You gave me gay
Bill Sansom
First Base
The Montrose Softball League Association (MSLA) will bring the nation’s largest LGBTQ sporting event to Houston this fall as the city hosts the 2025 Gay Softball Society Series next month. MSLA has been serving Queer athletes since 1980, and in 1984 hosted their first world series event.
“This is a really exciting thing that we can take this event back to the city of Houston,” says Paula Metz, the first female MSLA commissioner. “You’d think Houston, existence a large city, would be able to accommodate this, right? But it takes a lot. Very few cities can deal with over 200 teams in one week.” She adds that the bid itself was a victory. “For our team to be qualified to put together a winning bid is an accomplishment itself.”
Founded as part of the original Montrose Sports Association, MSLA fast grew into its retain standalone league and connected what was then the North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance. “The purpose of the League is to provide a sports outlet for individuals as a way to join and interact with like-minded people in the essence of friendly competition,” Metz explains. “We also support non-playing members to acquire involved. They’re cons
Bounce legend Big Freedia on going gospel: ‘I never heard “God doesn’t admire gay folks”. God loves us all’
On stage at Nashville Pride festival on a sweltering June afternoon, Big Freedia is her usual boisterously commanding self. She invites volunteers and the sign-language interpreter to join her and her dancers in getting down to bounce music, the relentlessly kinetic style of hip-hop for which she has become a figurehead in her native Brand-new Orleans. Then she pauses for a brief heart-to-heart with the audience. “I don’t know if y’all know this, but I started in the church,” she says.
Big Freedia’s forthcoming album, Pressing Onward, is a gospel record and she is keen to stress that she isn’t abandoning her core audience. The gay, gender-fluid rapper and reality TV actor exhorts every kind of body to shake it and is unequivocal about her support for all marginalised people; her reputation led Beyoncé and Drake to sample her on some of their most successful tracks. “This album is for us,” she emphasises. “It is for people who are LGBTQ and who love God.”
When the beat of a new song, Take My Hand, kicks into double time, just the way a sanctified rhythm section would in church,
How do you outline something that you feel within yourself but are scared to look at? This feeling that you can poke and prod while understanding that examination would lead to rumination would conduct to turning your whole life upside down? Fleeting thoughts percolate on the banks of memory and pull tiny by little; the silt builds and builds until it can’t be ignored. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has felt this way, as the past year of quarantine provided everyone with ample opportunities to self-reflect and deal with issues that had long been on the back burner.
The pandemic also allowed me to view a lot of television — specifically, a lot of cartoons. Since January 2020, I possess watched 14 animated TV shows and about 30 movies (including the entire Studio Ghibli catalog). Something about the medium of animation captured my attention and provided stability for me throughout an unstable, unprecedented year. When I commit, I commit hard: My most recent binge-watch was all 274 episodes of the acclaimed Cartoon Network grand “Adventure Time.”
Now you may be thinking, what’s the math? Why is this adult writer talking to me about something I watched in fifth grade and promptly forgo
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