Queer Lives Revealed in the UK and US, ‘Boots’ Reviews, and Elder Gay Magic

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This week in Prism & Pen, we feature three very different queer lives. Meet an aging, “stealth” transgender woman in conservative America, a younger gay man in Scotland struggling to connect to love, and get angry with a queer woman in England who wants corporate money out of Pride so we can make it our own again.

Also,

is back! Years ago in P&P, he serialized his memoir of coming out as gay after living as straight for over 4 decades. What’s Larry writing about now? Something magical!

And don’t miss a story by

’s wife Claire. When Charlie came out to Claire as a trans man, she didn’t have a “rule book” or advice guide to lean on, so she’s written her own, for anyone who needs it.

Oh, and Oscar Wilde got his library card back. Yes, that Oscar. Yes, really!

Use the 🔑 link next to each story. Even if you’re not yet a paying member of Medium, the special link lets you through the paywall. If you are a paying member, the writer will be paid when you read their story.

Big thanks to all our readers and supporters!

* P&P Highlights *

Living Transgender, Aging, and Afraid in South Dakota

I’m a 59-year-old transgender woman living in the Upper Midwest. I came out at 53, at an age when many are planning retirement, not executing a complete system overhaul of their identity. I live almost entirely stealth. Most people in my life don’t know I’m transgender, not my coworkers, classmates, bandmates, or the athletes I coach. The risks are too high.

In this part of the country, being known could mean losing my job, my safety, or my community. So I compartmentalize. I plan. I assess. I hide.

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Queer Joy Isn’t Corporate, It’s Communal

There was a time when Pride felt intimate. Not small, exactly, but personal. Like it belonged to us in ways that actually mattered. Every June, I’d make my way to London Pride with a backpack full of cheap alcohol from the corner shop, heading for Soho square knowing I’d find myself swallowed up by a sea of drag queens, bears, twinks and trans friends. People who understood that we were there to celebrate our existence and fight for our survival at the same time…

But something has shifted. The last half-decade especially has transformed Pride into something I barely recognize.

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One Gay Man’s Quest for Love and a Relationship Instead of a Situationship

In moments of anger or conflict, I often heard that nobody would ever put up with me long term… And then, Y. showed up. He was keen. Persistent. Curious.

In the 8 months after my break up, I endured a marathon of disastrous dates that led me nowhere. One guy I went to dinner with asked for the check only 10 minutes after getting his plate of pasta. So, you can imagine how it felt to have Y. pursue me so intensively out of nowhere. Young and mulleted — he put a plaster on my internal wound of never being cool enough to hang out with the cool kids.

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Watch This Gay Show: Trump Will Hate You for It

Boots is the story of a 17-year-old in 1990 who follows his best friend into the U.S. Marine Corps to escape a dead-end home life where he is constantly bullied for being gay. It’s based on the 2015 memoir by Greg Cope White, The Pink Marine: One Boy’s Journey Through Boot Camp to Manhood.

Something of a sleeper hit, Boots is one of the most popular TV series in the world right now, and the Trump Administration hates it.

Pundit/Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson suggested it was “woke garbage” that reflected poorly on the military as this administration pledged to return to a “warrior ethos.”

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* Essays & Creative Nonfiction *

Banning Trans Women from Sport Shrinks Womanhood as a Whole

Every few months, someone new pops up, hand on heart, insisting they’re “just protecting women’s sport.” It’s said with the air of moral duty — fairness, equality, safety — like they’re doing women a public service. But the truth is, these arguments have little to do with fairness and everything to do with fear. It’s about control. About deciding who gets to be seen as a woman, and who doesn’t.

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Hadrian and Antinous: A Queer Love Story that Transformed History

Few love stories have stood the tests of time with knowledge of their glory, sanctity and eventual tragedy intact, and fewer still end in a dramatic deification and the founding of an entire city.

