter than you. Stand tall, and find yourself in a good place.
AQUARIUS Jan 20—Feb 18 With great pride comes amazing revelations. While you might not feel it now, the world is in love with you. You might not fully understand what this means, but the message is clear: the world is what you make it. Size doesn’t matter. PISCES Feb 19—Mar 19 Someone surprised you lately with a perspective on worth that you didn’t consider. What you put on the radar is a tricky one, as you want to care but also want to focus. Finding out that everyone is worthy of attention provides clarity.
54 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | FOOD & DRINK
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 353 | November, 2023
on the street
Bars, Barbers, Boba, and Burritos BY JOSH JONES
We’re
breaking news about what’s new and coming soon to downtown! From the folks behind THE PEOPLE’S COFFEE and right across the street (inside THE RANDI) comes THE BLOCK BARBERSHOP. This newest edition at Second and Second only adds to the vibrancy of the neighborhood–especially with that awesome neon! Road construction is finished, there are a ton of interesting shops, bars, and restaurants, and the liquor store is months away. Dare we say 2nd and 2nd is the new 9th and 9th? Private event space, THE TASTING ROOM near The Gateway on 200 South has applied for a conditional use permit to switch to a bar and operate under the same name. Intriguing… imagine what you could do with the 1900’s Goodyear Rubber Factory, with
all that exposed brick and wood. A stone’s throw up the street, the previous FINCA/GEORGE property is getting some love from a venerable Park City restaurateur. The location in Park City has four stars from
Forbes and is a longtime holder of Triple AAA’s Four Diamonds award. We might live across the street from these two additions, but we will try to keep our excitement contained. HOTEL MONACO has finished its
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top-to-bottom renovation, including one of our favorite bars, THE VAULT. The once-tiny bar is a bit bigger, amping up the sophistication but retaining all the charm of its former self. And, all you blue-cheesepotato-chip fans, Chef Patrick LeBeau updated the dish with fresh-fried Idaho potato chips accompanying a smoked blue cheese monterey jack dip. (It’s delish). We will keep an eye on this one. A sign appeared this week inside the Judge Building on the corner of Broadway and Main Street: “NEW YORK PIZZA KITCHEN, coming spring 2024.” Killer — we mean killer — location; this place should print money when they open. Down the street between
CUPBOP and KAZE SUSHI, another ‘coming soon’ wrap has appeared for BOBA TEA. Next to Main Street’s 222 Building, MALI THAI is sometimes overlooked. It has been rebranded as SHIM. Check them out– the lunch specials offer some delicious curries. We’re burying this one a bit. CITIZEN is still in a soft opening, but that’s not the reason we put it at the end of our column. It is a charming little neighborhood bar inside the new LOTUS REPUBLIC on 300 East near South Temple. Views of downtown from the patio are picturesque, the bar itself is gorgeous, and very kind bartenders are interested and interesting. See why we’d want to keep it to ourselves? Q
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THE PIE S. SALT LAKE 801-466-5100 3321 S. 200 EAST
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56 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | COMICS
Remembering Dianne ACROSS
1 Kind of dunk, to Sue Wicks 5 Split 9 Winona of _Girl Interrupted_ 14 Prop for “Talking to My Angel”? 15 Nat. counterpart in MLB 16 Bone-chilling 17 Baldwin’s “The ___ Corner” 18 Japanese attack word 19 Burke of baseball 20 Start of what Sen. Feinstein said we do with the “dark patches in our past” 23 Locale of valuable stones 24 “Delta of Venus” author 25 Karen Walker, perhaps 28 Ruing the S&M 31 Musical Horne 32 B’way hit sign 33 “On the Beach” author Nevil
34 ‘69 Series winner DOWN 35 Author Rednour 1 Peggy of Split Bitches 36 More of what she 2 Material for a drag said queen 38 What gay porn may 3 Frequent Trump do portrayer Baldwin 40 Segments of “Mac4 Uprights at Stonebeth” henge, e.g. 41 Estimating words 5 Like “Finding Nemo” 43 Mistake in Billy 6 Be a ham in “HamBean’s sport let”? 44 P on Socrates’ paper 7 Burning software 45 Kitchen appliance 8 Type of hosiery for brand men? 46 Like bell-bottom 9 Ruler with a vagina jeans 10 Fox’s cry 47 Tower of Rumi’s 11 Unisex garment? religion 12 One to Ulrichs 49 Go smoothly 51 End of what she said 13 Stimpy’s partner 21 Impressionist Claude 56 Houston athlete 59 “Brothers & Sisters” 22 Hose down 26 One with a gifted producer Ken tongue 60 Eugene O’Neill’s 27 Lord of the bullrings daughter 61 Movie based on “The 28 Like angry bees 29 LaRue of gay porn Price of Salt” 62 Sophie B. Hawkins’ 30 Timothy of “Kinsey” 31 Fruit in a slot ma“The Cream Will chine 39 Reproduce nonhet___” 34 “Down Under” band erosexually 63 Novel idea 35 Some bottles, or 42 Like Errol Flynn 64 Harass relentlessly what bottoms do 45 Harvey, in “Torch 65 Madeline of “Young 37 Targeted, with “in Frankenstein” Song Trilogy” 66 Smart-ass output on” 48 Composer Copland
