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…
On a rain-threatening Wednesday night in August, the Crack Fox downtown has a few indicators that something unusual is happening inside. A hand-lettered sign bears the quote people posted in the ’70s supporting Angela Davis: “Sister, you are welcome in this house.” Another right by the door handle is less subtle: “No Men.” Inside, past…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It’s important to remember that Pride, social highlight and party extraordinaire that it’s become, started with a riot. Half a century ago the LGBT community (with trans women of color right up front) had enough of institutionalized bigotry and fought back hard against a pointless police raid at the Stonewall Inn. Our community comes together…
“More leather cycles through here in a week than most people will see in ten lifetimes,” says Thom Glowski as he looks around the workshop in the basement of the home he and his husband share in south city. Home to his business, LDD Leather Works, the workshop is where the self-taught leather maker creates…
On a gray drafting table speckled and smudged with blue, orange, red, and white paint lays a pencil sketch of a buxom doll in platform heels plucking bubbles from the air. Next to the sketch is artist David Rantz’s newest painting. The details at this stage are few. Her hair is a blonde bouquet of…
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…
