Welcome back to the Watering Hole, a day late and twice as full. This one covers five days instead of three, so pour something bigger. It opens on the worst of it: the Pentagon is going through protected medical records to find the trans troops who told the truth back when telling the truth was the requirement, and Mount Sinai, having beaten the Justice Department in court twice, turned around eight days later and handed over its trans kids anyway. Then a federal study arguing that supporting us makes you violent, one in three foster kids, and a maple tree pulled out of the ground in Berlin. There is joy in here too, further down, and it is real: a quarter of a million dollars for a fired wellness director, ten Italian bishops in a room, a block in Sacramento that threw its party anyway, two drag kings in one day, and Alan Cumming beating RuPaul. Let's get into it.

The Pentagon is reading medical records to find the trans troops it missed. If you joined the military as a trans person in the years when you were allowed to, you told them. You told the doctor, you changed the gender marker, you filled in the forms correctly, because doing it correctly was the whole price of being allowed to be there. Those files are now the search. Rachel S. Cohen reported for Federal News Network on Sunday that the military is going through protected medical and personnel data to find service members with current or past gender dysphoria, and that the sweep has already outed several hundred active-duty and reserve troops in about two months. Service academy and ROTC cadets are in that number, people who have not finished college. The databases named are MHS Genesis, the Military Health System Data Repository, and the personnel systems that track gender marker changes: the places where prescriptions, mental health notes and care you received before you ever enlisted all sit in one drawer. Commanders are getting notices that somebody in their unit is out of compliance. And the search is not only finding trans people. Priya Rashid, an attorney representing service members caught up in it, says the queries are flagging troops who are not transgender at all, people who happened to receive a particular procedure or diagnosis while being treated for something else. You do not have to have transitioned publicly, or recently, or at all. A line in a file is enough. The Pentagon will not answer questions about the searches, citing the litigation. keep reading →

Mount Sinai beat the Justice Department in court twice. Then it handed over the trans kids anyway. A grand jury in Amarillo, Texas subpoenaed Mount Sinai for the records of children in New York City who had received gender-affirming care. In June, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla said no and shielded the identifying details of trans young people treated there and at NYU Langone. The government appealed. On August 27 the Second Circuit refused to lift her protections while the appeal ran. Mount Sinai was winning. Then on Friday, September 4, eight days later, it signed a deal with the DOJ: stop all puberty blockers, hormones and surgery for anyone under 18, pay a penalty, and set aside $2 million to treat people who say the care harmed them. The hospital says it settled to keep patient files out of a grand jury room. Both things can be true, and the kids are still cut off. keep reading →

One in three foster kids is queer. The rule that protected them is gone. CNN ran the number on Sunday: an estimated one third of children in American foster care are LGBTQ+. Not a rounding error, not a special population you staff with a pamphlet. In 2024 the federal government wrote a rule for them that did four plain things: require trained supportive homes to exist somewhere in the system, give a kid a formal way to say this placement is hurting me, bar retaliation for saying it, and prohibit conversion therapy. It never forced a single family to take a single child. It required that there be a door. Judge Jeremy Kernodle stayed it nationwide in March 2025, a court vacated it that June, and on July 14, 2026 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the rescission published in the Federal Register, which is the paperwork version of salting the ground. keep reading →

Somebody pulled the Pride memorial tree out of the ground. The next day the AfD won a German state. On July 25 a man drove a van into Berlin's Pride march on a Tiergarten footpath called the Ahornsteig, then got out with a machete. A 65-year-old woman from Poland was killed and about thirty people were hurt. The van hit a tree hard enough that the tree had to be felled. Ahornsteig means maple path, so in August the Mitte district planted a maple in the same ground, put a grate around the base for cards and flowers, and set a rainbow bench beside it. Last week somebody tore the slats off that bench; police said it took “considerable physical violence,” and every other bench on the stretch was left alone. Then, on the eve of Sunday's Saxony-Anhalt election, somebody came back and pulled the tree out of the soil. Nobody has connected either act to anyone. What we will say is that a person looked at a calendar, picked that weekend, and went and got a shovel. Berlin says it will replant the tree as often as it needs to. keep reading →