PUZZLE SOLUTIONS ON PAGE 39
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 353 | November, 2023
50 Stuff in a closet 52 Kazan, whose desire was a streetcar 53 “Hi” to Ricky Martin 54 Name that rhymes with phallus?
55 Floor coverings 56 Austrian exclamation 57 Word in Brazilian place names 58 Broadway bio
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Each Sudoku puzzle has a unique solution which can be reached logically without guessing. Enter digits 1 through 9 into the blank spaces. Every row must contain one of each digit, as must each column and each 3x3 square. Qdoku
Q doku Easy
6
3 5 8 8 6 4 3 9 5 7
1
3
2 7
2
3
8
2
4 1
7 4 8 9 6 3 5 7
7
2 5 7 4 2 4 7 3 6 8 1 1 6 3 4 5 1 3 6 3 1 9 1 6 4 9 7 2 8 8 5 9 8 4 6 9 3 8 1 6 4 3 3 4 6 5 3 2 1 6 5 5 9 3 3 9 5 2 7 6 4 3 1 3 2 5 6 7 2 7 4 6 2 5 9 8 6 2 6 4 9 2 1 3 3 5 8 6 1 5 1 9 3 8 6 7 4 7 8 4 1 4 3 5 7 5 2 5 8 3
First-time Exam, Bite-wing X-rays, Cleaning
You know you want to sing with the Salt Lake Men’s Choir Join us Thursday nights starting Jan. 12. Show up at 6:45pm at First Baptist Church, 777 S 1300 E. Give us a try. We are a non-auditioned choir. More info at SaltLakeMensChoir.org
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Salt Lake 2150 S. Main St 104 801-883-9177
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Bountiful 425 S. Medical Dr 211 801-397-5220
New patients only. Limitations and exclusions may apply. Not valid with any other offers.
To schedule an appointment, please call 801.878.1700 Evening and Saturday Appointments Available Most Insurances Accepted
58 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | QMMUNITY
Q mmunity groups BUSINESS
LGBTQ+ Affirmative Therapists Guild lgbtqtherapists.com * jim@lgbtqtherapists.com Utah LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce utahlgbtqchamber.com * info@utahgaychamber.com Utah Independent Business Coalition utahindependentbusiness.org 801-879-4928 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233 YWCA of Salt Lake ywca.org/saltlakecity 322 E 300 S 801-537-8600 HEALTH & HIV
Planned Parenthood bit.ly/ppauslchiv 654 S 900 E 801-322-5571 Salt Lake County Health Dept HIV/STD Clinic 610 S 200 E, 2nd Floor Walk-ins M—F 8a—5p Appts 385-468-4242 UAF Legacy Health utahaids.org 150 S 1000 E 801-487-2323 Weber-Morgan Health Mon., Weds 1-4:30p 477 23rd St, Ogden Appt 801-399-7250
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 353 | November, 2023
HOMELESS SVCS
SOCIAL
VOA Homeless Youth Resource Ctr, ages 15—21 880 S 400 W 801-364-0744
Alternative Garden Club utahagc.org/clubs/ altgardenclub/
LEGAL
Rainbow Law Free Clinic 2nd Weds 6—7:30pm Utah Pride Ctr probono@law.utah.edu POLITICAL
Equality Utah equalityutah.org * info@equalityutah.org 376 E 400 S 801-355-3479 Utah Libertarian Party 129 E 13800 S #B2-364 libertarianutah.org 866-511-UTLP Utah Stonewall Democrats utahstonewalldemocrats.org fb.me/ utahstonewalldems RELIGIOUS
First Baptist Church firstbaptist-slc.org 11a Sundays 777 S 1300 E 801-582-4921 Mt. Tabor Lutheran Church 10:30a Sunday worship 175 S 700 E 801-328-0521 mttaborslc.org Sacred Light of Christ slcchurch.org 823 S 600 E 801-595-0052 11a Sundays
