u/atwojay

>Yep, I’m eight months late to the hubbub. Gay friends kept telling me to watch, but I resisted. Having been burned by gay-eye-candy shows without much substance (Red, White & Royal Blue, anyone?) I was done with watching gay-leaning content just to “support the cause.”

>Then my discerning Canadian pal James was emphatic — “You need to watch it, Joe. It’s only six episodes. It’ll change you.” Oh, come on. A gay sports story? One that’s believable? And well done?

>I wasn’t holding my breath.

>I took the plunge earlier this month. By episode four or five I felt like I’d been smacked over the head by a sledgehammer — in a good way! Now I’m floating here in the blessed honeymoon period, where it’s another day, another 24 hours and somehow I haven’t stopped thinking about the “Little-Gay-Hockey-Show-That Could,” weeks later. I’m one of those crazed, over-thinking fan converts, needing my Shane and Ilya daily-reflection fix.

>Warning: This essay deals with mental illness and suicidal ideation. See the end of this story for lifeline contact information.

>Chattanooga, kind of an undignified name for a place to kill myself.

>Yet here I was, standing on the edge of Lookout Mountain, high above Chattanooga, ruminating about that very thing.

>‘Chattanooga Choo Choo won’t you choo choo me home.’ Yes, but in a casket, I thought grimly.

>It wasn’t the first time.

>There had been another occurrence when I lay in the back seat of my car, horribly depressed, thinking there was no other way out. What stopped me was the thought of my kids losing a parent, and I didn’t know how to complete the task. I hate pain, but I guess when the pain of living overtakes the fear of dying, one slowly becomes open to the option.

>After an horrendous relationship break up, I was deep in the mire, as sad, heartbroken and miserable as I’d ever been. Despite kind words from some friends, and support from family, I couldn’t recall ever feeling in this much pain.

>Here was a perfect opportunity to bid farewell to my crappy life. I felt numb, there were few people around, and death would be certain.

>Plagiarism or embellishing a CV would not normally make it into the news, whether proven or alleged. It’s a matter for an employer or academic institution to deal with — it’s not in the public interest. Despite this, 249 articles on Arday were published in 22 days; 188 were published within the last 9 days of his life, after he had resigned from his position at Cambridge.

>It clearly wasn’t about forcing Arday to resign. The right-wing media used him as a political football to argue against DEI schemes — because they believe that they exclude white people from top jobs. They don’t. In fact, in my experience of academia and work in general, these schemes don’t even come close to levelling the playing field for those from demographics that are disadvantaged.

>In an age of increasingly visible rights movements and an endless proliferation of individual expression, provocative – even radical – voices are hardly unusual. Meanwhile, as traditional moral constraints have weakened, sexual liberation has reshaped the way we understand intimacy, with relationships themselves increasingly giving way to the ambiguity of the “situationship.” Amid all this noise, however, we seem to have paid less attention to something far simpler and perhaps more fundamental: the affection, longing, and desire that can arise between two people of the same sex.

>As an expat living in Japan, I came from another conservative Asian society and had once imagined Japan to be more open. Over time, I found the reality more complicated: growing visibility and advocacy coexist with persistent social conservatism. Perhaps this tension is why I often find myself thinking back to those early, half-formed feelings I could not yet put into words.

>What draws me, then, is a quieter, earlier form of same-sex longing: feelings that were rarely named, seldom expressed directly, and often existed only in gestures, glances, and emotional undercurrents. I find precisely this almost unspoken intimacy in several films by Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–1998), a major figure in postwar Japanese cinema whose work often explored family, social convention, and emotional restraint.

>No one has ever praised me for my fashion sense. In the 60s and 70s it didn’t matter. Lesbians all wore pretty much the same thing — jeans and T shirts. I bought my flannel shirts at JC Penney in the boys’ department, boys size 18. I worked construction, and so I could wear the same outfits for work and play. For lesbian dress up events I bought a used tuxedo. But straight affairs like weddings left me perplexed as I surveyed my closet.

>I didn’t have a thing to wear.

>By the 1980s I felt the need for something a little dressier. I enlisted my friend Joan and her tailor girlfriend Lucy to help me. They accompanied me to Macy’s in downtown San Francisco to buy what my father might describe as a sport coat. Something you would wear with slacks of a different color.

>Dr. Amy Acton served as the Director of the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) from 2019 to 2020. During this time, she gave frequent public status reports on the Covid-19 epidemic and ODH recommendations. She became a lightning rod for the political controversy surrounding measures like masking recommendations, state stay-at-home orders, the temporary closure of gyms and businesses, and school shutdowns. All this occurred while she served alongside the Republican Ohio Governor, Mike DeWine.

>As a result, Dr. Acton received national acclaim and awards — including the JFK Library’s Profile in Courage Award — for swift medical leadership that flattened Ohio’s initial infection curve!

>In 2020, facing heavy opposition from conservative lawmakers and anti-lockdown protestors, she resigned in June, stating that she stepped down because she disagreed with political pressures to sign orders she believed would compromise public safety and science.

>She seemed to be person of integrity, scientific knowledge and understanding, and someone who could be a leader of Ohio, rather than a political weathervane, as is typical of most politicians. I supported her early on and have given to her campaign.

>Unfortunately, recent events have given me reason to doubt her integrity after all.

>On June 30, 2026, she told The Toledo Blade that she does “not support boys playing in girls’ sports” and would uphold Ohio’s existing restrictions as governor.

