Jessica Hicklin may be best known as the trans woman who took the state of Missouri to court over access to gender-affirming care while incarcerated, with a successful ruling in 2018. Now five years later, as Missouri state legislators are sponsoring an array of bills targeting transgender health care, she describes this as a dark…
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The Hearse Chaser: Steven Brawley Preserves LGBTQ History
The nickname came up for the first time this past summer. When I heard of my friend Ed’s passing, in addition to being saddened by the loss of a special person, I was immediately concerned about his personal collection of local LGBTQIA+ history. What would happen to it? I got nervous. While I was researching…
Arch Rival Roller Derby Is a Queer Sanctuary
When I joined St. Louis’ flat-track roller derby team in 2016, one of the first things I was told was, “Nobody joins roller derby if they have a perfectly happy life. Usually, they’re dealing with some shit.” That was certainly the case for me. I was 22, newly enrolled in graduate school at Washington University…
Sex Work: The MO Ho Justice Coalition Is Here to Help us Get Free
Many in the queer community are quick to remind us that Stonewall was a riot and that it was started by trans sex workers of color. Images of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera flood Instagram all year round, but especially during Pride Month. We love to cry out that Pride exists because of the…
Chris Andoe is Ready to Talk
Chris Andoe learned to tell stories in his grandmother’s backyard on the north side of Tulsa, Okla. “I’m from a family of storytellers,” he says. At 46, he’s a current St. Louis Magazine contributor, former editor of Out in STL and the author of the recently released “House of Villadiva,” a book that straddles multiple…
Biker Clubs and Queer History: Stories of Rebel Queers in St. Louis
Picture it: St. Louis, 2003. You’re a young queer person from southern Illinois, in the big city for your first-ever Pride parade. You’re scared shitless, horny as hell and trying to look cool. You’ve managed to score prime real estate on the parade route because in your nervousness you accidentally showed up two hours early.…
Nailing Down Nancy
As Nancy Novak Returns for a Final Farewell, One Writer Seeks to Understand her Polarizing Legacy Less than a week after I signed up to profile Nancy Novak, I realized it would be anything but reporting as usual. For starters, there’s absolutely no need to dig for dirt or persuade sources to talk. Even five…
Meth at the Melrose
My husband sleeping by my side, I woke from a Saturday afternoon nap two summers ago to my friend and downstairs neighbor, whom I’ll call Keith, passionately kissing me. My Tower Grove apartment building, which we called “the Melrose,” was like a big gay frat house back then, a place where it wasn’t uncommon for…
Where We Live: Presenting the St. Louis Area’s Top 5 LGBT Neighborhoods
There was some grumbling in conservative Jefferson County when the 2016 DeSoto Christmas Parade was slated to include the county’s drag bar, Rumors on Ice. Among the garden-variety homophobic comments posted to the event’s Facebook page, one stuck with me: “Go back to the Central West End.” The remark amused me on a couple of…
Jake Bain: Grace Under Fire, On and Off the Field
After Jon, an eighth-grade student at a St. Louis area private Catholic school, heard about how a star football player at John Burroughs School had come out and managed to remain calm despite being put on blast by the infamously hateful Westboro Baptist Church, he decided to reach out to the player. His Instagram conversation…
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