1 to 5 Club (bisexual) facebook.com/ groups/1to5clubutah blackBOARD Men’s Kink/Sex/BDSM education, 1st, 3rd Mons. blackbootsslc.org blackBOOTS Kink/BDSM Men’s leather/kink/ fetish/BDSM 4th Sats. blackbootsslc.org OWLS of Utah (Older, Wiser, Lesbian Sisters) bit.ly/owlsutah qVinum Wine Tasting qvinum.com Seniors Out and Proud fb.me/soaputah info@soaputah.org 801-856-4255 Temple Squares Square Dance Club templesquares.org 801-449-1293 Utah Bears utahbears.com fb.me/utahbears info@utahbears.com 6p Weds SL Coffee Break, 430 E 400 S Utah Male Naturists umen.org fb.me/utahmalenaturists info@umen.org
Utah Pride Center utahpridecenter.org info@utahpridecenter.org 1380 S Main St 801-539-8800 Venture OUT Utah bit.ly/GetOutsideUtah SPORTS
QUAC — Queer Utah Aquatic Club quacquac.org questions@ quacquac.org Salt Lake Goodtime Bowling League bit.ly/slgoodtime Stonewall Sports SLC fb.me/SLCStonewall stonewallsaltlakecity. leagueapps.com 385-243-1828 Utah Gay Football League fb.me/UtahGayFootballLeague Venture Out Utah facebook.com/groups/ Venture.OUT.Utah SUPPORT
Alcoholics Anonymous 801-484-7871 utahaa.org LGBT meetings: Sun. 3p Acceptance Group, All Saints Episcopal Church, 1710 Foothill Dr Tues. 7p Live & Let Live, Mt Tabor Lutheran, 175 S 700 E Wed. 7p Sober Today, 1159 30th St , Ogden
Wed. 7p Bountiful Men’s Group, Am. Baptist Btfl Church, 1915 Orchard Dr, Btfl Fri. 7p Stonewall Group, Mt Tabor Lutheran, 175 S 700 E Crystal Meth Anon crystalmeth.org USARA, 180 E 2100 S Clean, Sober & Proud Sun. 1:30pm Leather Fetish & Kink Fri. 8:30pm Genderbands
Gay-Straight Alliance Network gsanetwork.org
fb.me/genderbands
USGA at BYU usgabyu.com fb.me/UsgaAtByu
genderbands.org
LifeRing Secular Recovery 801-608-8146 liferingutah.org Weds. 7pm, How was your week? First Baptist Church, 777 S 1300 E Sat. 11am, How was your week? First Baptist Church, 777 S 1300 E LGBTQ+ Affirmative Therapists Guild lgbtqtherapists.com * robin@lgbtqtherapists.com YOUTH/COLLEGE
Encircle LGBTQ Family and Youth Resource Ctr encircletogether.org fb.me/encircletogether 91 W 200 S, Provo, 190 S 100 E, St. George 331 S 600 E, SLC
OUT Foundation BYU theout.foundation fb.me/theOUTfoundation Salt Lake Community College LGBTQ+ 8 slcc.edu/lgbtq/ University of Utah LGBT Resource Center 8 lgbt.utah.edu 200 S Central Campus Dr Rm 409, M-F, 8a-5p 801-587-7973
Utah State Univ. Inclusion Ctr usu.edu/inclusion/ Utah Valley Univ Spectrum linktr.ee/spectrumqsa uvu.edu/lgbtq/ * lgbt@uvu.edu 801-863-8885 Liberal Arts, Rm 126 Weber State University LGBT Resource Center weber.edu/ lgbtresourcecenter Shepherd Union Suite 323 Dept. 2117 801-626-7271 Westminster Student Diversity Center Bassis 105, M-F 8a-5p bit.ly/westdiversity
JOIN OUR GROUP OF ACTIVE OUT SENIORS Our Vision is to reduce social isolation and loneliness, improve the health and well-being of older adults and to empower them to lead meaningful and connected lives in which they are engaged and participating in the community.
