🏳️‍🌈🐻Bear and Bondage Night⛓️🏳️‍🌈 Tonight 2/28 with DJ Amy Alderman at 9pm ⛓️The Bondage and Kink demo at 10:30 will be discussing breath play and choking. THERE WILL NOT BE FREE PLAY AFTER! This will be a discussion and presentation about safer ways to do this inherently unsafe practice. We will have mock demonstrations examples but no actual airway of blood flow restrictions will be allowed. Afterwards we will discuss popper usage and safety. Remember you must arrive on time (10:30) and get a wristband to be in the lounge. Upcoming events for the lounge 🐶 Next week will be Pup Stray Night with the Mats out from 7:30-9 for making new friends ⚔️ Shadowdark D&D survival at 4:30 second Saturdays 👨🏼‍✈️ Leather Night this month is Slick (rubber, latex, and vinyl) ⛓️ (NEXT month we will discuss flogging and impact) and have a 🐻Hibernation after party

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈 For many persons of color, the freedom of the sea was the only freedom to be had, which also attracted many queer folks. For Black men in the age of piracy, maritime labor offered something plantation life did not: movement and independence. Even in places where they were technically free, they were often restricted or even in danger of re-enslavement. Ships were all-male environments, many of which inherited British common law bans on homosexuality, but they at least had the sense of freedom. In naval court-martial prosecutions for “unnatural acts,” Black sailors appear in these records alongside white sailors — sometimes accused together, sometimes described in ongoing relationships rather than isolated encounters. By trying to erase queer people, authorities preserved the evidence, as very few other records of naval culture survived. Port cities like New Orleans and Charleston saw periodic arrests of sailors for “lewd conduct.” Black men were part of these arrests but often faced far more severe punishments—enslavement. When faced with such punishments, some queer people turned away from the formal navy altogether. Pirates complicate the queer picture even further. In the 17th-century Caribbean, buccaneers commonly entered into formal partnerships called matelotage, in which two men shared property and inheritance — arrangements some historians interpret as including romantic or sexual bonds. Multiracial crews were common (Black Caesar sailed with the possibly queer Blackbeard) Pirate codes sometimes specifically regulated gay conduct, which indicates it was common enough onboard, but evidence is still sparse and uneven. But there is a persistent myth: that a queer black merchant sailor was to be sold into slavery in Charleston for sodomy on board by a tyrannical Captain. In response the whole crew mutinied, and with little other option, turned Pirate. While documentation is absent it fits in the known gaps, which is so often where we were forced to live. Black/Queer— Free on the sea away from the official record. Be gay, do pirate We will revisit Blackbeard & Bonnet in a future post.

🏳️‍🌈🏺 2-GAY IN HISTORY 🏺🏳️‍🌈 Ruth and Naomi It’s not just David and Jonathan who are treated as ‘special’ friends in the Hebrew Bible, but two women as well. Many now consider it the Bible’s best love story. In the Book of Ruth, famine has struck the land, and two women are now widowed. Naomi tells her daughter-in-law to go home. Ruth refuses. And what she says is immortalized in Christian marriage ceremonies every day: “Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die— there will I be buried.” (Ruth 1:16) Spoken at heterosexual weddings as vows of lifelong union. The Bible places them in the mouth of one woman to another. The Hebrew verb used is dāvaq — “to cling” — the same verb used in Genesis for a man “cleaving” to his wife or a soul clinging to a beloved 34:3 It’s an obvious, intentional parallel. The narrative then centers their bond. Ruth lives with Naomi, providing for her financially. They struggle and strive together in a patriarchal world. When Ruth finally has a child, the townswomen proclaim: “A son has been born to Naomi.” (4:17) The emotional arc belongs to the women. Boaz is a biological necessity; Naomi is narratively central. Scholars see the queer reading. Ken Stone, Deryn Guest, and J. Cheryl Exum all argue that the text presents a covenantal same-sex bond using language otherwise reserved for marriage. It is affectively intense, economically intertwined, socially visible, and theologically sanctioned. Nothing in the story rebukes it. Nothing distances the reader from it. Instead, Israel’s royal line is built on it. From Ruth and Naomi to David, the lineage in the Gospels is built on these queer foundations. You could read it as just a platonic commitment between a younger woman and an older one. But the text treats it as exceptionally devotional and covenantal—as holy. So much so that countless couples have chosen to hear those words as the truest form of love: the very definition of what marriage means, gay or otherwise.

🏳️‍🌈👨🏼‍✈️This Week at Thirsty’s 🍿📚 3rd week of February ‘26 💅🏾 Wednesday is Hot Girl Drag with Amber, Lady, and Lavender 📚 Resistance Reader Boom Club is Lavender Scare by Johnson at 6:30 🍿 Thursday’s Queer Fan Cinema is Weekend (2011) 7:30 🎉 Saturday is the fourth anniversary of Leather Night with classic leather formal ware. 👨🏼‍✈️