But the love story of Hadrian and Antinous, one of the most enduring queer relationships, does just that. Who were Hadrian and Antinous? Roman Emperor Hadrian was always guaranteed a place in the history books, with his integral contribution in consolidating imperial borders and administrative reforms…

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How a Queer Video Game Made Me Cry. Repeatedly.

Something sinister is going on, in a video game that plays like a mix of ‘warm nostalgia for the LGBTQ childhood you never had, but always wanted’ and the TV show “Twin Peaks”. A luscious art style coupled with an indie soundtrack that makes a mix as artistic as our heroine with the Polaroid camera.

Max is back in town to attend the private school Blackwell Academy on an art scholarship. Soon after she starts classes l, she re-encounters her childhood best friend Chloe Price. It’s a reunion in the cruellest scenario possible … The shock … triggers Max’s latent power to rewind time.

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History I Lived Shows How We Queer People Just Want to Live Our Lives

For queer people in America, belonging has too often been treated as something dangerous, as if our presence is a threat to society. In my seventies, I’ve lived long enough to wear my belonging as a badge of courage and honor. It’s been questioned repeatedly by my faith community, by my government, and by people who believe they have the right to deem my life as less worthy, immoral, and less human.

From the Lavender Scare of the 1950s to today’s attacks on transgender people, I’ve watched queer lives targeted not for what we do, but for who we are.

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Charlie & Rachel: The “B” in LGBTQ

This is the third in a series of informal chats on what each letter of LGBTQ means to Charlie Ray, a trans man, and Rachel Addison, a trans woman. We both live in the UK and are of similar age, having attended school in the same region of the country.

Rachel: It’s time for “B”, and I understand we have a special guest this week…

Charlie: We do indeed, my lovely wife, Claire has kindly agreed to help us out with our conversation this week. As she is bisexual, I thought, who better to include in our series than her?

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and

Convicted Sodomist Oscar Wilde Finally Gets His Library Card Back

At last, justice prevails. At a London ceremony, on what would have been Oscar Wilde’s 171st birthday (October 16, 2025), Dame Carol Black, board chair of the British Library, sought to put this injustice right by reissuing a replacement card to Wilde’s grandson.

Oscar Wilde died in exile in Alsace, France, in 1900. He was just 46. A mere half dozen years earlier, he had been the toast of London’s literary society. Apparently, he wasn’t particularly enamored with the décor in the hotel room in which he passed and his wit stayed razor sharp until the end.

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Do All Men Have a Penis?

My eldest daughter (still in elementary school) asked me a question at the weekend that I couldn’t really answer at first, but then somehow answered — clearly wrong — with: Yes.

I’ll be honest, I’m ashamed of my answer. Especially me — someone who has no idea where he/she fits in, someone who has been in therapy and has the diagnosis “transgender” permanently recorded in her/his file. I told her:

Yes, a man always has a penis.

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Zohran Mamdani Defends Trans People as Democrats Cower

New York mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani … recently posted a video on YouTube paying tribute to Sylvia Rivera, a transgender activist who played a major role in the Stonewall uprising that helped launch the modern Pride movement. He spoke about her friendship with Marsha P. Johnson, Stonewall activist who advocated for trans people. I really liked hearing this from Zohran, as it showed that he does know a lot about the LGBT community and some of our elders, as well as demonstrating that he genuinely stands with the LGBT community.

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Grindr Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Union Busting

Grinder (i.e., the masc-centric, queer dating app infamous for allowing people to hook up with relative ease) has always been plagued with controversy… Add to this an inconsistent approach to how the company handles doxxing and political speech, as well as the precarious management of the data of its users, and you have a company that has long had a contentious relationship with the community it alleges to serve.

Recently, the application has been embroiled in … a labor scandal. Its employees have attempted to unionize, and Grindr… has been doing its best to crush their efforts.