A NONSEXUAL NATURIST GROUP. HOUSE PARTIES, NAKED LUNCHES, CAMPOUTS, RETREATS, MORE. UMEN.ORG | FB.ME/UTAHMALENATURISTS
Recent events: Snowshoeing, Bingo, Valentines Pot Luck & Dance, Movie Night, Walking Groups, Theater groups
Our Mission is to reimagine aging by empowering older adults to live life to the fullest potential guided by these five pillars: • Cherish the Journey • Encourage the Body • Inspire the Mind • Nurture the Spirit • Empower the Future Find us at
SeniorsOutAndProudUtah.org and Facebook.com/SOAPUtah
November, 2023 | ISSUE 353 |
Utah Pride Center Weekly drop-ins and activity nights held at the Utah Pride Center, 1380 S Main St. Some require registration at utahpridecenter.org/ programs/ ADULT & SENIOR Silver Pride Senior (50+) Mon 2—4 pm, in-person. Neurodivergent Support & Social Club, Mon 6—7 pm, In-person & virtual Bi+Pan Support & Social Club, Mon 6:30—7:30 pm, In-person & virtual registration req’d Trivia Night (21+ Mon 7:30—9 pm, in-person (no more than 6/team). Health Insurance Help From Take Care Utah, Tue 3—5 pm, in-person, 18+.
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Gay Men’s Peer Parents & Caregivers Support Group, Support Group, Tue Thurs 6:30—7:30 pm, 6:30—8 pm, in-person, In-person & virtual, 18+ billblevins@ registration req’d hotmail.com Game Night, 18+ Fri Pride in Recovery, 18+ 5:30—9 pm, in-person, Tue 7—8 pm, in-person Families Like Ours, Gay Men’s Sack Sun 3:30—5:30pm, Lunch, Wed, Noon—1 in-person pm, in-person, any gay male-identifying YOUTH & FAMILY humans 18+. PROGAMS Women’s Support Youth 10—13 Support Group, Tue 5—6pm Group, Wed, 6—7 pm, pm, registration req’d in-person & virtual, registration req’d Youth 10—13 Activity Night, Thu 5—6 pm, LezBee Honest registration req’d Support & Social Club, Wed, 7—8 pm, Youth 10—13 Free In-person & virtual, Time Hours, Tue/Thu 3—8 pm, reg. req’d registration req’d Teens 14—17 Support Trans/Nonbinary Group, Mon 5—6 pm, Support Group, Thurs registration req’d 6—7:30 pm, In-person & virtual, registration Teens 14—17 Activity req’d Night Wed 5—6 pm, registration req’d Queer People Of Color Support & Social Teen 14—17 Free Time Hours, Mon/ Club, Thurs, 6:30—7:30 Wed 3—8 pm, pm, In-person & virtual, registration req’d registration req’d
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60 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | MARKETPLACE
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marketplace BARBER
HOUSE & PET SIT TING
BARBER AND BODY GROOMING GEORGE M ICH A E L DU V E N 1140 E B RICKYARD R D #33 STE 108 BY APPT G O D S H AV E T H E Q U E E N . C O 8 0 1-3 3 0 - 5 0 5 5
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COUNSELORS
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November, 2023
deep inside hollywood John Cameron Mitchell joins Margaret Cho for ‘Ron.’ When “Will & Grace” star Leslie Jordan died, it left the fate of his latest project, “Ron.,” up in the air. Now the period piece — set in 1982 — has found a new lead actor in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” creator John Cameron Mitchell. He’ll play the title role, a gay man fired from his job who takes on babysitting duties for his 10-year-old niece and introduces her to punk rock and filmmaking. Written and directed by Ben Eisner, the film also co-stars “Boys in the Band” alum Robin de Jesús and legendary queer comic Margaret Cho, who has described the project as inspired by the various gay male babysitters she had while she grew up in San Francisco. Still in production (paused at the moment, of course, due to the SAG-AFTRA strike), look for this one to light up screens in the near-ish future.
