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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
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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.

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Austin Free Press: Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation Leads to HateLGBTQIA rights still matter when resisting tyranny
Pride Flag - Kate CC NC Flickr
November 6, 2024
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Austin Free Press: Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation Leads to Hate

Posted in Austin, and Journalism

Murder, assault, bomb threats, and verbal threats were some of the worst anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents occurring in the greater Austin area over the last three years, according to data that the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD documented as the basis for a recent report on such incidents nationwide. Austin Free Press used GLAAD’s Texas data to analyze incidents in the Austin area.

Even as violent crime falls nationwide, threats against the LGBTQ+ community are on the rise nationally, in Texas, and in Austin. In explaining that contradiction, experts say anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is helping to drive those trends.

“We’re seeing this really massive rise in anti-LGBTQ incidents all across the U.S.,” said Sarah Moore, GLAAD’s senior manager of news and research. Moore’s research shows that between Pride Month in June of 2023 and that same time this year incidents increased by 112% nationwide. In Texas, the increase was 44% during that period.

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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
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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.

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The Barbed Wire: Anti-LGBTQIA+ Incidents in TexasLGBTQIA rights still matter when resisting tyranny
Pride Flag - Kate CC NC Flickr
October 14, 2024
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The Barbed Wire: Anti-LGBTQIA+ Incidents in Texas

Posted in Austin, Journalism, and The Advocate

Before dawn on a Sunday morning in April, the bars in Austin had just closed. Joshua Ybarra started walking to his Uber. Then he heard an anti-gay slur hurled at him from behind. Three men leapt on him, pinning Ybarra to the ground and thrashing him so severely that he fell unconscious. The beating was so vicious that a friend of Ybarra’s “tried to defend him by covering his body on the ground, and she was also beaten by the attackers,” according to research from the nonprofit GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Even the alleged attackers’ own fraternity brothers tried to stop the assault, to no avail. 

Ybarra’s assault was just one of 93 hateful incidents of anti-LGBTQIA+ bigotry in Texas tracked by GLAAD’s new ALERT Desk (Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker). The tracking project — which went public last week — serves as a central hub to count both non-criminal and criminal acts of hate towards the queer community since 2022. Using a wide variety of sources, from mainstream news outlets to social media and verifiable firsthand accounts, the GLAAD ALERT Desk attempts to paint a comprehensive picture of the threats against the larger queer community. (Editor’s note: GLAAD is using the term “incident” over “hate crime” because many of the events did not meet the definition of a criminal act.)

And that picture is a grim one that reflects a disturbing rise in attacks nationwide. The lead at the ALERT Desk and GLAAD’s senior manager of news and research, Sarah Moore, said across the country from June 2022 to June 2024, “we saw a 112% increase in incidents just looking at that two year period.” 

For Texas, that includes at least one murder.

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The Advocate: The Joy of LGBTQ+ Reading ClubsIn a composite photo, at left, three people gather with books outside the Little Gay Book Club. In an inside shot, about two dozen people gather around long tables to discuss a book.
Courtesy of the Little Gay Book Club
September 24, 2024
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The Advocate: The Joy of LGBTQ+ Reading Clubs

Posted in Austin, Journalism, LGBTQIA, and The Advocate

The ever-evolving membership of the Little Gay Book Club in Austin, Texas, gathers several times a month to read together, to celebrate their love of literature, and of course to debate the latest selections. They’re one of a small, but growing number of LGBTQ+ book clubs springing up across the United States—from Philadelphia to Richmond, Virginia, among others—that meet regularly to share books and dish about their lives.

I first met Lex Loro, the genderqueer manager of the Little Gay Book Club, in the sumptuous roof garden on top of Austin Public Library’s main headquarters during a book fair. We spoke under the shade of solar panels as Loro took a break from slinging books on behalf of their employer and the book club’s sponsor, the Little Gay Shop. Lex was dressed in a casual-yet-fab Barbie-pink-themed outfit, complete with dangly earrings declaring her pronouns: ‘They’ down one ear, and ‘She’ down the other. In addition to managing the shop’s book club and other literacy programs, they’re also the director of community health at the San Antonio Pride Center.

“Book clubs create an opportunity for queer people in particular, or just any minoritized people, to access stories about our realities that are similar to us and access stories about people in our community that are different from us,” Loro told me.

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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
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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.

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