I don't want to be told that my presence matters while simultaneously being reminded that my absence is acceptable.

The post This Pride, Disabled LGBTQ+ People Don’t Need Your Apologies appeared first on Autostraddle.

Tierra Whack can really, really rap. The Philadelphia artist is a super-inventive visual stylist with a ton of bright art-pop ideas, so it can be easy to overlook the fact that she's got bars. It'll be a lot harder once you hear her new record Whack's Museum. When she announced the impending release a couple of weeks ago, Whack referred to Whack's Museum as a "rap mixtape." She wasn't kidding.

The post Tierra Whack Raps Her Ass Off On New Mixtape <em>Whack’s Museum</em> appeared first on Stereogum.

Today marks Juneteenth, the day when enslaved African Americans in Texas became free. The Emancipation Proclamation was 2.5 years old when it reached Galveston, Texas in 1865. Slaveowners in the state already knew, of course. Jordan Smith reports they forced in at least 150,000 enslaved folks in those 2.5 years. All this came decades after Texas itself went to war with Mexico to protect its own slaveholders. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, and Texas declared its independence in 1835. But 30 years later, the enslaved people of Texas finally broke the bonds of chattel slavery. We've celebrated Juneteenth every year since.

My ancestors (not even distant ones) lived during segregation and Jim Crow. Some of them took part in other civil rights struggles. These causes are, ultimately, linked. Lilla Watson put it best when she said, "If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” We celebrate Juneteenth as a rare step towards the total liberation of all people who call this country home. Today the project of our collective liberation is not finished. Though the struggle continues, we mark our progress with joy.

I sometimes wonder: what happens when we're done? It feels like we're still a very long way off from the imagined utopias of pop culture like Star Trek. The future that feels so rational and bright is still crafted by present-day minds. But the time we spend on imagination is never wasted. I find that it's essential to deciding where we want to go.

what does utopia mean?

To me, it means everyone has their basic needs met. A person may want for whatever but need nothing. The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement is a self-governance organization in Sri Lanka. They offer material support and conflict resolution to people in villages across the country. Founder A.T. Ariyaratne led research in more than 600 villages to create a list of people's 10 basic needs. Sarvodaya organizes this list from most to least important, but all 10 needs are essential for well-being.

1. Clean environment
2. Adequate supply of water
3. Clothing
4. Nutritious food
5. Shelter
6. Health care
7. Communication
8. Fuel and lighting (energy)
9. Access to education
10. Cultural and spiritual performance

Sounds simple, right? The aforementioned Star Trek nerds (guilty) might describe this condition as post-scarcity. In the galactic UN called the Federation, everyone has what they need. Money is no longer an issue for anyone. Nobody hoards wealth. It doesn't even figure into most people's daily lives! In a utopia we could easily meet all the needs above. What might people still argue about?

Logistical struggles. How do we share the resources that we all need to survive? What do we produce and where does it need to go? What does power and agency feel like in a world like this? Are services centralized in the style of an empire? Are we arranged in highly-connected bureaucratic city-states? Is there a massive entity like Sarvodaya that distributes resources to far-flung villages?

Principled struggles. What is a struggle when we're all on the same side? Activist groups during the civil rights era all had the same ultimate goal. Their success was the product of hours of debate, discussion, and conflict. Members articulated their passions, fears, and hopes through connection with each other. adrienne maree brown describes the concept she learned as principled struggle. Quoting N'Tanya Lee, she writes,

"[I]n struggle that is principled, we struggle for the sake of building deeper unity, that we are honest and direct while holding compassion, that we each take responsibility for our own feelings and actions, and seek deeper understanding by asking questions and reading a text (such as an article or proposal) before we launch our counter argument."

No matter our experiences, there will always be things we don't know. The universality of utopia asks us to consider the perspectives and wisdom of others. Principled struggle offers us a way to do so.

Struggles against greed and chaos. As I was imagining a list of utopian problems, I kept coming back to these. I'm a product of my surroundings. Society birthed its first trillionaire this week, and he's unfortunately a violence-fueling insufferable racist. It's hard to imagine a utopia when all that some people want is a utopia of one. These future-folks will deal with similar people, too. We already have bigots who insist the social progress we made has gone too far. We see in the present day how easy it is to subvert institutions. We need safeguards, not just written into rules or laws, but into the values we hold as a people.

utopia found

It's possible that utopia is less a destination than a perpetual journey. For as long as we exist as humans we will be as fallible as we are brilliant. I hope that principled struggle is where we spend most of our time. But the 10 basic needs above are so tangible it's maddening. We already produce enough resources for everyone on earth to live in comfort. If scarcity is manufactured, the obstacle we face is not material but societal.