‘Together 99’ revives a 23-year-old arthouse hit Think back to the year 2000, subtitle-lovers, to the intelligent, boisterous, and sweetly heartfelt Swedish arthouse crowdpleaser, “Together.” A warm hug of a film, it was the story of a band of lefty 1970s holdouts — some straight, some queer — defiantly remaining committed to politically motivated communal living. And now filmmaker Lukas Moodysson — who also gave the world the teen lesbian romance “Show Me Love” — is returning to his band of outsiders with “Together 99.” Set 24 years later, in the year 1999, it finds the last original members of the community, now feeling somewhat lonely, organizing a reunion with their old friends and comrades. Set to win hearts all over again, the film opens this month in Sweden and will be distributed internationally later. And if you’ve never seen the original, go catch up. It’s a treat no matter your orientation.
Elegance Bratton to host ‘The Night Disco Died’ Elegance Bratton, the rising queer filmmaker responsible for the moving military drama “The Inspection,” is hard
at work on the documentary feature “The Night Disco Died” (with “Cassandro” director Roger Ross Williams on board as executive producer) all about disco music’s popular decline and house music’s rise in the mid-’80s. If you’re old enough to remember July 12, 1979, when Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl organized an anti-disco stunt during a baseball game at Comiskey Park called “Disco Demoliton Night,” you’ll also know that the ensuing white straight fan frenzy on the field helped usher in a cultural moment that saw the dominance of disco music begin to wane. Bratton’s film, in production now, will draw together the musical elements that simmered underground after the backlash, as well as the queer Black and Latino cultural moments that gave fresh voice to new music in Chicago (the birthplace of House). No word on when we get to see this one but it’s exciting news about a historical moment that reverberates through speakers to this day.
enzie, “Jojo Rabbit”) is working at a juvenile detention facility. And then along comes Rebecca (Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway), the newly hired and very charming counselor. Together, they become something of an obsessive pair, but is it romance or something more complicated and dangerous? That’s the premise of “Eileen,” set to take its bow at October’s NewFest: The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Film Festival. From acclaimed filmmaker William Oldroyd (2016’s Florence Pugh-starring “Lady Macbeth”) and based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (she co-adapted the book with partner Luke Goebel, screenwriter of “Causeway”), it’s an intense dramatic study of women’s intimacy in a time when that sort of thing was usually met with a variety of punishments. Neon has picked up the film for distribution and looks to release it in December in time for awards consideration. Just don’t expect “Carol”-style happy endings.
‘Only Murders’ will kill again
It’s giving ‘Navidad’ with Salma Hayek
Good news (and spoiler-free!) for fans of “Only Murders in the Building,” the Hulu mystery-comedy series starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as amateur sleuths/podcasters who keep stumbling over dead bodies in their fancy NYC apartment building: It’s returning for a fourth season. The third season culprits (not telling) were discovered just in time for the last-minute set-up of a death (again, not telling) to be solved for the next round of episodes. Meanwhile, the queer elements of this show become more and more pronounced, not just with regard to probable suspects and their likely victims, but with supporting characters like the scene-stealing sweater-enthusiast-and-cat-man Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton) building niches for themselves as fan favorites. The writers can get back to work building a mystery, which we’ll probably see sometime in 2024, bloody fingers crossed.
Anne Hathaway is that mysterious object of desire in ‘Eileen’ It’s the 1960s in preppy, repressed New England, and Eileen (Thomasin McK-
The holiday movies are coming, and Hallmark’s no longer the only game in town. There’s seemingly an endless supply of interchangeable white people falling in love at Christmas on almost every TV channel and streaming platform. And while queer characters have been seeing more of that holiday love in the past few years, there have been almost no films showcasing Latine characters speaking Spanish, until now. Salma Hayek, producing mogul, is delivering “El Sabor de la Navidad,” a Christmas movie in Spanish from queer screenwriter Jose Tamez, directed by Alejandro Lozano (“Control Z”) and featuring Spanish-language TV star Pamela Almanza (“Rosario Tijeras”). The plot involves three intertwined stories, all set in Mexico City: a lonely chef falling in love, rival street Santa Clauses and a young trans woman, estranged from her mother, looking to reunite with her family. The film drops in November on Univision’s ViX streaming service, just in time for you to avoid the cookie-cutter plots of all the others. Q Romeo San Vicente always wins when he plays “Clue.”
