A spiffy new enterprise is making use of technology and research to tell tales of the past. It’s an online map that shows you exactly where — to the pinpoint — LGBT history happened in St. Louis. Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis is an interactive digital history project that combines the mapping and research efforts of…
Artist Mickalene Thomas is known for large scale canvases incorporating rhinestones into colorful images of black women frankly regarding the viewer. On her website, she describes exploring “a complex vision of what it means to be a woman.” She told Refinery29.com that “It’s okay if the viewer doesn’t understand the relationship I have with my…
Lovers of belles lettres can enjoy a feast of literary discussion at Left Bank Books this Thursday, September 28. In the back of the shop, nationally renowned lesbian poet Eileen Myles will be discussing her most recent work, Afterglow (A Dog Memoir). Ostensibly it’s a love letter to her late pit bull Rosie, whom she…
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…
