John Price and Joseph Pizzini are remaking homes for the next 50 years It all started with a maxed-out credit card. (This is actually almost true.) It was in New Braunfels, and the year was 2000. John Price found himself about to lose his home to foreclosure, so he decided on a Hail Mary…
Vet Erika Land pulls poetry from her PTSD
“I had to shut off my emotions. The only emotion was anger.” Erika Land’s memories of her deployment at a military hospital in Iraq include a military pilot’s brain fragments spilling out over her hands. She began obsessively washing them. She’s since recovered from that compulsion, but other symptoms of her PTSD are not as…
Boylesque legend Tigger! is stripping to change the world
“It makes sense that you want to hear from all genders. There are more than two.” Tigger!, the 50-year-old burlesque godfather who’s making his Texas debut as tonight’s headliner for the 4th Annual San Antonio Burlesque Festival, has always been wary of confining himself to gay audiences, so his crowds have often been a mixed bag.…
The Real Drag Husbands of SA
Meet the men who tease the wigs and get the lipstick off the couch From the time I saw my first drag show at the Saint Showbar back when it was still on Main Street, I knew there was something very special about the San Antonio drag scene. Whether they are working to achieve the…
Jenn Alva and Kia Geronimo on fame and marriage
“She took me to meet Nina and Phanie the very first time we went out.” Jenn Alva and Kia Geronimo locked eyes one night at the Korova, and they knew instantly romance was in bloom. “I saw her dancing and I just knew that I had to talk to her,” Alva recalled. “I gave her…
A conversation with poet Richard Blanco
“We forget that to be an intelligent, thriving human being means to pull from all sources of information, knowledge, and understanding.” Richard Blanco received our democratic society’s version of literary knighthood in 2013 when President Barack Obama chose him as the nation’s fifth inaugural poet. He is the first Latino, the first openly gay man,…
A favorite daughter and a forsaken son reconnect on the road from El Paso
The moral of this story, apparently, is when you’re la consentida, you can bring transgender friends home. Despite the fact that we were both born through a family with a deep history of homophobia, it still comes as a surprise to me how much more my half-sister Olga and I have in common. I’m the…
From closeted to ‘Fearless’ in college sports
“This book shows the images of young people who are role models for the rest of us: athletes who are not afraid to be who they are despite the difficulties in being openly LGBT in sports.” Life is good these days for Matt Dooley, who just completed his first year at the University of Texas…
Country days and drag nights on the South Side
They would eat tuna-fish sandwiches with watermelon by the river until it was time to go into the bar and get dressed for the evening. John McBurney and I sit down at the table to look at just a handful of the hundreds of Polaroid pictures he has stashed away from the Ponderosa. He’s…
Summer road trip daze: Head west
It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon in late July and we’re sitting in a steaming hot apartment. We moved in a few months ago so we could save enough money to buy our first home, and in the meantime we’re dripping our body weight in sweat. The window unit in the living room fights hard to…