November, 2023 |
ISSUE 353
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A&E | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | 63
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64 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | HEALTH
Qsaltlake.com |
ISSUE 353 |
November, 2023
Getting fit with Pridefit founder Sam Leicht BY JOEY AMATO
Sam
Leicht didn’t always know he was going to find a career in fitness. The Wisconsin native attended school in Cleveland for music theater, before relocating to New York City about six years ago. Acting in NYC was great for a few years, but he mentions he has a passion for fitness. Earlier this month, he launched the Pridefit app, which features a collection of on-demand workouts for every fitness level, an in-app global community, a recipe guide, and more. The app is now available for download for a low monthly payment of $35 per month. As with many great entrepreneurial ventures, Pridefit was created out of necessity. “I’ve always found the gym to be such an intimidating place — even after becoming a trainer,” mentions Leicht. “I grew up feeling like I didn’t fit in there because I was gay, and I never want people to feel like they can’t be healthy because they don’t have a space where they can confidently and safely exercise.” Pridefit helps athletes by giving them educational resources so they can feel confident at the gym, and a global community of peers who will lift them up at every point in their fitness journey. “Everyone deserves to exercise and be healthy, and we’ve created the perfect place for it through Pridefit,” Leight continued. Leicht taught himself how to create the perfect inspirational fitness videos through a combination of past educa-
tion and post-college certifications. “I had taken lots of on-camera acting classes, so when the pandemic happened, and everything went online, it was a pretty natural transition for me,” he said. “Coaching on video can really only be improved by doing it, so I’ve made hundreds of workout videos over the years so that I can be the best coach possible for my community.” In 2024, the goal for Pridefit is to build a “badass, diverse team of coaches so that everyone feels included in the community.” Adding more coaches increases the efficacy of the coaching dramatically because each user should have different trainers to learn and grow with. Personal training can have its ups and downs. One of Leicht’s favorite aspects of training is getting to help people improve their movement mechanics in real time. “Sometimes we’ll make an adjustment to an exercise that you can tell will stick with a member their whole life, and seeing them make that connection is incredibly rewarding,” he said. His least favorite part about being a trainer is having to remind people that fitness doesn’t have a finish line. “We’re exercising and moving our bodies for the rest of our lives, so stop looking for shortcuts. The only shortcut we have in fitness is consistency,” Leicht explained. “Having to remind people of this can be super draining — especially when so many fitness programs out there promise fast results and absolutely cannot deliver on them.” Over the years, Leicht has had many
coaches who have pushed him to be better and continue his education. “Someone I look up to is Jane Fonda,” he said. “I’m so obsessed with her multi-hyphenate life of being an actor, fitness queen, entrepreneur, and activist.” Starting a business always comes with challenges, and Pridefit is no exception. “One of the hardest parts about creating a holistic fitness program is that it’s hard to get people excited about fitness without over-promising and exaggerating results,” he explained. “We’re giving you the best workouts out there, an incredible community, all the resources you need to reach your goals and live a long and happy life, and yet, if we don’t show you an ad with progress pictures and a promise to lose 10 pounds in your first month, you’re not going to trust us with your fitness? It’s tough, but we’re not going to jeopardize our ethos to get members in the door.” Leicht goes on to explain that all individuals need movement, but that doesn’t always mean going to the gym, lifting weights, or jogging. “You get to decide what type of movement you enjoy the most and go from there. Motivation to do something that you know you’re going to hate? Very hard. Motivation to do something that you actually enjoy, like walking or yoga? Much easier,” He said. “We must stop thinking that traditional gym workouts are the only option. Some movement is always better than none.” Q For more information, visit pridefit.com and follow Sam @leichtning or @pridefit on social media.
MADDY TURNED HATE
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ISSUE 353
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Qsaltlake.com
HEALTH | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | 65
Maddy Park Founder, @CafeMaddyCab
INTO HOPE
AND STARTED A MOVEMENT
In 2021, the rise of violence against the Asian community made even the simple act of taking public transportation unsafe. So, Maddy started a fund to pay for cab rides for those in the Asian community that needed it most, including women, the elderly, and the LGBTQ+ community. With over $100,000 raised in just two days, she started a movement based on love that lives on today.