The federal government published a study arguing that supporting us makes you violent. HHS's Office of Population Affairs put out a paper titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” Its answer is yes. Its argument is that if you agree with the American Psychological Association about trans healthcare, you are more likely to be an authoritarian who excuses political violence. Its evidence is a survey of 1,208 people. To measure your beliefs they needed a scale, and no existing one gave them what they wanted, so they invented one, the Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale, and never validated it. Andrew Flores, who studies this for a living: “These are not scales that have ever been validated. They just made them up.” Then they measured appetite for political violence by asking only about violence aimed at conservative targets. Count the punches thrown one way and you will find one side throws all the punches. No peer review. Published anyway, on federal letterhead. keep reading →

Riley Gaines went to one WNBA game and was shocked to discover lesbians. The entire product Riley Gaines sells is that she is the last person in America who will stand up for women in sport. So she bought a ticket to a women's sporting event, sat among women who pay to watch women play sport, and went on Fox News' The Big Weekend Show to report that the Minneapolis arena was “a bunch of disgruntled lesbians” and that it felt like the whole building was booing Sophie Cunningham. Reader. She has described the customer base. She was there on August 2, Fever at Lynx, supporting Cunningham, who has called keeping trans women out of women's basketball “common sense” and has been booed on the road since. That is the sum of the persecution: women bought tickets and then made a noise with their mouths. Worth knowing, since she is at these games to prevent an emergency: the WNBA says it currently has zero transgender eligibility cases in the league. keep reading →

A Tucson realtor went off at 35,000 feet. First class taped him to his chair. American Airlines 618, Dallas to Newark, Thursday night. About two hours in, a 67-year-old man in first class started shouting about Jesus and people going to hell. Passenger Juan Mejia: “Just like a light switch, all of a sudden, it went from quiet to yelling and chaos.” Per passengers he called a Black flight attendant the n-word, used an anti-gay slur, struck the passenger beside him and pushed a woman who got up to help. Then the crew did the thing that should be taught in business school: they walked down the aisle handing out duct tape and zip ties. Five passengers and the crew taped him to his seat and held him there for about fifteen minutes while the plane came down. It diverted to Baltimore; a three-and-a-half hour flight took roughly eight. Police met him at the gate. keep reading →

Two women tortured Sam Nordquist for a month. On Tuesday both got life without parole. This one is hard, and if you need to skip it, skip it. On Tuesday morning in Canandaigua, New York, Judge Kristina Karle sentenced Precious Arzuaga, 40, the woman prosecutors called the ringleader, to life without parole for the first-degree murder of Sam Nordquist, the maximum on all eleven counts she pleaded guilty to. That afternoon she gave Jennifer Quijano, 32, life without parole as well. Reporters in the room say the judge was in tears by the end of the family's statements. Start with Sam, because nineteen months of case file have buried him under what was done to him: he was 24, a Black trans man from Minnesota, who travelled to the Finger Lakes in September 2024 to meet someone he had met online and decided to stay. He was reported missing on February 9, 2025, and found in a field four days later. In between he was held and tortured for about a month, in a room with other people in it. There were never any hate crime charges, and the prosecutor's reasoning for that is on the record and worth reading in full. Seven people were charged. Four have now pleaded guilty. keep reading →

She lost her job over free chest binders. Georgia just paid her $250,000. Gemma Skuraton joined Georgia Southern in 2016 and by 2020 ran student wellness and health promotion on the Savannah campus, with good evaluations in 2023 and 2024. Then the campus started subtracting: the Pride flag came down from the counseling center, LGBTQ resources were deleted off the student services site, posters for gender dysphoria care came off the walls. None of it announced. There was a grant in the works for free chest binders, which is harm reduction of exactly the same kind as a bowl of condoms by the door, because a kid who cannot afford one will improvise with tape and crack a rib. Her vice president had endorsed the application, then rejected it in May 2025, weeks after Georgia's trans athlete restrictions were signed. Skuraton was fired. The state has now settled for $250,000 and agreed to call it a resignation. keep reading →

