Rugby involves a lot of whoring. In fact, the whoring is one reason there’s such a brotherhood between players across the sport. As if that weren’t intriguing enough, they even have hookers on the field (for real!), and all of this goes on under the watchful eye of “the Sir.” OK, I may have inadvertently…
Letter from the Editor: Chris Andoe
If you’ve been around the St. Louis scene a while, what I’m about to say might make you feel really old: Many LGBTQ twenty-somethings don’t know who Nancy Novak is. The five years she’s been in exile (or retirement) is a lifetime in the bar scene where Novak reigned. But for those of us who…
Author & Professor Patrick Dilley to Present from Acclaimed New Book at Prime Timers This Saturday
Patrick Dilley, Professor of Higher Education and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, will be presenting from his newly published book at this month’s Prime Timers St. Louis organizational meeting, Saturday, August 10, 2019. Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation: Early Non-Heterosexual Student Organizing at Midwestern Universities, was published in February by…
A Word from Editor Chris Andoe
We’re honored to once again partner with Pride St. Louis and #Boom to bring you this combined Official Pride Guide and summer issue of Out in STL. On this monumental anniversary, we contemplate where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. Associate Editor Melissa Meinzer and Steven Louis Brawley of the St. Louis LGBT History…
Strike a Pose: St. Louis has a storied ball scene — and its stars are ready to strut their stuff at Pride
It was 2001 when Mechee Harper took her nineteen-year-old friend Meko Lee Burr to Chicago for his first ball. “We ended up taking over a KFC as our dressing room,” Harper recalls. “And the employees were like, ‘Well, alright!’” The underground, largely black and Latinx LGBTQ ball culture has mostly existed out of mainstream awareness…
Attitudes Entertainers Horrified After Patron Accused of Torturing and Killing Cats
Young performers at Attitudes Nightclub are reeling after the revelation that accused “Kitty Killer Kaine” was a patron of their establishment, and a former friend to several. On Monday, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Kaine A. Louzader, 20, tortured and mutilated at least a dozen cats and kittens he found on Craigslist, according to…
Chuck J. Pfoutz: Running the Runway
In 2013, photographer and producer Chuck Pfoutz attended his first drag pageant. He was inspired. “Some of the best production I’d ever seen,” Pfoutz says. “I was fascinated by how far people would go to win a crown,” he adds. “Hours of effort to achieve something great and entertain while doing it. I documented 30…
David Dwight IV: Forged From Ferguson
Philadelphia-area native David Dwight IV, 25, didn’t plan on sticking around after getting his biomedical engineering degree from Washington University in St. Louis. But his priorities and his trajectory had to pivot: During his final year, unarmed Ferguson teenager Michael Brown was killed by police, and things changed. “The killing of Michael Brown Jr. and…
Joss Barton: A Necessary Defiance
It’s by some cosmic fluke that the people of 2019 St. Louis get to experience the outrageous wonder that is Joss Barton, when everything about her indicates she rightfully belongs in the provocative art scene of 1970s New York — a time when the city was so sinister, tourists were given brochures with survival tips.…
Shawn Jennings Kohrs: He Makes a Wish Come True
Sitting in the garage with family in 2012, Shawn Jennings Kohrs stumbled upon a Facebook post that changed his life. A woman in Kentucky wrote with intimate details about how her thirteen-year-old son knew he was going to die, but still worried about her well-being. “Two seconds in I was invested, and knew I had…