Let’s set aside for now any tension among the various pride celebrations in St. Louis and establish this: There are a million legit ways to be proud. You can catch gleaming beads at one of the city’s largest parades. You can set up a booth at a street party to let your neighbors know you…
Eric Dontè is not in counseling. His music is how he gets out his anguish. “I think a lot of people feel like I do but are afraid to say it out loud,” he says, sitting in his bare-bones apartment in the Shaw neighborhood. “I’ve hit rock bottom so many times, what’s the worst that…
When artist Jess Dugan began shooting portraits of her friends in 2011, she says, she gravitated to those who had “found a way to be masculine that’s more gentle and more vulnerable than the mainstream version of it.” In 2015, she published a book of those photographs, Every Breath We Drew. Now she’s exhibiting 30…
Up until this summer, Jen Everett had an ordinary routine. She would wake at 7:30 a.m., go to work as a project engineer for a construction firm and then come home around 5:30 p.m. to her partner and their thirteen-year-old son in south city. In her bits of spare time, though, she took photographs. And…
If a man were on trial for murder and adopted the “gay-panic defense,” it would sound something like this: I’m sorry I killed the victim, your honor, but he winked at me, and he’s gay, so that’s provocation. I deserve a lesser charge. On August 25, Illinois joined California as one of only two states…
It’s a Saturday in a small town in Missouri. There’s a beauty pageant underway, and a young teen — we’ll call her Tya — is nervous. She keeps to herself all day long. She thinks she doesn’t fit in with the other girls. She stays at the edge of room, looking in. She has never…
It’s hard to believe chef Rob Connoley when he says he doesn’t like beets. Consider his “Rolled Roasted Roots” dish. He uses the core of a red beet like the veal shank in ossobuco, then slices the remainder of that beet — plus a golden one — into thin strips, which he wraps around the…
When I think “quick weekend getaway,” I often neglect everything across the Mississippi River. That’s a mistake, because for years it meant I overlooked the historic hamlet of Elsah, Illinois, on the Great River Road. A friend and I visited briefly in July. Within five minutes, I found myself plotting to come back for a…
I consider Alton, Illinois, the undiscovered Sausalito of the Mississippi River. It’s a picturesque town about 22 miles north of the Arch, a place with dramatic topography and grand vistas. It also happens to have mysteries below the surface. And a Historic Museum of Torture Devices. The museum’s proprietor is Janet Kolar, Alton’s hearse-driving (and hearse-racing)…
Sick of hearing about health care? In late July, after seven years of promises and drama, congressional Republicans failed to pull off a wholesale repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Now this week, they’re trying once again. But even if this most recent effort loses steam, that’s no excuse to tune…