Ten Italian bishops sat down in the Jesuit headquarters to talk about how to treat us. On Friday, September 4, about 200 people sat down at half past nine in the morning in the auditorium of the Jesuit headquarters in Rome, read Psalm 86 out loud, and spent until six in the evening on how the Italian Catholic Church should treat gay and trans people. It was the first conference of its kind in Italy. The part worth sitting with is who convened it: not a rebel network of parish volunteers, but the Italian Bishops' Conference itself. About ten bishops came. Cardinal Matteo Zuppi sent personal greetings. Archbishop Giampaolo Dianin, who now holds the brief, opened by defining good practice as “the capacity to read the present and live anticipating the future,” and later described where the Church currently is with one Italian word: travaglio. It means labour. Not work. The kind that happens before a birth and hurts the whole time. keep reading →

Alan Cumming beat RuPaul for the hosting Emmy, and a lesbian sci-fi show took four. The Creative Arts Emmys ran September 5 and 6, and the queer half of the ballot did well. Alan Cumming won Reality TV Host for The Traitors, out of a field that included RuPaul and Ariana Madix. “I think it's a really positive thing to see so many queer people and, hopefully, trans people in a show that also celebrates dressing up, androgyny, femmeness, and queerness,” he said, which is a remarkably accurate description of a man in a cape making strangers vote each other out of a castle. Pluribus, the dark sci-fi comedy built around Carol, a lesbian romance novelist surviving an alien invasion, took four: main title theme, sound mixing, production design and picture editing. Hacks took picture editing on the back of a record 24 nominations. The Primetime Emmys are September 14, with Rhea Seehorn and Jean Smart both up for lead actress. keep reading →

Four men jumped a guy in Lavender Heights. Six days later the block threw a party anyway. Shortly before one in the morning on August 31, Joseph Sais was walking home through Sacramento's gay district with a friend when four men started in with anti-gay and racist slurs, chased him down and punched him repeatedly. He got away by running toward the security staff outside a bar, with a split lip, a cut forehead and broken glasses. Police took a felony assault bias report. Nobody has been arrested. On Sunday the Rainbow Festival filled the block one street up, as it has for more than four decades, this year on a Retro Rainbow theme planned back in February when the hardest question was whether the DJ list was too much disco. Terry Sidie, who owns Faces and started the festival, did the arithmetic out loud: a security guard for every 100 people, eight police officers, about 30 more security. “It's sad we have to have so much, but we do.” They had it anyway. keep reading →

A drag king got into the Bake Off tent. Hours later another one got into Drag Race España. Drag kings have spent roughly forever being the answer to a question nobody on television was asking. That got dismantled twice on the same Monday by two shows with nothing to do with each other. Channel 4's Great British Bake Off line-up, in the tent from September 22, includes Gabe Capes, 32, who uses he/they, an artist and costume designer who performs as the drag king Blü Romantic and calls himself the “daddy of Birmingham drag,” which is the correct amount of confidence to bring to a marquee full of proving drawers. He has wanted it since he was thirteen, he is into meringue and savoury bakes with meat in them, and he has already met Alison Hammond, who he says “famously smacked my bum, live on Channel 4 while I was in drag.” The same day, Marcus Massalami was announced for Drag Race España, the first full-time drag king in the entire franchise. keep reading →

Nick Offerman sat on three years of Ben Shapiro and spent it all in one sentence. “Long, Long Time” is the third episode of The Last of Us and the one everybody's straight cousin cried at: Bill and Frank, twenty years of a marriage nobody officiated, strawberries grown as a present, and an ending they choose together. Offerman won the Emmy for it. In 2023 Ben Shapiro reviewed it by doing inventory, no zombies, no threat, just “two gay dudes who meet and have a relationship, in which one grows strawberries for the other, and then they die,” and settled on calling him “gay Ron Swanson.” Offerman said nothing for three years. Then somebody played him the clip on Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso on Sunday. His first reaction was almost affectionate: “That's the most Ben Shapiro I've ever seen.” Then he spent it: “I'm embarrassed for his reading comprehension. I think he got eight things wrong in his recap, besides his rampant homophobia.” Eight. He counted. Somewhere there is a list. keep reading →

