We Lost Dolly. We Lost Frank-N-Furter. And the South Sent Us to Congress.

We lost Dolly. We lost Frank-N-Furter. And the South sent us to Congress.

Welcome back to the Watering Hole. This one hurts: Dolly Parton and Tim Curry died on the same Tuesday, two people who in completely different outfits made room for us before it was remotely safe to. Then Georgia elected a Black gay man to Congress for the first time in the history of the South, so pour something.

Dolly Parton died Tuesday at 80. She said “I am not gay, but if I were I would be the first one running out of the closet.” She said “if I hadn't been a girl, I'd have been a drag queen.” She wrote Travelin' Thru for a trans character in 2005 and she was raising money for people with AIDS in the eighties, when the government would not say the word. This week the Castro Theatre marquee read “We will always love you Dolly Parton” and a rainbow flag down the block went to half-staff. That's the whole obituary, really.

Tim Curry died the same day, also at 80. In 1975 he put on the corset, the fishnets and the pearls, looked straight down the barrel and sang “don't dream it, be it” to a generation nobody had ever told that was allowed. Frank-N-Furter was not a joke at our expense. It was permission. Luke Evans, who just played the part himself, wrote him a letter. Go put on I'm Going Home and fall apart properly.

Meanwhile gay Twitter went to war over “No Sex Gay Weekend.” A guy named Chris in Madrid started running weekends and free local meetups for gay men with exactly one rule, nobody's hooking up, and 700+ people came in year one, with 1,300 more on the list. One post about it did 2.1 million views and 626 replies, split roughly evenly between “finally” and “so… friends?” Yes. Friends. That was the entire pitch. The fact that it read as radical is the actual story.

Yayoi Kusama died at 97, and the world found out nearly two weeks later. She died in a Tokyo hospital on August 14; her studio only announced it Thursday. Everyone will run the infinity rooms and the pumpkins, so here's the part that belongs in this newsletter: in 1968, seven months before Stonewall, Kusama ordained herself the High Priestess of Polka Dots, opened a Church of Self-Obliteration on Walker Street, and officiated a wedding for two men. She designed the gown, one gown, both grooms, stitched together. They swore their vows on a Manhattan phone book because a Bible wasn't going to have them. Her own press release billed it as the first homosexual wedding in America. She was not a member of our community; she simply decided in 1968 that we should be able to marry, and went ahead and did it, forty-seven years before the Supreme Court caught up.

And something to look forward to: first look at Slo Pitch, Elliot Page's sapphic softball mockumentary. A dysfunctional lesbian softball team. That's the show. That's the whole show. We are seated.

The White House used a back-to-school event to go after trans kids, with actual schoolchildren sitting in the room. Trump called it “transgender insanity”; Education Secretary Linda McMahon claimed schools are “secretly” transitioning students and threatened federal funding over “radical experiments.” The Education Department has never identified a single school doing any such thing. The investigations it is actually running are about names and pronouns. That's the experiment. That's it.

Stigma is gaining while the science isn't losing. GLAAD's new State of HIV Stigma report: 44% of Americans still don't believe that undetectable means untransmittable, a settled fact. 72% saw zero media stories about a real person living with HIV all year, up from 66%. Gen Z reports knowing less than in 2020. Invisibility is quietly doing the work that bigotry used to have to do out loud.

Georgia just sent a Black gay man to Congress. Everton Blair, former Gwinnett County school board chair, out since National Coming Out Day 2019, won Tuesday's runoff 54–46 to finish the late Rep. David Scott's term in the 13th. He is Georgia's first out LGBTQ+ member of Congress and the first out Black gay man ever elected to Congress from the South. The catch, and we'll say it plainly: the term ends in early January and November's ballot already belongs to someone else. Four months. The history is permanent anyway.

Amber Ruffin is (her word) “en-gay-ged.” She and Kelsi Cleary-Hammarstedt proposed to each other at the same party in Omaha. Kelsi got down on one knee first, and Amber, who had brought a ring of her own, counter-proposed on the spot. Nobody got to be the only one asking, and honestly that's the most functional thing we've heard all week.

We're 12% now. The HRC Foundation ran 2.4 million Census Household Pulse responses and put LGBTQ+ adults at 12% of the country, roughly 25.6 million people, over 10% in 40 of 50 states, and a majority of us under 35. Gallup's phone surveys say 9%. The gap is just that people will tell a screen a truth they won't tell a stranger. Either way: there are more of us than they budgeted for.

Christian nationalist broadcaster Seth Gruber went on air ranting about “California sodomites” and “a couple of gay dudes.” The couple he was describing, Omar Ahmed and Nausheen Gilkar, are a man and a woman. Together. Straight. He didn't misread a detail. He reached for “gay” because it's the shortcut that lands with his audience, and he never once checked whether it was true. The surrogacy dispute underneath all this is genuinely contested and genuinely sad, and he put it on like a costume. Cunt of the Week, and not the fun kind.

Say it out loud: undetectable = untransmittable. That's the whole ask this week, and it's free. Nearly half the country doesn't believe a fact that has been settled for years, and almost nobody is hearing it from anyone. Dolly was writing checks for people with AIDS in the eighties when the President wouldn't say the word out loud. Repeating one true sentence is a very low bar to clear in her honor. U=U.

And if Blair's win moved you, fund the ground he won on. The Campaign for Southern Equality has spent over a decade doing the unglamorous work across the South. The Trans Youth Emergency Project gets families through care bans with travel grants and logistics, and the Southern Equality Fund puts money directly into small grassroots groups. The South isn't a lost cause. It's an underfunded one.

P.S. Gay Water partners with and donates to LGBTQ+ orgs year-round, not Pride-month cosplay. Reply and tell us who we should support next.