Table of contents for February - March 2020 in OUT

Dear Reader, A new year and a new decade is upon us! If you’re like me, you may be feeling a mixture of excitement, sadness, irreverence, and exhaustion—and all of them are valid. After all, 2020 is shaping up to be one of those years we’ll remember as massively transformative. It’s currently the Season of All Seasons: awards, elections, and—at the time of printing this issue—an ongoing impeachment hearing for Donald Trump. When life gets this hectic, we can forget to celebrate our wins and just how far we’ve come. With our Culture issue, we’re celebrating all of the gifts that queer and transgender folks have bequeathed to the world and what some of our most brilliant minds have to say about them. In our Out/Take (p. 9), author and…

IN A CULTURAL MOMENT where RuPaul’s Drag Race is bringing unprecedented attention—and revenue—to drag, there remains an open question in the nightlife scene: How can the spoils of the drag boom be shared equitably among performers, even those who don’t have millions of followers on Instagram and lucrative Netflix deals? The reality is that while Drag Race winners like Trixie Mattel and Bianca Del Rio are booking sold-out shows across the country, drag remains a labor of love for many performers who may struggle to get paid on time, if at all. In a 2018 deep dive into the economics of the industry, The Stranger reported that the vast majority of performers are booked through Facebook and Twitter direct messages, usually without a written contract. Because the deal isn’t binding,…

FLOODED IN PINK, TEAL, AND VIOLET LIGHT beams and surrounded by a thick fog, singer Brittany Howard emerges before a racially- and gender-diverse crowd on stage at the Moore Theatre in Seattle. It’s mid-November (less than two months after she dropped her debut solo album, Jaime) in the wet, chilly city, but there’s a noticeable warmth in this medium-sized venue. Howard cloaked in all black—save a silvery, sequined cardigan, grips her guitar as if it’s the most cherished thing she’s ever held. As a mellow, yet heavy drum beat gears up, she begins the concert with “He Loves Me,” a soulful ode to God and what spirituality means to her. “I know he still loves me when / I’m smoking blunts / Loves me when I’m drinking too much /…

Laverne Cox and Chella Man individually break barriers and shatter ceilings with every step in their careers. So, it’s a slightly arresting moment to witness them both meeting for the first time. Though the Emmy-nominated actress best known for her role on Orange Is the New Black quite literally paved the way for the 21-year-old genderqueer model who made his acting debut in the DC Universe’s superhero series, Titans, last year, the pair is surely far beyond what our transcestors (or transgender ancestors) could’ve imagined. It’s a sharp, early winter afternoon deep in Brooklyn when Man arrives at our joint cover shoot and greets Cox, who has been on set all morning, dancing to Beyoncé and belting out operatic riffs as hair and makeup enhance her natural beauty. After some…

My dad was Latino and my mom is white. I’m a tall guy with black hair and olive skin. I’ve often been asked if I’m Italian, Indian, or Pakistani—and I tell them I’m Latino. I don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t know what all the Mexican food items on the menu are. This didn’t preclude me from torment! I played on a baseball team in high school, where I was nicknamed “Mexican,” “Dirty Sanchez,” “Beaner,” and “Wetback.” Yay, me! I love my granny because she calls me mijo and tells me stories of her life. But she is kind of the one who decided our family needed to be “American.” She had to cut off a piece of herself because she thought that the pain of being different would be…

We should encourage the industry to create authentic stories by including disabled writers, directors, and actors in the story-making process. I am executive producing a series and have several other projects in the works, but we still have a long way to go in portraying disabled characters, particularly Deaf folks, in Hollywood. If a character is Deaf, the actor needs to be as well. Yes, hearing actors can “act” like a Deaf person, but usually there are behaviors that they lack and/or give away their inexperience in American Sign Language. I was once expected to coach a hearing actor in ASL in one day despite asking for more days so I could quickly reteach/adjust on the spot as necessary. In the end, my request was ignored, and the actor made…

Our smartphones, and other newfangled, digitized devices can keep us on schedule, and abreast of the time, but they will never be as chic as a classic watch, and—that’s on period, love. With the Santos de Cartier relaunch, Cartier pivoted back to letting classic design do talking. “I’ve always been charmed by simplicity,” Alberto Santos-Dumont, the aviation pioneer who ordered the first Cartier wristwatch in 1904. And that charm remains with a design featuring an 18k yellow-gold face, diamond-paved bezel, interchangeable leather straps, and slightly stretched typeface for the numerals nodding to its grand history. To bring a little flair to your timepiece-centered look, why not add some chromas to your cuticles. No doubt Juan Alvear knows just what’ll make your aesthetic pop. “Nail art can be for anyone, it…

WHEN I SAW BOYS DON’T CRY—the film based on the 1993 rape and murder of a young trans man, Brandon Teena—during its initial release, I threw up in the bathroom of the movie theater. After finishing the film, I went home and, without yet understanding why, re-read Frankenstein, taking what I can only describe as comfort in the “transgender rage” of Victor Frankenstein’s creation described by theorist Susan Stryker in her seminal 1994 paper, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” I get all of it now. A monster is, after all, more powerful than a victim. As a trans woman, Stryker, too, saw something of herself in the wounded being at the heart of Mary Shelley’s novel. She notes that trans people who have altered their…

LAST SUMMER, WHEN IT WAS TOO HOT TO VENTURE OUTSIDE and far too hot to even consider preparing food that didn’t arrive in a takeout bag, I developed an obsession with Bon Appétit’s YouTube channel. For hours, I’d watch as an eclectic cast of food editors made their favorite pasta dish, tried out survival cooking in the great outdoors, searched for the perfect New York City pizza slice, and reverse-engineered a gourmet version of Twinkies. I was obsessed, and so were millions of others—Bon Appétit’s YouTube channel has more than five million subscribers, with their big franchises (like Claire Saffitz’s Gourmet Makes), pulling in over two million views per installment. But my interest in Bon Appétit’s presence on the video streaming platform traced further back than its recent explosion in…

THERE ARE FEW SOUNDS SO UBIQUITOUS TO QUEER LIFE that they are instantly recognizable: the chirp of a Grindr notification, the clack of a drag queen’s fan, the soft smack of an air kiss between old friends. But is any sound as pervasive and thrilling as the comforting cackle of Fran Drescher, best known as The Nanny’s Fran Fine? Since it premiered in 1993, The Nanny—and the woman who created it—have been an indelible part of queer culture thanks to its camp sensibility and outrageous fashion. “It just made sense that [the show] would’ve been embraced by the gay community because it was us creating it and we have that sensibility,” says Drescher, now 62, referring to her collaboration with former husband Peter Marc Jacobson. Drescher believes her character resonated…