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— Spencer

Welcome back to the Watering Hole. Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday, and before we get to anything else it is worth saying why she is at the top of a gay newsletter: in 1977 she got on a plane to Miami to stand against Anita Bryant at a moment when standing next to us cost something. The rest of the week was, improbably, a run of wins. A judge threw out the Justice Department's $44 billion threat against California with prejudice. Massachusetts buried the most prominent Democrat to have defected on trans kids. San Diego deleted a law from 1988, Arkansas paid a librarian $275,000, Switzerland and Bulgaria both moved. Then Ecuador wrote us out of adoption by 118 votes to nothing, so nobody get comfortable. Pour something. Let's get into it.

Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday at 92, and in 1977 she got on a plane to Miami for us. She died at her home in Manhattan on Wednesday, September 2. Her foundation announced it the next morning, saying she “passed away peacefully at her home, surrounded by some of the many who loved her.” No cause was given. You know the outline: Toledo, Smith, “A Bunny's Tale,” Ms. on the newsstand in 1971, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, the aviators. Here is the part that belongs on this page. In 1977, when Anita Bryant was campaigning to repeal Dade County's nondiscrimination ordinance and standing next to us was a career risk, Steinem flew to Miami and stood next to us anyway. That same year she told a convention of the American Association of University Women that lesbians were “the most vulnerable group of women” and that the word lesbian had to become “as honorable as any other.” She did not treat us as a wing of her movement. She treated us as the movement. keep reading →

Six days before he died, Vincent asked his sister if anyone would show up. A thousand people did. We led last week with the two men shot outside the Venture-N in Tucson. This is what happened after. On Wednesday, September 2, more than a thousand people filled Catalina Park at sunset with candles for Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, and Cameron Davis Capara, 33. Someone left a silver Polaroid camera; Cameron was the photographer who shot Tucson's protests, including the ones where about nine people turned up. Vincent's sister, Kate Marquez, told the crowd that six days before he was killed her brother had asked her whether anyone would actually be there for him if something happened. She was standing in front of a thousand people when she said it. “No gun gets to define my brother. No hatred gets to erase his joy.” And, earlier: “Hate does not begin with a gun. It begins much earlier. Our rhetoric matters, the jokes matter, the words we excuse matters, silence matters.” The Venture-N opened its doors again at four that afternoon, before the vigil, which is its own kind of statement. keep reading →

A judge told the Justice Department it cannot make California ban trans girls from sports. The DOJ sued California in July 2025 on the theory that letting trans girls play violated Title IX, and that roughly $44 billion in federal education money could be pulled over it. On Monday, August 31, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Valenzuela dismissed the case with prejudice, the legal way of saying do not come back with this. Under the Spending Clause, the federal government cannot punish a state for breaking a funding condition it never clearly set, and nothing in Title IX told California in advance that it had to exclude trans athletes to keep the money. Be precise about what this is not: she did not rule that trans kids have a right to play. She ruled that Washington cannot invent a condition after the fact and attach a $44 billion invoice to it. The girls are still on the team and the money is still in the schools. keep reading →

Seth Moulton threw trans kids under the bus. Massachusetts ran him over by nearly 30 points. On Tuesday, September 1, Ed Markey, 80, beat Seth Moulton, 47, in the Senate primary by about 65 to 35, a margin just under 30 points. Moulton spent a year running on Markey's age. The actual story is what he did after 2024, when a congressman who had co-sponsored the Equality Act told the New York Times he did not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” It was the first big Democratic defection on trans kids and it was meant to look brave. At Boston's No Kings rally the crowd booed him; Markey, wrapped in a trans pride flag, told that same crowd “trans rights are human rights.” Two days after winning, Markey named his next fight: “We must pass my Trans Bill of Rights.” He has been its lead sponsor since 2023. He did not moderate a syllable to get here. keep reading →

