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…
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…
Meet fifteen LGBTQ community members making a major impact in St. Louis Where do we get off, telling you who the influencers are in this town? Well, we’d like to think we keep our ears to the ground and watch who’s moving and who’s shaking, who’s driving the discussion and who’s pressing buttons. This collection…
Cami Thomas wields her influence in gentle but powerful ways. She’s a journalist, with bylines in HuffPost Black Voices and this very magazine, and a documentary filmmaker lending her unique perspective to issues in a post-Michael Brown world. “I grew up in Florissant, the tippity-top of north county,” says Thomas, 25. “I went to middle…
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…
Mister Kameo Dupree is that suave, debonair gentleman who opens your doors and brings you flowers. You may have fallen under the classic male illusionist’s spell at the Grey Fox or other venues, sharply suited and slaying tunes by Jessie J, Brad Paisley or Jason Derulo. “I just don’t do that heavy metal,” the musically…
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…
