🏳️‍🌈🍿Queer Fan Cinema & Trans Joy Market🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 Plain Clothes (2024) when an undercover cop, who arrests gay men starts having conflicting feelings… well you should probably watch. Thursday 12/11 7:30 with free popcorn And this weekend is Trans Joy with a market by TransJam (possibly inside, taking over the lounge and bar if it’s cold, so no ShadowDark D&D this weekend) Holiday Market 4-8 with Sexxy Santa Photo Booth Live music 8-10 And NBphobia DJ Collective with Lucky and Aaaron 10-1 Come keep your holiday dollars pink and in our kinky queer community

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History: Bible Series 1🏺🏳️‍🌈 Genesis doesn’t enforce heterosexuality—it sanctifies companionship. The sacred good is not “male with female,” but human with a partner who corresponds, who complements. Genesis 2 is often invoked to defend ‘traditional’ marriage yet the story’s own logic points somewhere more inclusive. When read closely, Genesis becomes less a rulebook about gender and more a meditation on human companionship. The narrative begins not with “man” but with ’adam—a gender-nutural (undifferentiated) human formed from the earth. The first divine assessment in the Bible is: “It is not good that the human should be alone.” The first issue is isolation. Unfortunately for that Oklahoma Psychology student, she’d get a 0 in hermanutics as well God promises to make a “helper”“corresponding to” the human (ʿēzer kenegdô). ‘ēzer’ is used mostly of God helping Israel—so it cannot mean an obedient wife. ‘Kenegdô’ means “matching, facing, equal, corresponding.” This is the relational condition: a partner who answers the human’s loneliness with mutual support. The text then depicts God forming animals—not as comic relief, but as a process of discernment. None are found to be a true counterpart. The goal is not heterosexual pairing; the goal is finding the one who corresponds, like to adam. Scholars like Phyllis Trible and Ken Stone argue that the hermeneutical key is this: Genesis 2 does not prescribe a universal model of “one man + one woman” (the Bible was definitely open to polygamy) It narrates God’s search for a relationship of equality and mutual comfort. From this logic, queer theology makes a natural—though not original (see the Talmud)—conclusion: If God’s concern is the human need for a partner who truly corresponds, then any relationship that embodies mutual help, shared life, and chosen companionship fulfills the text’s purpose. This is not claiming the ancient author intended to affirm gay love; rather, it’s following a canonical pattern where later communities draw broader, life-giving meanings from earlier stories, where no one must walk alone.

🏳️‍🌈🍿📚 Queer Fan Cinema & Book Clubs 📚🍿🏳️‍🌈 Wednesdays – Queer Book Clubs at 6:30 PM Thursdays – Queer Movie Nights at 7:30 PM 12/3 — Queer Horizons: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz 12/4 — Movie: Aristotle and Dante (2023) 12/10 — Queer Canon: Symposium by Plato 12/11 — Movie: Plain Clothes (2024) 12/17 — Resistance Reader: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder 12/18 — Movie: The Holiday Exchange (2024) 12/24 — NO BEAR BOOK CLUB 12/25 — CLOSED 12/31 — Midnight: Free champagne Drag Show to ring in the New Year! Also This Month 1st Saturday — Pup-Jamas 2nd Saturday — Trans Joy Holiday Market with Trans Jam (4–8 PM) 3rd Saturday — Union Suit Leather Night 4th Saturday — Bear & Bondage ⸻ 📚 Our Queer Book Clubs 🌈 Queer Horizons Focuses on light, enjoyable reads—YA fiction, romance, fantasy, and popular queer literature. Meets the first Wednesday each month. 🏺 Queer Canon Explores classic and foundational LGBTQ+ works, including subtly coded fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and other seminal (and sometimes heavier) texts. Meets the second Wednesday each month. 🚹 The Resistance Reader Dives into socialist, sociological, political, and historical works—from theory and comparative history to biographies and analyses of current events. Meets the third Wednesday each month. 🐻 The Bear Book Club Hosted by the Richmond Bear Network (see their Facebook group for membership info). Focused on cozy gay novels. Meets the last Wednesday each month

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈 World AIDS Day was first observed on December 1, 1988, becoming the first international health awareness event. Conceived by the World Health Organization, it was created during a moment of profound global stigma, political inaction, and rising AIDS deaths. Its purpose was simple and radical: acknowledge the crisis, honor those lost, support those living with HIV, and spur world governments to action, when most were ignoring it as the ‘Gay Plague.’ The pandemic itself started half a century earlier. Though AIDS was first clinically recognized 7 years before in the United States, the genetic evidence shows HIV-1 group M—the strain responsible for the global pandemic—likely made the jump from primates to humans in the 20s. The virus circulated silently for decades before it was identified, by which time HIV had spread across continents. More than 91 million people have been infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic, and over 44 million have died of AIDS-related illnesses. Today, about 41 million people worldwide live with HIV, with 1.3 million new infections reported in 2024 alone. Despite enormous advances in treatment and prevention, global inequity continues to shape who gets sick, who gets care, and who is left behind. This year’s World AIDS Day theme is “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response.” It highlights the growing concern that political instability—especially the defunding of major U.S. global AIDS initiatives (USAID’s PEPFAR) threaten decades of progress. Community-led organizations, which have historically been the backbone of HIV prevention and care, now face heightened barriers at the very moment when the end of the pandemic was finally on the horizon. World AIDS Day remains a call to action: restore government funding, support people living with HIV, reverse rising new-infection trends, and fight the stigma that still prevents millions from seeking testing and treatment. Testing matters. Early diagnosis and consistent treatment not only make HIV chronic but manageable—they stop transmission altogether.