Twenty-one attorneys general and a governor sued over the Medicaid trans care ban. On August 13, HHS published a rule barring federal reimbursement through Medicaid and CHIP for puberty blockers, hormones and surgery for anyone under 18 on Medicaid or under 19 on CHIP. It takes effect October 13. On Wednesday, September 2, a coalition of 21 attorneys general and one governor sued in federal court in Massachusetts, arguing an agency cannot build a coverage ban Congress never passed. Oregon's Dan Rayfield: “Freedom means very little if the government can reach into your family's private decisions and take it away.” Read the odds with this in mind: the administration has lost this exact fight twice already this year, in March and again in August. And read who it lands on. Kids on Medicaid are poor kids, the ones with no second option and no family lawyer. keep reading →

Ecuador just banned single gay people from adopting. The vote was 118 to nothing. The Reform Law for the Streamlining of Adoption passed Ecuador's National Assembly on July 28 by 118 to 0 with 25 abstentions, and entered into force on August 14. Sold as a way to get children out of foster care faster, it explicitly bars single lesbian, gay and bisexual people from adopting, on top of a constitutional ban on same-sex couples that has embarrassed the country since it legalised same-sex marriage. Worse: a parent who supports medical treatment intended to “modify the biological sex” of their child can lose parental rights, and if both parents do and no relative steps in, the child becomes available for adoption, and most of the parents that clause will hit are heterosexual people who simply have a trans child. The carve-out gives the game away: none of it applies to parents who authorise “normalising” surgery on an intersex infant. Surgery on a child too young to speak is fine. Listening to a teenager who can is the offence. The Ecuadorian LGBT Federation: “Being heterosexual does not demonstrate parental fitness. Being LGBT+ does not constitute parental incapacity either.” We can legally marry in Ecuador. Seven years later its legislature voted 118 to nothing to say we still cannot be trusted with a child. keep reading →

Hegseth's High-T rulebook lasted less than a day. In July, Pete Hegseth announced a High-T Department of War: mandatory testosterone blood tests for every man in uniform aged 30 and up. On Wednesday, September 2, the Pentagon published the actual clinical guidance. By Thursday it was gone from the website, “temporarily rescinded to allow for updates,” with no timeline. The order still stands, so the tests are still coming. The rulebook itself conceded that “the evidence does not show testosterone treatment improves women's psychological well-being, cognition, cardiovascular health, bone density or muscle performance,” and got published anyway. Here is why it is a Cunt of the Week and not a clerical error: the same department is discharging trans service members and cutting off their hormone therapy right now. Kara Corcoran of SPARTA Pride: “If hormone therapy helps warfighters perform at their best, then it cannot simultaneously be used as evidence that transgender service members are unfit to serve.” keep reading →

Switzerland said it out loud: ban conversion therapy nationwide. On Wednesday, September 2, the Federal Council published a report saying uniform national legislation is “worthwhile” and that it “clearly rejects and condemns” any attempt to change someone's orientation or gender identity. Governments rarely write the damage down this plainly: the practices “could cause considerable psychological distress, anxiety and depression, and impair self-esteem and social relationships.” It called the status quo a “patchwork of cantonal regulations.” Neuchâtel banned it in 2023, Valais and Vaud followed, Zurich says it plans one. Everywhere else it is still legal to sit a teenager in a room and try to pray the gay out of them. This is a door, not a finish line. Parliament has said no before. keep reading →

Bulgaria's top court told the government to recognise trans people. In 2023 the Supreme Court of Cassation effectively shut the door on trans people changing their name and gender on their ID. In rulings dated July 22, reported last week, the same court reopened it for four trans applicants: the constitution never prohibited legal gender recognition, blanket bans are unlawful, and nobody can be made to have surgery to qualify. Then it wrote a sentence Bulgarian trans people had waited years for: “The rule of law in Bulgaria implies a universal equality of the dignity of all human beings, including transgender people.” The push came from Luxembourg, where the EU Court of Justice ruled in March that member states must allow it. A court can say a procedure must exist. Only the government can write one, and ILGA-Europe, TGEU, Bilitis and Deystvie spent September 1 telling Sofia to get on with it. keep reading →