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What My Gender Transition Taught Me About Belonging

It’s hard to feel that sense of belonging as a trans woman when society still looks harshly upon us — the whispers, the wary looks, the quiet exclusions. We’re cast as outsiders.

The need to belong is deeply human, hardwired into us. It’s not just emotional; it’s physical, mental, and spiritual. Thousands of years ago, belonging meant survival. To be cast out from the group was to face the wilderness alone. That instinct hasn’t left us.

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What You Do When Someone Comes Out as Trans to You

Since I came out as a trans man, my wife has struggled to find any help or resources for partners, so she decided to write her own support “guide”.

This is part of what she’s learned, in her own words:

When Charlie sat me down one evening and told me he was transgender, it was no great shock to me. In fact, he asked how I was being so calm about this. I explained that it was because I had seen this coming for a few weeks now.

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and his wife Claire

Two Gay-themed Historical Miniseries Leave Me Confused and Frustrated

Over the last several weeks, I found myself watching a pair of miniseries [House of Guinness and Boots], both streaming on Netflix, and both attempting to capture a certain time and place in history. I got hooked… primarily because their plot lines featured central characters struggling to reconcile same-sex attraction while negotiating environments extremely hostile to homosexuality.

Once the plight of these primary characters was revealed, I had to keep watching, if only to find out how their untenable situations would be resolved.

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J.K. Rowling: When Transphobia Becomes Taboo

… One fantastic example that I just saw was a laser clinic in Manchester offering people 50% off on Harry Potter tattoo removals. The clinic say they support trans rights and former fans of Harry Potter, who are now distancing themselves from the franchise by continually coming in to get tattoos removed.

Rowling’s views are just so toxic that many people don’t want anything to do with her. Removing tattoos or covering them up is something that usually only happens when someone has done something very questionable.

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Transgender Women and the Patriarchy: Sadly, the March Goes On

Rejection of transgender women is globally universal. We are hated by religions, we are hated by governments, we are hated by society, we are hated by both sexes, and some of our family and friends. We are even hated by some members of the gay and lesbian community. The media then just fan the hatred to increase their profits.

Clearly, there are exceptions in each group, and I will even argue that the majority in each group are at least tolerant, but at the end of the day, those who hate are the more active, even though they are the minority.

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The Hot Man: This Extraordinary Gay Thing Happened

Gay men over forty commonly describe feeling ‘invisible.” Certainly, that is how I felt when, bald and the father of three children, I came out at age forty-two. Nonetheless, my life since has been beautiful and filled with the love of my husband who is twelve years younger; and, as I have written before, graced with a few sexual adventures with others, nearly all of whom were far younger than me.

Now, at age seventy-six, I quite naturally feel more invisible than ever… But even at my age the extraordinarily unexpected can still occur with a jolt that shocks and astounds.

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The Projectionist’s Playbook: The Modern Political War on Transgender People

Have you ever noticed that the people who shout the loudest about a specific “sin” are often the ones most guilty of it? This is a classic psychological defense mechanism called projection…

My research argues that the entire modern political war on transgender people — specifically the obsessive, hateful accusation that trans people are “groomers” — is a massive, coordinated act of psychological projection.

This campaign isn’t a random grassroots movement. It’s a cold, calculated playbook. And by examining it, we don’t learn anything about trans people, but we learn everything about the accusers.

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* Fiction Finds *

The Warrior with the Strength of an Army and the Love of a Goddess

Deep in the forests of Arcadia, at the foot of a mighty oak, a squirming baby lay wrapped in a blanket. Her voice was hoarse, her tears unending, her strength quickly fading. Her father, the king, crept into the night, furious that he had sired a daughter instead of a son, and carried her far from the palace. Some days had passed, and she was growing hungrier, screaming her pain into the vast domain of Mother Earth.

As the infant wailed, a she-bear passed, her heart heavy, as if wrapped in ivy, at the sight of the abandoned child.

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That’s it for this week! Courage to our 21,000 followers on Medium!

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