🧑‍🎄🎅🤶 Santa knows your gayest secrets, darling ✨

🎄 No matter what or how you celebrate … Happy Holidays, my queer stars, and welcome back to Big & Bright  🌈⭐👏! Do you remember how that old song goes? He knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows that you are gay af so stop pretending to be str8 … 

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.

⛄ In hindsight, there’s always signs … And who better to know than your jolly old elf, Mixter Santa Kit themselves? ⚧️ My most recent realization has to do with my childhood obsession with the song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” … we all agree that Cyndi is Mother but, in hindsight, isn’t it another sign I wasn’t a cis straight boy? 

✉️ This week, Santa’s mailbag is bulging with letters, and so many of them are laced with children’s secret wishes … and not-so-secret identities, glittering like sugar on a gingerbread cookie. At The Barbed Wire, writer and musician August Ponthier brought us six of their letters to Santa, beginning in 2002 at age six, and stretching all the way to today, when they’re twenty-nine. Whether it was a lifesize Barbie to help guide them back to the cisterhood, or a sick skateboard they can use to distract their classmates and themselves from that Sapphic yearning, each of August’s Christmas wishes hints at the person they would become, and who they hope we’re all someday free to be. 

Steers & Queers 🐂

What we’re writing and reading in Texas. 

🤠 Thank goodness for The Barbed Wire’s bi queen contributor Taylor Crumpton and her pen. Read about her burning desire for Cuffing Season’s #1 Draft Pick, a man who oozes irresistible charm, Texas’ finest movie star, a boy every mom dreams of her bisexual daughter bringing home for the holidays: Glen Powell. Editor-in-chief Olivia Messer’s mom makes a cameo in this one, as do repeated mentions of Out magazine’s reporting on Glen’s thirst traps.

🚩 Lauren McGaughy, at The Texas Newsroom, reports that the state is continuing to try to assemble lists of transgender people; this time it’s a list of about 100 purportedly trans people who unsuccessfully tried to change the gender marker on their driver’s licenses between August 2024 and August 2025. I agree with Landon Ritchie, of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, that the list and any potential uses of it “raises a lot of red flags.” I’ll continue to monitor this story.

🏢 Arlington, Texas Pride is canceled for 2026 after the city revoked LGBTQ+ protections under pressure from the Trump administration. I wish the best for Arlington queers in whatever they do next in response … And remember, Stonewall wasn’t a parade. 

🚽 Attorney General Ken Paxton established a tip line for violators of the state’s new anti-trans bathroom bill, even encouraging people to snap photos of supposed violations. Butthe Texas Tribune reports protests and challenges against the law are already ramping up, and the city of Austin recently pledged to protect access to public facilities, even promising to renovate buildings where necessary. This is one fight where it’s crystal clear who’s on the right side of history, and it’s not the perverts taking photos in bathrooms.

🫏 David Taffet, senior staff writer at the Dallas Voice, created this handy list of some LGBTQ+ candidates in the Democratic primary, from Congress all the way down to local judges! Ryan Adamczeski of The Advocate reminded us that whoever wins the primary race for Senate, they’re likely to be a queer ally! Remember to vote March 3, 2026! (As an aside, I'm still feeling glittery and glowy from the time we spent with Judge Denise Hernández and ten lucky couples earlier this month).

🙏 Our queer hero: When our scummy governor came for our rainbow crosswalks, Reverend Rachel Griffin-Allison responded by painting a rainbow on the steps of her church, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church, which stood across from the site of a former rainbow walk in Dallas’ gayborhood. This move led the Dallas Voice to name her their LGBTQ+ Texan of 2025. Now, she’s taken it a step further, placing a powerful installation in support of immigrants atop those same steps. Thanks for keeping the holidays merry and gay, Reverend!

Stars & Stripes 🇺🇸

What’s happening in the rest of the gayborhood. 

🎥 Samantha Riedel of Them reports that the Trump administration is targeting 12 companies which make chest binders, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration claiming (for the first time in history) that the compression garments are unregistered “medical devices.” When will someone invent a cure for everyone in the Trump admin being creepy little busybodies? 

⚕️Even as Representative Sarah McBride recruited Republicans to protect transgender healthcare in Congress, RFK Jr.’s Health & Human Services launched a new attack on hospitals, potentially blocking them from accessing medicare and medicaid funding if they continue to offer gender-affirming youth care. However, Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning reports that the Trans Youth Emergency Project is prepared to help trans kids maintain their healthcare by connecting them with new providers. 

