Queer Vulturing
August 17, 2026
Today’s queer news and culture sweep: Pride keeps marching well past June, queer athletes make the case for visibility, Troye Sivan takes Nicole Kidman clubbing, Jinkx Monsoon heads to the West End, and queer history, theater, comics and looking back at queer Coney Island.
Queer Coney Island Summons the Ghosts of the Boardwalk’s Gay Past
Coney Island USA
A Saturday history-and-performance program traced queer Coney Island from Mae West and Mabel Hampton’s cabaret world to the long-gone Stauch’s Bathhouse. The event’s clever conceit was to treat demolished queer spaces not as footnotes but as ghosts still haunting one of New York’s great pleasure grounds.
Oakland Pride Draws Thousands for a Day of ‘Pride, Power and People’
San Francisco Chronicle
Oakland’s 16th annual Pride parade and festival filled downtown Sunday, with a 90-minute parade, community grand marshals and performances including Amerie. This year’s event also marked a structural shift: Oakland Pride is now operating under the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center, a move intended to give the celebration firmer financial footing.
Badminton’s Only Out World Championship Players Say Visibility Still Matters
Outsports
Scottish players Kirsty Gilmour and Ciara Torrance are heading to badminton’s World Championships as the tournament’s only publicly out LGBTQ players. Their argument is refreshingly uncomplicated: queer athletes belong everywhere in sport, including international competition where visibility can still be scarce.
Anti-Smoking Campaign Targets a Persistent Health Gap Among Queer Men
Los Angeles Blade
Kick It California is focusing attention on the disproportionate impact of smoking on queer men, pairing cessation work with LGBTQ-specific outreach. It is a reminder that queer health coverage cannot begin and end with the political battles currently dominating the headlines.
Russian Edition of Pope Francis’s Memoir Reportedly Censors LGBT Passages
UNN
The Russian-language edition of Pope Francis’s autobiography Hope reportedly removes or alters passages dealing with homosexuality and transgender people. The edits are especially telling in a country where state policy has increasingly treated LGBTQ visibility itself as suspect.
Troye Sivan Takes Nicole Kidman Clubbing in His New Video
Out
Troye Sivan has enlisted Nicole Kidman for the video for the title track from his forthcoming album, placing the Oscar winner in a club world populated by trans women and drag queens. It is an inspired collision of Kidman’s icy movie-star glamour and Sivan’s increasingly assured queer-pop universe.
Jinkx Monsoon Is About to Take Mary Todd Lincoln to the West End
Attitude
Jinkx Monsoon begins her six-week West End run in Oh, Mary! on Monday, reprising the Mary Todd Lincoln she played to considerable acclaim on Broadway. The casting feels less like stunt casting than the next logical stop for a role built around theatrical excess, comic precision and a performer who knows exactly how to weaponize both.
Flame Con Takes Over Times Square for a Queer Comics Weekend
Flame Con / GayTravel4U
Flame Con, billed as the world’s largest LGBTQ comics convention, wraps its 2026 edition Sunday in New York. The convention has become a useful counterweight to the old assumption that queer fandom is a niche inside geek culture rather than one of the forces continually reshaping it.
A New Play Lets a Trans Kid Build His Own ‘Gender Clinic’ at Recess
The Tank
Tal Bloom’s Recess Gender Clinic plays The Tank Sunday night, following 12-year-old Max, a trans boy, and his seven-year-old sister Ellie, who responds to the mysteries adults make of gender by opening a playground clinic of her own. Magic, childhood and trans history meet in a premise that sounds far more interested in wonder than diagnosis.
Toronto Queer Film Festival Celebrates Ten Years by Getting ‘Pissed Off, Still Laughing’
Toronto Queer Film Festival / Buddies in Bad Times
Toronto Queer Film Festival marked its tenth anniversary Saturday with an experimental cabaret at Buddies in Bad Times built around the theme “Pissed Off, Still Laughing.” Joy and rage sharing a stage is hardly a new queer strategy, but in 2026 it may be one of the more durable ones.
Charlotte Pride Fills Uptown for Its 2026 Festival and Parade
Charlotte Pride / GayTravel4U
Charlotte Pride’s two-day festival concludes Sunday with its parade through Uptown, drag performers and a sprawling slate of community events. The celebration is one of the largest Pride gatherings in the Carolinas and a reminder that Pride season in the United States now stretches well beyond June.
Provincetown Carnival Opens for a Week of Queer Summer Spectacle
Provincetown Carnival / GayTravel4U
Provincetown Carnival begins Sunday, launching one of the town’s signature summer weeks with an opening party before the festivities build toward the parade. In Ptown, of course, “summer event” can be an inadequate phrase for what is essentially civic ritual performed in costume.
Houston Pride Returns Downtown With a Message of Love and Resilience
ABC13 Houston
Houston’s Pride 365 parade marched through downtown Saturday night for its 48th year, bringing the city’s LGBTQ community and allies together for a late-summer celebration. The timing may be outside traditional Pride Month, but the political backdrop gives the familiar language of resilience considerably more weight.
Jersey City Pride Revives the White Party Tradition
Art House Productions
Jersey City Pride brought back its White Party Saturday as a fundraiser, explicitly nodding to both Miami’s legendary 1990s White Parties and Jersey City’s own early Pride celebrations. House music, Harmonica Sunbeam and an all-white dress code turned queer nightlife history into a living fundraiser rather than a museum piece.
Richmond’s ‘Camp Genderf*ck’ Puts Queer Bodies and Camp Center Stage
Gallery5 / RadQueer Productions
Richmond’s RadQueer Productions staged Camp Genderf*ck Saturday, a burlesque showcase devoted to camp, gender play and LGBTQ performers. The collective describes its larger mission as building community among queer artists while centering queer bodies and histories, which gives the glitter a little infrastructure underneath it.
Gay Bathhouses Could Return to NYC. But Opening One Won’t Be Easy.
Gothamist
New York lawmakers are moving to repeal the city’s four-decade-old ban on gay bathhouses, but changing the law may be the easy part. Gothamist reports that zoning, building codes, health regulations and the sheer cost of New York real estate could make opening a modern bathhouse a far more complicated proposition.
After 31 Years, a Quirky Gay Gossip Website Shuts Down
The New York Times
The New York Times bids farewell to DataLounge, the gleefully bitchy, frequently outrageous gay gossip forum that survived 31 years of internet reinvention. Its closing marks the disappearance of a distinctly pre-social-media corner of queer online culture, where celebrity gossip, political arguments, camp obsessions and anonymous one-liners lived side by side.
WeHo Times
A West Hollywood man arrested at PortMiami in a drug case involving passengers boarding a gay cruise has been accepted into a felony pretrial diversion program, according to WeHo Times. The arrangement could allow him to avoid prison if he successfully completes the program and its court-imposed requirements.
HIV Is Not History. The New Queer Series ‘Red Light Diaries’ Refuses to Look Away
OUT Magazine
Filmmaker and HIV advocate Micheal Ighodaro explains why his new TV series centers Black and brown queer lives at a moment when hard-won progress against HIV is under threat. The project pushes back against the comforting idea that HIV belongs to queer history rather than the queer present.