San Diego finally deleted its 1988 bathhouse law. A staffer in Council President Joe LaCava's office was reading the municipal code and found it: a 1988 ordinance, amended in 1991, written to stop gay and bisexual men having sex in bathhouses. Unenforced for years. Still the law. On Tuesday, September 1, the City Council repealed it unanimously. “This language does not reflect who we are as a city,” LaCava said. “It is an outdated and offensive perspective.” Councilman Raul Campillo, whose uncle died of AIDS in 1992, thanked him for bringing it forward. When the ordinance passed in April 1988, more than 700 San Diegans had been diagnosed with HIV or AIDS and half of them were already dead. The city has since lost roughly 10,000 people. The grief was real. The law was still wrong. San Francisco cleaned its books in 2024, Minneapolis in June, New York is trying now. Check your city. keep reading →

She refused to hide the gay books. Arkansas owes her $275,000. In 2023 Saline County ordered books with “sexual content or imagery” out of the children's section. Patty Hector, who ran the county library system, stood up at a hearing and said a picture book with two dads in it is not sexual content. That October she was fired. She sued with the ACLU of Arkansas in February 2025, and under a settlement reported on August 27 she gets $225,000 and her lawyers $50,000. The money comes out of the insurance pool every county in the state pays into, so congratulations to Saline County's neighbours on their new shared bill. Hector: “Standing up for the freedom to read cost me a job and a career I loved, but I never believed that staying silent was the answer.” keep reading →

The Dallas Stars quietly dropped Pride Night. A fan named Tori is throwing her own. The Stars published their 2026-27 promotional schedule last week. Eighties Night is on it. So are Star Wars Night, Anime Night, Black History Night, Noche Mexicana and Military Appreciation Night. Pride Night, which the team had run at least five years running, is not; in its slot is “Hockey Unites Us: Women in Sports Night.” Asked why Pride specifically had to be the one that went, the Stars declined to comment. Tori Copeland, a fan of years' standing, told Chron the swap felt “really icky and targeted,” and was careful about it: “I'm a woman in sports; I understand the need for that, but we can do that alongside Pride Night, too.” Then she posted the sentence that started everything: “Screw it. I'm throwing my own Pride Night and everyone's invited.” It is November 14 against the Sabres, it benefits Dallas Hope Charities, and people have already donated season tickets so queer fans can get in. In 2017 the Stars were the first pro team in Texas to come out against the bathroom bill. Their fans still are. keep reading →

Miley went to the leather bar and brought a camera crew. “Bass Persuades” arrived on Thursday, September 3, the title track and lead single from her tenth album, out September 18 on Atlantic. The video is directed by Mert Alas, who did Madonna's “Girls Gone Wild” and the Jeremy Allen White Calvin Klein campaign, so you already know the lighting: a shadowy club, leather pants, Muir caps, an eighties electro groove that would not be out of place at the Eagle at 1 a.m. “The kids don't wanna dance,” she complains, before the pitch: “We can't stay like this forever.” She still does not tour. There are exactly two dates, the Hollywood Bowl on October 16 and 18, with tickets on general sale September 10. Reader, the video is 1 percent Miley and 99 percent thigh. keep reading →

Trixie Mattel: “Ironically, I was the rat boy. I was the mole king.” On the I Like to Watch episode posted August 29, Trixie Mattel and Katya got onto the rat boy trend and Katya confessed to being “a victim of the rat boy community.” Then Trixie delivered the sentence of the week: “Me and Frankie Grande were in a consensual, non-monogamous relationship with Barry Keoghan. Ironically, I was the rat boy. I was the mole king.” For the lawyers and for Barry: it is a joke, and nobody has asked Frankie to confirm, which is the only correct way to handle this. It is also a joke that does more cultural work than most think pieces, flipping the hierarchy so the six-foot-two drag queen in a fourteen-inch wig is the small scruffy one. Rat boy summer is the culture deciding, after a decade of gym-rat Hemsworths, that the hot man is the one who looks like he owes you money. Gay men have been there for decades. We called it a twink. keep reading →

— Spencer