👽⭐ From One Queer Star to Another

📡 Interrupting tranmission!

Dear queer stars, it is I, Kit O’Connell, your enby aunt (and sometimes unc), broadcasting to you from my space station in geosynchronous orbit above the Lone Star State. I’m honored to welcome you back to to Big & Bright  🌈⭐👏 — with all the latest on queer life down there. 

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.

🛸 This is our very third B&B newsletter, and I’ve got y’all in my tractor beam! Thanks to Olivia for getting things started, but I’m grabbing the mic now 😈. I’m officially your Big & Bright newsletter writer, and you can find me contributing two stories per month to the website. Look for pop culture takes, news features, and personal essays. I won’t lie, this piece about life in Texas as a transgender journalist feels especially vulnerable to share, but I also know the power of seeing ourselves mirrored in the media. And not just in the moments where we’re fighting for survival. We need to share stories of queer joy, resilience, and self-discovery too. 

Find my essay below, and keep reading for the biggest and brightest in Texas news!

Steers & Queers 🐂

What we’re writing and reading in Texas. 

⛺ Tired of the gay bars? Touch grass! (But really.) At The Barbed Wire, Mario Leal, Jr. took us on to Camp Nackte, one of four LGBTQ+ campgrounds in Texas, for a clothing-optional adventure. As one business partner at the camp said, “You can just be your true self; have a good time, get dirty, hang in a hammock, and not worry about who’s seeing you or who’s going to try to judge you.”

Come Inside Texas’ Gayest Campground

The first rainbow pride flag used green to signify nature. Now across the country, LGBTQ+ communities are rediscovering the peace of camping, hiking and building spaces that feel both safe and restorative outside of gay bar life.

By Mario Leal Jr

🎓 S. Baum at the Substack Erin in the Morning reports that The Board of Regents for the Texas A&M University System voted that professors will need prior approval to teach about race, sexuality or so-called “gender ideology” (that is, trans people just living their lives). The ruling is already causing predictable chaos.

🛍️ Austin's Little Gay Shop and neighboring East Side businesses were vandalized when someone shot multiple windows with a “high caliber BB gun,” per the shop's TikTok. We genuinely hate to see it.

🦸‍♀️ Our hero: OutSmart magazine profiled Gwen Howerton, the Chron’s transgender Texas Culture Reporter, in a wonderful article about the importance of visibility and why trans reporters have to fight to tell stories that aren’t all “doom and gloom.”

Stars & Stripes 🇺🇸

What’s happening in the rest of the gayborhood. 

⚧️ November 20 was Trans Day of Remembrance, when communities gather to honor the lives lost in the past year. CNN reports at least 27 trans and nonbinary people have been killed since last year.

💊 A landmark study in the Journal of Pediatrics found that gender-affirming care for transgender young people reduces suicidality by as much as 70%. As Erin Reed wrote in her analysis for Erin in the Morning, “Gender-affirming care saves lives. It remains one of the most effective interventions available for transgender youth who need it.”

👩‍⚖️ A federal judge blocked efforts by the Trump administration to subpoena the medical records of patients receiving gender-affirming from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. At The Advocate, Christopher Wiggins reports that the attempt came amid widespread attempts to access records from over 20 hospitals or clinics.

🧹 After crying through the ending of Wicked: For Good, I got a little choked up again when I read that some of the movie’s most sapphic moments, including that scene at the closet door, were largely improvised. “I think both of us were just figuring out how each of our characters would actually say goodbye,” Cynthia Erivo said in E! 

📱 Bright & Buzzy

Memes and more.

😡 Are you bisexual and angry? 

🍲 Sorry, we don't make the rules: Men cannot eat soup. 

🐿️ Finally, sometimes wouldn’t we all like to be this lucky squirrel?

Shameless Merch Plug 🧢

🏳️‍🌈 Unseasonably warm weather means you can wear our Texas Pride Crop Tee home for the holidays — but it pairs perfectly with a cute jacket when it actually cools down. Available in both white and bubblegum pink, for all you pretty Glindas out there.

That’s all for this issue, but I’ll be back in two weeks. Remember, my stars, I’m always here if you’ve got tips or ideas (kit@thebarbedwire.com). 

🌈 Until next time, stay big, bright and bold! 

Kit (They/Them) 💖

I’m a Trans Journalist Choosing to Live in Texas. Here’s Why That Matters.

Allow Kit O’Connell to introduce themselves.

By Kit O'Connell

I was probably 13 years old.

It was near the end of middle school, during a wintry holiday vacation back home in Connecticut. I was at my best friend Kate’s house, sitting in her bedroom, and listening to her dish with other girls from my class. Honest, unfiltered talk. Complaints about boys. 

“Wait a minute,” I asked. “What about me? Aren’t I one of the boys?” 

Oh Kit, don’t worry, you don’t count, they all assured me.

I remember later, when I returned home, I asked my mother, “What do they mean I don’t count as a boy?”

I don’t even remember what advice she gave me, but we both recalled this incident recently, when I called my mom to tell her I’d started taking estrogen. That remembered question, “What do they mean I don’t count?” had popped back into both of our heads 34 years later. 

Now it’s taken on a new shape. 

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