Skip to content

Category: The Barbed Wire

Kit’s Best of 2024Kit O'Connell is leaning with their hands clasped on the railing of a boardwalk, the Austin city skyline behind them. They are a white nonbinary person with wavy, graying brown hair wearing a purple and white scarf, a cactus necklace, a deep blue jumpsuit and a rainbow steel bracelet. Their nails are shiny green.
Kit O'Connell on the Austin Boardwalk Photo by Montinique Monroe
December 28, 2024
Kit
Leave a Comment

Kit’s Best of 2024

Posted in Austin, Journalism, Life, The Advocate, The Barbed Wire, and The Texas Observer

What a ride this year was—the highs were very high and the lows were very low. But at the same time, I can look back at 2024 and feel proud.

Probably my proudest moment this year wasn’t something I wrote, but that someone else wrote about me. In September, the Columbia Journalism Review profiled my work and career. Journalist Lucy Schiller spent days getting to know me and shadowing me while I reported, and photographer Montinique Monroe made me feel incredibly comfortable and look incredibly cute. I couldn’t be happier with how this turned out, and I’m honored that they thought me worth profiling.

Read moreKit’s Best of 2024
The Barbed Wire: First Arrests at Austin Pride in Over a DecadeOn Congress and 4th St in Austin, Texas, multiple police officers pin a shirtless man to the ground (his features have been blurred) as a Pride parade passes in the background. A police officer on a horse, with a rainbow painted on its flank, stands guard.
Kit O'Connell
October 18, 2024
Kit
Leave a Comment

The Barbed Wire: First Arrests at Austin Pride in Over a Decade

Posted in Austin, Journalism, LGBTQIA, and The Barbed Wire

At Austin’s Pride Parade in August, while rainbow-painted police horses stood guard and brightly decorated floats passed by, officers tackled two men, using kicks and pressure points to pin their bodies to the ground. They were taken to jail on charges of ignoring law enforcement commands and resisting arrest. 

They were the first arrests at an Austin Pride event in years — perhaps more than a decade, according to one of the event’s longtime organizers. And it left many who watched it unfold, including journalists like myself, with one unshakeable thought: That didn’t need to happen. 

I’ve spent the weeks since reporting on why it did.

Read moreThe Barbed Wire: First Arrests at Austin Pride in Over a Decade
The Barbed Wire: Jonny Garza Villa on Censorship & Writing for Queer KidsJonny Garza Villa, an nonbinary Latine person with thick dark hair in a top knot and bandanna and short beard and moustache, wearing a khaki jacket over a white tee. They are sitting on a bench with red and blue pillows behind them along with a potted palm.
Jonny Garza Villa in Austin Kit O'Connell
September 20, 2024
Kit
Leave a Comment

The Barbed Wire: Jonny Garza Villa on Censorship & Writing for Queer Kids

Posted in Austin, Journalism, LGBTQIA, and The Barbed Wire

“The most rewarding part of stories,” said author Jonny Garza Villa at a book signing hosted by Austin’s Little Gay Shop, is “realizing that I can write something that’s hyperspecific, a Mexican-American experience in a specific city in Texas, and how what that character is going through can relate to anyone, anywhere.”

Garza Villa’s young adult fiction is imbued with rich cultural details of Latiné Texas life, including the perhaps unlikely queer joy one can find here, despite the hostility that LGBTQ+ Texans face. One rising form of such hostility is book bans. Since 2021, Pen American found Texas has banned more than 1,500 books in public schools and libraries, many of which featured LGBTQ+ identities. In the U.S., only Florida has banned more books. And, as Garza Villa has experienced first-hand, that antipathy may be extending to authors.

Read moreThe Barbed Wire: Jonny Garza Villa on Censorship & Writing for Queer Kids