Join Maddy’s cause and get the tools to support the Asian community now at LoveHasNoLabels.com
66 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | FINAL WORD
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 353 | November, 2023
the perils of petunia pap smear
The tale of Mrs. Pap Smear goes to Washington, part III BY PETUNIA PAP SMEAR
The road
to our nation’s capital is fraught with danger and excitement. On my recent trip to Washington, I had lofty ambitions of visiting the United States Capitol Building, paying some selected Congress members a visit, and giving them a stern “performance review.” On the appointed day, I donned my tallest beehive wig, a blindingly brilliant rainbow sequin caftan, my sharpest pair of “say something” breasticles, and my most stern schoolmarm looking glasses, to complete the look of authority I wished to portray. I deftly mounted my mobility scooter, Mini-Queertanic, just like Almira Gulch mounted her bicycle in “The Wizard of Oz.” However, unlike Miss Gulch, I elected not to ride a twister to the capitol but made my way via the subway to Capitol Hill. This mode of transportation was much more convenient but did lack a certain amount of perilous panache, as I would not be able to drop a house on selected members of Congress, which turned out just as well because there was no possible way for me to have been able to transport a large enough house to be able to cover all the MAGAs in one fell swoop. Upon arriving at the capitol grounds, I made my way through the new visitor’s center, which is now the official route the public must follow to access the building. Since I did not have an appointment to meet any specific member of Congress, it was necessary for me to join one of the public tours in order to obtain entrance into the inner sanctum of democracy. It quickly became fairly evident to me that I was just one very small sheep in the gigantic herd of people that was trying to tour the seat of government. The mass of humanity was funneled through a narrow passage and separated into smaller groups, (much like sheep being sorted for slaughter), and assigned to a tour guide. I was ever-so-pleased
when my designated chaperone turned out to be a rather tanned and toned thirty-something stud sporting a very smart fitting tour guide blazer with a name tag that read Biff. I was very happy to follow him anywhere he led me. Firstly, he took us to the basement area — to the crypt. I almost got lost trying to navigate the elevator on Mini-Queertanic while the rest of my group took the stairs. Out of the corner of my eye, I could swear that I saw Kevin McCarthy lurking behind the pillars, acting ever-so-much the part of the crypt keeper from “Tales of the Crypt.” The next stop on the tour was the rotunda. It was big and beautiful. The dome was so tall that it was the perfect setting for my beehive hair. Very few edifices in this world are able to encompass the majesty that is my hair and live to tell the tale, but this one did. On the far side of the room, lurking behind a statue of Ronald Reagan, may he turn over in his grave, I spotted Rep. Lauren Boebert. I deftly maneuvered Mini-Queertanic through the teeming masses across the rotunda, anxious to give her some helpful hints as to how to give a hand job to someone in a crowded theater without getting caught. She must have seen me approaching because she quickly ducked out of sight into a little hidey-hole before I could reach her. Disappointed that I was not able to share my voluminous knowledge with her, I turned around, and who should I see but Matt Gaetz. Well, if there was ever a member of Congress who needed my sage advice on how not to get caught with an underage paramour, it was this guy. I aimed Mini-Queertanic directly at him at warp speed. Just as I was about to get within earshot of him, his security detail saw me coming, and intercepted me, much like a herd of angry charging buffalo, knocking me off of Mini-Queertanic and sent me sprawling
onto the floor, landing into an undignified pile of glitter, breasticles, and hair. When I regained my composure, Gaetz was gone, but my studly tour guide, Biff, was there offering me a helping hand to get me back into my saddle. I was at my wits end with frustration, and there, right in front of me, emerging from a side hall, came Marjorie Taylor Greene. I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, but she was moving so very quickly that the best I could do was to perform a “drive-by fruiting,” ala Mrs. Doubtfire. So, I reached into my purse, withdrew a grape I had been saving for a snack, and chucked it at her. I discretely disguised my chucking motion as if I was swatting at a fly, so as not to engage her security thugs. I believe it may have landed in her hair. I hope it stayed in her hair long enough to turn into a raisin and begin to draw flies. Finally, after many a close call, my time in the capitol came to an end. Petunia has left the building! This story leaves us with several important questions: 1. Which is the best lube I could have recommended to Lauren Boebert to prevent chaffing? 2. Where the hell was Josh Hawley when I was trying to run him down with Mini-Queertanic? 3. Would his raised fist be able to save him? 4. What is the best fruit to throw at members of Congress? 5. How many times is it necessary to watch Mrs. Doubtfire to be able to perform a drive-by fruiting with expertise? 6. Should I begin carrying “Petunia has left the building” placards on Mini-Queertanic to exhibit when I exit an event? These and other eternal questions will be answered in future chapters of The Perils of Petunia Pap Smear. Q
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