>I don’t miss any of my ex-boyfriends and often wonder how I even found something in them to like in the first place. Each one of them broke a little something in me. I know I am supposed to focus on the positive aspect; I try to remind myself that each of those relationships taught me something about myself that allowed me to grow and become the woman I am today, but to be completely honest the feelings of regret often take the lead.

>I resigned myself to my fate and got a cat to embrace my newfound status of “single for life.”

>Nestled between grey, nondescript buildings stood a small country-style house. It was very purple with white trim, and a sign on the front lawn read, “Salón de Belleza Memo” (Memo Beauty Salon).

>Memo, short for Guillermo, was accused of being queer. A male who engaged in the business of beauty was not macho in Colombia, period, so Memo was assumed to be gay. They may have been right, but I don’t recall anyone telling me.

>I asked, and, “Yes,” he answered. “ I am queer.”

>Relabeling gender-affirming care as a billing-code scam serves two purposes at once. The first is old: the word fabricates the fact, and the institution treats the word as if it were the world. The second is that calling it a “scam” frees Trump administration officials from debating the merits of the treatment.

>My name is Rachel Addison and I am closeted transgender woman.

>That means ‘I’m a coward.’

>No, No, No. This doesn’t help.

>I thought that ‘finding myself’ meant that I would find my niche, no matter how small. But finding yourself doesn’t mean ‘finding all the answers’, it more means ‘finding all the right problems to solve.’

>Imagine the scenario: “You've stayed together with your partner for years and realised you are a transgender person, and you're about to change your whole life. How will your relationship transform? What struggles will you face? Will your heterosexual couple become lesbian/gay?”

>Sounds like a script for a drama or psychological thriller movie, but this is the reality for many trans people, especially those who transition later in life, and their partners. What might change in the couple, and what can remain the same?

>Being a “bi-myself” single is a special kind of hilarious tragedy, especially when you spend half your time toggling your filters between “everyone” and “just one gender,” as if the algorithm can solve a crisis of identity.

>I recently learned the hard way that my bisexuality is a secret best kept under a triple-locked vault.

>In May of this year, the U.S. Department of Justice and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital resolving a years-long investigation into a pediatric gender-affirming care program. Texas Children’s Hospital eventually decided (no doubt influenced by the 2024 Trump win) that it made more sense to settle than spend valuable time and money fighting the suit.

>They shut down the care, and as part of the settlement agreed to pay ten million dollars to fund a “detransition clinic.”

>This is part of a series about my complicated relationship with sex, addiction, and my attempt to “decox.”

>At the start of the month, I decided to see if I could go without sex for 30 days, and document what happened along the way. Six days in, the experiment is already getting complicated.

>It’s a solitary pursuit, but I rarely feel lonely when I write. Through correspondence, I now count some writers, editors and readers as friends. Though we’ve never met in real life, I feel the threads of friendship. There’s also a relaxed anonymity to working in this manner, still just a little behind the curtain.

>But imagine if I just took some of my writing to a room full of strangers? What if I stood up in front of a room full of live, breathing humans and read something of mine out loud, and in person?

>What if those strangers were attendees at a poetry slam, and there are other talented writers in the crowd? What if they’re mostly cisgender and straight? What if they think I’m too old? What if people don’t like my work? What if, what if, what if?

>Gawd, I can feel my mouth drying and the nerves rising. There’s a whole new level of discomfort, but also maybe just a frisson of excitement.

>

>

>One phrase, seven words that summed up a life.

>That opening line explained the feeling, defined the unease, spoke to a part that was not supposed to exist, said all that was needed to be said. Blunt. Direct. It would take me years to read the rest of the poem while that line percolated through a life that sensed from an undefined beginning that a man was not the being that belonged in the body.

>A poem in Spanish with an English title, Walking Around, by Pablo Neruda. You can read the poem in Spanish here, and an English translation here. The first line in Spanish, and then in English translation:

>SUCEDE que me canso de ser hombre.

>It so happens I am sick of being a man.

>Elliot Page is once again under fire from transphobes for the crime of *checks notes* appearing in a major film. I wish I could say I was joking here, but that’s really all this recent wave of backlash to Page from transphobes comes down to.

>The entire narrative originates from a single line in gospel historian Anthony Heilbut’s liner notes to a 2000 compilation album, repeated later in Heilbut’s 2012 book, The Fan Who Knew Too Much.

>Heilbut wrote that after Broadnax was stabbed to death, an autopsy revealed he had female anatomy. He named no source for that claim, cited no document, and pointed to no official record. Corcoran tried to verify the claim, requesting a copy of the autopsy from the Philadelphia Police Department and receiving a reply of “no record found.”

>I’m not exactly a covert leftist, so it may surprise some people to hear me say that humanity needs both progressive and conservative ideologies to survive.

>Hear me out.

>Which is more important: creating new art, or conserving classic art? That’s a bit like asking whether it’s more important to make new friends or keep the old. (We all know that one is silver and the other’s gold.)

>As with art, as with friends, progress and conservation both play vital roles in human society. They should work in tandem: pushing human innovation to new heights while preserving and protecting the things that have historically worked out for us as a species.

>So it’s a real shame that U.S. conservatives are so focused on returning to moments in history that were objectively worse for human comfort and happiness… and that so much of that “conservation” is specifically anti-queer.

>How so, you ask? Let’s first look at what progress and conservation actually mean in theory.