The Barbed Wire

🏳️‍🌈 My dear queer stars, congrats on making it through Pride Month, and welcome back to Big & Bright 🌈 ⭐ 👏! I hope you’ve rehydrated and recovered. Pride may be over, but the discourse never stops, because some folks seemed determined to reheat a very old discussion… ✋  Hold up, before we go further … have you joined The Barbed Wire yet? Please become a member now on our new and improved site! You'll support this newsletter and our reporting on LGBTQ+ Texas.

Eight years ago, a moment of humor shared between two women blossomed into a movement for weirdos in North Texas. In 2018, Haley Ballenger had just moved to Fort Worth from Houston, where her husband had family ties and deep roots but she didn’t know anyone. Casting about for a new social circle, the mother of two joined a book club and hit it off with another mom there like herself. “We were joking one night,” Ballenger recalled. “Yeah, we're not regular moms, we're cool moms.

🤔 Welcome back, my beloved queer stars, to Big & Bright 🌈 ⭐ 👏. Your Aunt/Uncle Kit has more deep thoughts for you, alongside the latest in Texas LGBTQ news. This week I'm wondering … Have you considered the benefits of repeating history? 🙏 We need your support to keep The Barbed Wire alive ... Please become a member now if you haven't joined yet. And a special thanks to Kind Clinic and Texas Health Action for underwriting our first sponsored vertical and our newsletter.

Holden will never forget the discomfort he felt on his second visit to a Veterans Affairs’ endocrinologist for gender-affirming care. It was spring of 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic was raging across the globe. The army vet was masked up in a tiny, stuffy exam room, when his endocrinologist asked if she could invite medical students to join them.

Howdy y’all, it’s Brian Gaar with The Barbed Wire. Welcome back to Texas, which continues to be the only state capable of producing all of these headlines at the same time.

EXCLUSIVE If anyone had told Joey Giminiani what was under his house, he never would've bought it. On April 23, Giminiani took off work at the electric utility and joined a Zoom meeting from the home he had sunk his life savings into. He watched as the residential developers on the call insisted on two things. First, that no matter what anyone said, the site was safe. And second, that no one ever had any reason to tell him what lay beneath it.

EXCLUSIVE It was 6 p.m. in downtown Austin. Traffic was humming, and responsible adults were bustling, which is to say it was absolutely the wrong time to eat Whataburger. Whataburger is 2 a.m. food. Eating it while the sun is still up feels like seeing a teacher at the grocery store: technically allowed, but unsettling. But my friends and I had pressing business.

Wild Texas Newsletter 🗣️The Texans Who Refused To Shut Up This week’s stories are about the Texans who built communities, whether that meant opening Black-owned bookstores during a racial reckoning or organizing queer mutual aid in Dallas, decades before Stonewall. Howdy y’all, it’s Brian Gaar again, senior editor of The Barbed Wire.

In 1988, the city of Dallas filled in a hole. City council spent half a million dollars to fix a dangerous gap left on a vacant lot by a construction company. Seemingly good news, right? Well, to local LGBTQ+ activists, it was a sign of how little local politicians cared about them. At the time, the AIDS pandemic was tearing through the local gay population.

In Austin, a city with an abundance of drag shows, one monthly showcase offers a unique platform — and launch pad — for emerging talent. “You get to see future legends get their start, and other people just flourish and find their niche.” That’s how “Big Tits, Bigger Dreams,” or BTBD, was described by co-host and regular performer Reyah Sunshine at this month’s event on May 2.