🏆 Best of lists: It’s that time to look back at the year that just passed, and that means best of lists. 2025 saw some amazing queer films, with a few favorites selected by CBC, IndieWire, Out and queen of schlock John Waters. Over on TV, there was some fabulous LGBTQ+ representation, some of which won’t return in 2026. And let’s not forget to debate the Best Songs (or albums) of 2025 with lists from Out, Them and Xtra. As for yours truly, I’m just relieved to finally have an official cut of “Subway” this year. 🙇‍♀️ What were your favorties?

🌈 Rainbows everywhere! In Dallas, the colorful vibes spread from Oak Lawn UMC to nearby Roy G’s restaurant. Meanwhile, St. Petersburg, Florida installed new rainbow bike corrals. If those b*tches won’t let us have our crosswalks, let’s cover every other available inch of our cities in rainbows.

Bright & Buzzy📱

Memes and more.

📚 Why do drag queens want to read to children, anyway? 

🐀 Look, there’s only one thing I want under the tree: and it’s #RatTok throwing it in a circle. 

💅 Until I talk to you again, have a c*nty little Christmas my queer stars! 

Shameless Merch Plug 🧢

🌈You don’t need to memorize the hanky code colors to interpret this Texas Pride bandanna from our merch shop. Whether you’re on the road or right here in the Lone Star State, you’ll tell the world that you (or your cute puppy) love Texas in spite of herself.

I’m looking forward to cooking up a storm this week with my spouse and hugging my cats. I hope the holidays are kind to you, and I’ll see you here in the New Year… In the meantime, reach out if you have tips, ideas, or just to kiki (kit@thebarbedwire.com).

🌈 Stay big, bright, and bold in 2026, my queer stars! 

Kit (They/Them) 💖

Who Could’ve Guessed I Was Queer? Six ‘Glass Closet’ Letters to Santa

Who didn’t ask for a Barbie who can kiss her best friends, a computer for their “Twilight” fan club, or a skateboard for sick ollies?

By August Ponthier

The purest expression of a child’s heart must be the wishes sent to an imaginary man wearing a red coat with white fur. 

In all my childhood yearnings, I could not have foreseen just how queer my own future would be, full of genderbending shows, vivid parades, and loud protests. But when I look back at what I asked Santa to bring me, the clues were all there. My favorite Christmas tradition was, in fact, a trail of proverbial bread crumbs to my own identity.

Allow me to take you on a sacred tour of my gayest impulses and deepest childhood desires — as they evolved from the age of 6, when I thought I invented the idea of queerness, to 29 — when all I want to do is protect it.

A Life-Size Barbie

All I want for Christmas is a Barbie. The year is 2002, and I’m six years old.

I live in a suburb of Dallas-Forth Worth with my parents, my baby sister, and a floppy-eared dog named Oreo. She’s black and white, so the name was a stroke of pure innovation on my part. I have almost everything I need: my own bedroom populated with books about fairies and a backyard where I can catch rollie-pollies. 

Except I’d like one more thing.

Ideally I’d like a Life-Size Barbie — blonde with a permasmile — but any Barbie will do. Not to ask for too much, but if she had Barbie friends or a Barbie house, that would be really great. I’d like Barbara and her coterie to help me work out some of life’s greatest mysteries. I’m relatively new here, so I have a lot of questions about the world that I’m not quite sure how to ask. Questions like “When I get older, will I want to wear dresses?” and “What does being a woman mean?” and “Is having a husband a good thing?”

I would surely be the first kid in the world to put Ken’s clothes on Barbie, a bit of artistic genius I came up with over some Kraft Mac and Cheese while watching “Dragontales.” I think she would look great in moss-colored cargo pants and an orange, oversized tank top! Ken won’t be using them anyway because he’ll constantly be at work; my Barbie doesn’t like the idea of him being home very often. Unclear why; I refuse to examine that further.

However, I can imagine my Babs spending her days with a best friend, sharing her greatest highs and lows. They’ll play in the Barbie Dreamhouse, where every night’s a sleepover. They’ll gallop on Barbie horses, and they’ll take turns driving the Barbie car. They’ll own everything equally, by the way. I would really like a friend like that in real life, but that seems like a big ask for Christmas. 

Maybe through the years, playing God with Mattel plastic can help me explore the social dynamics of being different, something I’m already feeling somehow in Texas. I’ll make my Barbie and her best friend kiss each other, which I’m certain has never happened before.

Anyway, I have to go. There’s a “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” special on TV.

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