The City of Del Rio, Texas, elected a gay man as mayor during its May 5 municipal election according to unofficial results published by the Del Rio News-Herald on May 6. The race was won by 35-year-old Bruno “Ralphy” Lozano, who captured 62 percent of the vote, giving him a victory over incumbent Robert Garza.…
2017 In Review: Artistic Highlights and Milestones
Originally published in the San Antonio Current. As we prepare to bid farewell to a year riddled with chaos and tragedy, and cautiously welcome another with an odd combination of hope and uncertainty, it feels slightly therapeutic to revisit some of San Antonio’s more notable moments of 2017. In an effort to paint a broad…
LGBT Activists to March on Brownsville Federal Courthouse
A group of LGBT activists from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley are planning to march on April 17 through downtown Brownsville to the Federal Courthouse “to stand firmly against all legislative attacks currently being waged against the trans and queer communities throughout the South.” Participants say the march, which is being organized by Aquí Estamos, will…
Words of Wisdom from Celebrated Author Carla Trujillo
Born in New Mexico and based in California, Carla Trujillo is an esteemed fiction writer, editor, educator and a founding member of the Macondo Writers Workshop that Sandra Cisneros established in San Antonio in 1995. Celebrated for her novel What Night Brings (2003) and her work as editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Chicana…
A polyfidelitous family fights to keep their kids
“My kids don’t see what goes on in our bedroom. We sleep.” After the housing crash of 2008, James Lowe, a former construction worker, moved to San Antonio from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. With him came Elizabeth. The two were close friends at the time and hoped to find a better life in San…
Most Influential 2015: Neel Lane
In February 2014, Neel Lane, along with litigation partner Barry Chasnoff, led a team from the San Antonio office of Akin Gump on behalf of clients Nicole Dimetman and Cleopatra De Leon and Victor Holmes and Mark Phariss. The two couples were seeking a preliminary injunction to bar Texas from enforcing its same-sex marriage ban.…
Wedding Beaus: Wisdom from newlyweds
In celebration of the historic June 26 ruling from the Supreme Court finding a Constitutional right to marriage for same-sex couples, we’re posting stories and photos from our Spring wedding issue. Clay Rodgers spent one of his most memorable dates in a car. He and then boyfriend Ryan decided to drive to Las Vegas. The couple…
Now that you can get married … a few words of advice
Finally! It’s been too long. It’s way overdue, and we’re excited to see the barriers to marriage equality fall down. There’s even a clerk down at the courthouse waiting to give you a license. But wait just five more minutes, and read this first! Now that our community has the right to marry, we also…
Don Coyote: Flores’s ‘Sex as a Political Condition’
Carlos Nicolas Flores’s new novel, Sex as a Political Condition, bears the subtitle “a Border novel” and has a distinctly Mexican-American flavor, but its observations are universal. It sees the world through the perspective of Honoré, a former drug trafficker trying to survive selling knickknacks to tourists. Among the knickknacks are some old tin soldiers–a…
What you’ll need to get married in TX
We asked our sister pub the Current for a get-me-to-the courthouse-on-time checklist and they quickly obliged: Bexar County Clerk Gerard Rickhoff says his office will begin to grant licenses within 30 minutes of a ruling and he’ll stay open after hours if he needs to. Both applicants will need proof of age and identity by…