More people than ever are waking up to the true conditions of the world around them. Our liberation remains bound together. Utopia, or something like it, could arrive tomorrow. Can we find the courage enough to demand it?

This story originally appeared in The Stranger’s 2026 Queer Issue.

Photos by Billie Winter

Above a winding maze of clothing racks, dozens of styrofoam heads stare down at me. Sitting on three long rows of shelves, each head supports a carefully coiffed wig, tall, teased, and organized by color. Long pins stick out of some of them to hold them in place. Others have pins sticking out of their cheeks, lips, and chins like voodoo dolls. In the corner, one wig is sliding over the styrofoam head’s eyes. 

Looking up at the menagerie of hair, Sam Pierce shakes their head. “I put all these shelves up,” they say. “When we first got here, all these wigs were just in piles.” 

My eyes got wide imagining all of the work that goes into shaping, gelling, and perfecting each wig on the wall. 

Sam shrugged when they saw my face. “Don’t worry, they’re plastic,” they said. “They don’t have souls.” (They later clarified: “Some of them do. I try not to come in here at night.”)

We’re standing in the center of a drag studio in a Capitol Hill basement, the home base for local legends Jane Don’t and Bosco (you might recognize them from Drag Race Seasons 14 and 18, respectively). A corset made of monster faces hangs from the ceiling. A giant bird-shaped headpiece named Denise is perched on a pipe. Mannequins of every size and gender watch over vanities and sewing machines. 

It’s clearly a second home for Sam. They aren’t a drag queen, but in every corner of the studio, you can find something they’ve touched. The shelves, obviously. Every carefully bedazzled five-inch heel. The drawers, labeled “Spikes/Chains,” “Crystal,” “Pearls/Bangles,” “Glasses,” “Nails,” “Miscellaneous Jewelry.” The feather boa stitched into the hem of Jane’s dress. The “Samdega” full of makeup, hairspray, and other essentials. The suitcases in the corner? They’ve packed them. The Grindhaus posters on the wall? They co-produce the show. 

Sam doesn’t have a formal job title in the studio. Sometimes they’re described as a studio manager. Sometimes as an assistant. A stage manager. An all-purpose them. A handythey. Whenever I ask them to put a name on their position, they struggle to find an answer. But what’s not up for debate is that some of Seattle’s biggest drag acts could not happen without Sam. 

They’re part of what Jane Don’t calls an “unseen force” behind the drag world: the people who do everything in the drag world but the drag. “I always joke that behind every amazing creative person that you know, there’s a neurotic little freak hiding back there, taking care of all the weird little things that the creative person can’t do,” Sam tells me. 

“There’s people like Sam all over the drag world—you’d be shocked how many,” says Jane Don’t. “But my Sam is the best Sam.”  

Sam was introduced to the Seattle drag scene in 2018. They were newly out, looking for community, and started hanging around Queer/Bar. “I had friends that had gotten me into Drag Race,” they told me over coffee. “But this was like a way to reach out and touch it, you know? I could walk up and be like, ‘Hello, I’m gonna talk to you,’ which
was exciting to me.”

They were drawn to the pageantry of drag. “They’re so not normal,” they say. “So larger than life. I feel at home here.” 

“I was determined to get involved somehow, in whatever way,” they say. “The shows used to have dancers, and they would pick up the money after each number. But when the show couldn’t afford to pay the dancers anymore, Visage Legs LaRue was there at the time, and I had just been around a lot. I think she felt my urge to get involved and reached out to me on Facebook Messenger.” She offered 50 bucks a night, and Sam jumped at it. 

In burlesque, they’re called Stage Kittens—picking up clothes and tips so the performers don’t have to. “They shouldn’t have to scoop their own dirty, wet money off the floor,” Sam says. “Sometimes they physically can’t, they’re wearing too much stuff.”

From there, they started noticing more and more things that could be made better, or easier, or more organized. “I just found myself being too neurotic,” they say. “I just didn’t want to watch the drag queens struggle. I just started seeing problems and being like, ‘I can fix that.’”

Queer/Bar’s also where they met Bosco. “She became one of my close friends. We started doing crafts together,” Sam says. She got cast on Drag Race Season 14 in 2021. “I ended up helping her with her whole package and getting everything ready. There were three of us that made all of her stuff that went on her original season.”

