How can we hang onto art that brings us queer joy?
🎭 Dear queer stars, how can we hang onto art that brings us queer joy? Given all the slings and arrows the world is throwing at us right now, it’s easy to worry for the future of queer creativity. Let’s talk about it, and maybe find some kind of hope, in this week’s Big & Bright 🌈 ⭐ 👏!
⚠️ We recently launched a new and improved website where you can catch up on Big & Bright 🌈 ⭐ 👏 newsletters, as well as my latest LGBTQ+ reporting! And, while you’re here, please consider supporting our work:
|
A special thanks to Kind Clinic and Texas Health Action for underwriting our first sponsored vertical and our newsletter. All essays, reporting, and analysis will remain, as always, editorially independent.
🎵 When I interviewed Austin musician Caleb De Casper, he told me how public broadcasting nurtured his musical awakening, from classical symphonies to Little Richard’s appearance on Sesame Street. Coincidentally, I discovered Caleb’s music through a 2022 show where he and other local acts performed with a live symphony orchestra. The backers of that show were PBS and our local NPR affiliate, KUT.
😢 Sometimes it’s hard to grasp the scale of the damage right-wing politicians have done to our society, and then something personal brings it home. I found myself wondering whether the next generation will have the chance to discover the depth and wonder that music and the arts have to offer, thanks to bone-deep cuts to programs like public broadcasting. When I asked Caleb about this, he told me, “I hope that the wonderful things that we have in this world make it through the turbulence that we're experiencing right now.”
🌠 My queer stars, we can’t turn back the clock and undo what’s already been done. But what we can do is make sure each of us preserves the art, music and other media that brings us queer joy, and support the artists who continue to create despite a hostile culture. Hang onto those queer albums, books, comics, zines, and movies so we can use them as a lifeline that nurtures the next generation of queer kids. Like the living books from Fahrenheit 451, we can each of us carry forward the “wonderful things,” and keep them alive til this dark night ends.
🧛♂️ Read on for my interview with Caleb, a very Texas vampire, and for all the latest from queer life in our state and beyond …
|
|
Steers & Queers 🐂
What we’re writing and reading in Texas.
🌈 The City of Austin removed its rainbow crosswalks on Monday morning, a move made under pressure from the state government. As previously shared, locals already replaced the roadway art with other rainbow features in the gayborhood. Queer Austinites rallied on Tuesday, with drag queen Brigitte Bandit declaring we must refuse to “let our history and our presence be chipped away piece by piece.”
🐘 Neil J. Young of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks, ‘Why have LGBTQ+ Republicans suddenly gone silent in the face of homophobic attacks on James Talarico?’
🤑 Axios Dallas laid out the social and economic challenges LGBTQ+ Americans face as they weigh living in more affordable places (like Texas) versus cities in blue states where they may feel safer but the cost-of-living may be much higher.
♿ In honor of Disability Pride Month, OutSmart’s Brandon Wolf profiled longtime HIV survivor and Houston resident Nathaniel De La Fuente. 💅 Nathaniel slays when he tells Brandon, “I know that my inner strength can outmatch most people who deem themselves as normal.”
Stars & Stripes 🇺🇸
What’s happening in the rest of the gayborhood.
🪖 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that male servicemembers 30-years-old and up would have their testosterone tested, and would be able to receive testosterone supplements if it’s low, despite the same treatment being denied to many transgender servicemembers and vets. Kara Corcoran, executive director of Sparta Pride, accurately pointed out the policy’s contradictions: “The same class of evidence-based medical treatment cannot be characterized as readiness-enhancing for one group and readiness-destroying for another.”
🙏 Family members and advocates for trans rights are blaming the suicide of 16-year-old Idaho resident May Pollard on the harmful effects of anti-trans legislation. We won’t forget you, May, and we’ll fight in your name.
🏳️⚧️ Chalk up a win for once: Massive backlash forced Health and Human Services to halt plans to block medicare and medicaid funding to any hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to young people. However, the Trump admin is still targeting trans healthcare, including attempts to subpoena the medical records of trans teens.
📖 Republicans in the Senate introduced a book ban bill which, if it became law, could see literature acknowledging the existence of trans and other LGBTQ+ people censored from school libraries nationwide. Similar legislation was introduced in the House where it passed the Education and Workforce Committee along party lines. Neither bill is currently scheduled for a chamber-wide vote.
🫏 Meanwhile, the Democratic Party continues to fight internally over whether to fight for trans rights, after Amy Acton, the Dems candidate for governor in Ohio, and U.S. Representative Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, made transphobic remarks, drawing condemnation from other Buckeye Dems.
🇬🇧 Ultrabigot JK Rowling and her cohort are threatening Amnesty International, because the organization issued then retracted a report (full text here) calling out the shockingly bad state of trans rights on “TERF Island.” Classic “Are we the baddies?” moment.
⚧️ This week, I’m absolutely living for this headline from Quispe López, lifestyle editor for Them: “Elliot Page Is Three Things Transphobes Will Never Be: Happy, in a Hit Movie, and With a Girlfriend.” Not incidentally, Odyssey had a $124M opening weekend, despite the whining of very-online dudebros.
Bright & Buzzy📱
Memes and more.
🚽 Trans children don’t belong in toilets (from The Onion’s new Infowars).
✈️ When you're a lesbian at TSA.
🏳️🌈 The ever fabulous Vivian Wilson explains why we really need more gays in government.
Shameless Merch Plug 🧢
📚 If you’re like me and your to-read pile is always growing, then you need our Read Banned Books tote to carry home your latest bookstore (or public library!) haul. It features a freedom-fighting cowgirl who knows what’s up:
Reach out if you have tips, story ideas, or to tell me about your favorite queer art (kit@thebarbedwire.com).
🌈 Stay big, bright, and bold,
Kit (They/Them) 💖
The Big Story 🤳
Interview With a Lone Star Vampire: Caleb De Casper Is Reborn In Darkness
No Longer a ‘Good Boy,’ Caleb De Casper is back with a darker, more grown up sound and a stronger sense of self.
All rockstars have at least a little bit of the undead in them, according to Caleb De Casper.
“Musicians, true musicians, are vampires,” the Austin musician explained during an interview with The Barbed Wire before a recent performance. “We're night people, creatures of the night. We dabble in hedonism, (mind-altering) substances, intense passion and longing that we can't quite put our finger on.”
De Casper is hardly the first person to connect rock stars and vampires, or queer people with the monstrous. After all, The Vampire Lestat, which depicts Anne Rice’s antihero as a rockstar, has received buckets of praise and even racked up multiple GLAAD Media Awards for its positive representation of LGBTQ+ characters. And the connection between LGBTQ+ symbolism and horror has been the subject of much scholarship, but De Casper feels a more personal connection to the bloodsucker than most.