That’s when they discovered their knack for rhinestoning. “I’m apparently very fast at it. So, the girls love to be like, ‘Can you do this project in 24 hours?’ And I’m always like, ‘Fine.’” 

“It’s fun to take something that’s not shiny and make it shiny,” they say. “I do a lot of pasties.”

Their role organically grew from there. It was all guided by what they called their “brain worms,” which made them fix things. “Let me help you buy some shelves and hang things up and make it efficient in here, instead of just…piles.”

They paused for a second. “This is gonna make them sound really unorganized and messy. But they are.” 

Sam is quick to downplay how much they contribute to the queens they work with. When they told me that they helped build entire outfits for Bosco’s  Drag Race run, my jaw dropped a little, and they shrugged. “It was mostly bras and panties.” 

I asked Jane Don’t if she’d noticed how quickly Sam shrugs off their work, and I could hear her rolled her eyes through the phone. By the time Jane Don’t was getting ready to go onto RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sam had already prepped two other queens for the show. They were a rare pro. 

Jane says 14 or 15 people worked on her building out her outfits for the show, but Sam had something to offer that no one else did: experience organizing and packing a whole season’s worth of sparkling, larger-than-life looks. 

“It’s funny, because it’s like you think, ‘Oh, I just have to sew everything, and I put them in a box and I take them,’” Jane told The Stranger. “But it’s also about organizing things—having systems that make it easier for you to just do what you have to do when you’re there. That’s really Sam’s forte. And they had just done it so many times that it wasso streamlined.”

Jane calls Sam her “life preserver.” “When I think of Sam, it’s me crashing out and Sam just being like, “Hey, dumb dumb, go sit on the couch, I’ll just let me do it.’”

“They just do a lot to make all of our sort of quality of life a lot better. We’ve known each other for so long and worked together so closely that now they’re also just like extended family—my little/sometimes older sibling, and also kind of my assistant, and our studio manager, and the show runner, and my personal organizer.”

But she wanted to make sure we didn’t overlook the fact that Sam is a creative force on the team, too. And it’s not just they co-produce Grindhaus with Bosco every quarter. “Bosco will be like, ‘I need a giant cage on wheels,’ and Sam will figure out how to make it. Or ‘I need a big box that I have to come out of,’ and Sam will sit there and sculpt it out of foam. They are an artist and a craftsperson in their own right.”

“Drag is so interdisciplinary,” Jane says, “and it’s fundamentally goofy.”

“It’s the classic story of drag and and queer art. It demands so much labor that people don’t see,” she says. “The drag world runs on people like Sam.” 

Got something to say? Email us at letters@thestranger.com.
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The post The ‘Neurotic Little Freak’ Behind the Curtain appeared first on The Stranger.

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

Cain Culto is a paragon of artistic confidence: a vamping, twerking powerhouse with a sly, silver-grilled smile. He's a shredder on the violin whose lyrics, in English and Spanish, meld his political consciousness with his penchant for shaking ass. On his 2025 breakout hit with fellow rapper-violinist Sudan Archives, “KFC Santería (Remix),” Culto rapped about “American dollars fundin’ genocide” alongside “daddies in my DMs tryna pay for that,” and it did not sound incongruous at all. On his most recent single, “Cucuru,” he cranks up his suave voice to the pitch of a kewpie doll to sing lyrics like, “Let me be brash and abrasive/Speaking my truth with a brave tongue,” over a dollop of Afro-Colombian bullerengue, a philosophical statement from a fearless shapeshifter. He's a musical omnivore who stands on business in every song, conjuring spells against malignant forces with the self-assuredness of an artist who knows exactly who he is.

But for Andrew Estevan Padilla, it’s been a long path to develop his superheroic musical alter ego. Growing up in Kentucky and South Florida, he served as a youth pastor in an evangelical church, where he repressed his true self and devoted his music to God. Then his mind and body rebelled, and he embarked on a journey of embracing his queerness through his music. 

“In my earlier songs, I’m still very fragile and afraid and working through many things,” Padilla says on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “And then you hear me build confidence, willing to stand alone and present more authentically. Maybe the mischievous aspect of me birthed from there, too—like, Well, I’m so misunderstood, let me just troll a little bit. All these things everyone’s telling me I’m not supposed to become feel so liberating and true.”

He was always a little rebellious, though, starting from his insistence in playing bluegrass instead of classical when he first took up the violin in fourth grade. The son of immigrants from Colombia (dad) and Nicaragua (mom), he spent his first several years in South Florida before moving to Lexington, Kentucky, with his family. “When I was young, my dad always had this dream of assimilation—his fantasy of this American dream,” Padilla says. “And there was something quaint and beautiful about moving to a small town in Kentucky.” The Padillas were among the first Latine families in a predominantly white neighborhood, and he remembers when “probably some idiot kid” once spraypainted “KKK” on their garage door. But he also learned about Southern politeness, and his parents placed him in a magnet art school and found him a fiddle instructor who taught him bluegrass technique.  

As an adolescent, Padilla and a friend began posting covers of hits by Karmin and Fun on YouTube. Looking back, he sees those early videos as planting the seeds of his maximalist production style, where he translated his love of big pop songs via GarageBand and Logic. He began writing his own music then, too—worship songs for his church, but also those for himself. He recalls one of the first songs he ever wrote, “When Pigs Fly,” in which he started to express his own teen rebellion. “It was about, like, ‘I’ll care about what you say when pigs fly,’” he says, chuckling. “So bad, but in my mind, I thought I was so cunty with that.” 

Padilla wasn’t sure he could be a professional musician, though. So one weekend at a men’s retreat he attended with his father, he decided to put it to God, praying that if anyone read a certain Bible verse to him during the trip, he would know to follow his musical dreams. At the retreat, he played a song he had written and all the men sobbed. “It was the first time I experienced my work affecting people in such an intense way,” he remembers. But by the last day, no one had said the fated Bible verse—until the preacher stopped mid-sermon and read it. “Obviously, I've gone through my own deconstruction [with the church],” Padilla says, “but for a long time in my early young-adult life, that experience of having something so concrete to hold onto in my emotional self gave me that delusional belief that this is my path.”

Padilla’s self-belief as Cain Culto, mischievous gay superhero, is kinetic. On “Bimbaubau,” a summery party track, he analogizes the pop divas he loves to what sounds like extremely fine booty. Set to the melody of Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 single “Conga”—a South Florida classic that still resonates with Latines across the diaspora—and embellished with staccato violin stabs, he delivers his missive with the sensual self-possession of his many singles and last year’s Occulto 001 EP. “Tu culo me habla catalán com Rosalía/Nalgas como Kali Uchis hablan por telepatía,” he raps, talking about a remarkable ass that both speaks Catalan and is telepathic. And his ability to weave through genres—Colombian vallanato and bluegrass, cacophonous and sproingy rap, Brazilian samba and funk, big and bright pop, and more—has enabled him to sound natural alongside collaborators across the spectrum, including the rappers Xiuhtezcatl and Snow tha Product, singer Jarina de Marco, and fellow provocateurs like Peaches and Brooke Candy.

While Padilla’s talent was never in question, his cuntiness and Godliness were destined to converge and, eventually, explode. In 2021, he was working as a worship leader for various churches in South Florida and touring with a rising Christian band called Ecclesia. He was also closeted and, he says, “actively kind of preaching against being queer. I hold a lot of regret and shame—I was a young kid, I didn’t have it figured out. But at the same time, I was placed in certain positions of influence, and I impacted people with that messaging.”

The cognitive dissonance became too much, and it led to what he calls a “mental break” that was exacerbated by fasting, praying, and touring with his band. He eventually had to be hospitalized due to a “split from reality.”

“I came out in those moments, essentially, because I was in a mental state where I couldn't repress anything,” Padilla says. “All my church leaders and family thought I was possessed. I mean, it looked like it. There were these feral parts of my shadow that were just out.” With medication, he says, he was able to have a fuller perspective on what was transpiring in his life. “I just had this moment of reflection of being like, Whatever led me to this really rock-bottom place, something is not right in my life. I needed to practically confront that and be willing to change to find something that’s more sustainable and healthy.”

Padilla will release the Occulto 002 EP in July, and after that, a full-length record. He’s excited to further expand his vast musical range, showing off epic orchestral work that zooms past algorithmic limitations. And he sees his forthcoming music as a manifestation of everything he’s been through, as he further embodies the ferocious pop persona that is Cain Culto. 

“The split aspect of myself is just becoming more unified. Looking back at that traumatic moment where my mind literally did split, there was this severing, and everything had to be in two different boxes: My sexual self is here, my spiritual self is here. But it’s like, Actually, no, let’s just integrate everything,” he says. “Instead of finding myself, it feels like I’m telling people who I am.”