Queer Tales: Uncovering History, Roads to Freedom, & Dodging a Fighter Jet

Prism & Pen Weekly Digest, 12 July 2026

By Rachel Addison & James Finn

With Pride Month concluded for the year, we queer people are still here and still urging society to get used to it. Join us today for tales of love, family, history, courage, and roads to freedom.

From a trans woman who fled a war zone, to a Black gay man who helped found the Harlem Renaissance only to have been forgotten, we have always been everywhere. Just ask Alexander Hamilton’s son, who apparently knew something historians can’t quite pin down.

But as one joyful trans writer relates, being trans in a trans-hating world does not have to equal lack of joy!

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Big thanks to all our readers and supporters!

P&P Highlights

Being Trans in a Trans-Hating World

What does it mean to be trans?

All I can tell you, from this trans woman’s experience, is that being yourself is a deeply freeing and beautiful experience.

…And I have fun now!

🔑 Read more of this story by Clara Dolderman

This Letter From Alexander Hamilton Suggests a Gay Relationship, but …

There is a love letter in the National Archives with a note penciled across the top of it. The letter was written in April of 1779, in the middle of the war that made this country, by a twenty-four-year-old officer named Alexander Hamilton to another named John Laurens. The note was written decades later — almost certainly by Hamilton’s own son, who edited his father’s papers for the republic to read, and who cut this very passage from the edition he published.

It says: I must not publish the whole of this.

🔑 Read more of this story by Dimitrios Aletras, Jr.

The Life Story of a Trans Woman I Never Told

My real transition started two years before I truly understood and accepted my gender identity. I had to leave my country because of the war. For 11 months, I witnessed drones flying over the roof of my house, and a jet fighter exploding 500 meters (1,600 feet) away from my child’s bedroom window after being hit by a missile. I saw trains full of women and children leaving their families, not knowing when or if they would see them again.

🔑 Read more of this story by Kira Ry

There Was Never a Road for Us LGBTQ People

I read the latest Prism & Pen prompt on my phone in a site canteen, whilst battling permit systems and workers who refuse to wear their hard hats. I’m a health and safety advisor, offshore mostly — right now it’s an onshore wind farm, which sounds glamorous but is, in fact, a great deal of dust, paperwork and men who still think it’s 1975.

So. We queer people ask, what road do we take in the face of the current, intensifying backlash or moral panic?

🔑 Read more of this story by The Land Of Green Ginger

He Told the Truth About Black Queer Love Decades Before Anyone Else Dared

Queer history: An almost forgotten founder of the Harlem Renaissance.

[Richard Bruce Nugent] was not a one-story figure. He was a working artist whose life moved across genres, scenes, and eras.

In other words, the problem was not merely that Nugent was ahead of his time. The problem was that the time itself was unwilling to receive him.

🔑 Read more of this story by Dr. Janine Bouey

I Blamed the Algorithm for My Disgust Toward Gay Men: I Was Wrong

I always felt that most of the gay men I knew on social media were constantly talking about sex, and in such a vulgar manner.

There. I said it.

I’m not proud of it. In fact, I re-edited that sentence repeatedly, and every version sounded too self-congratulatory, so I gave up and left it raw.

Just recently, a gay acquaintance on Facebook — let’s call him Mike — posted a close-up of his torso, oiled and gleaming under studio lighting.

🔑 Read more of this story by Victor Ude

News & Opinion

Another Terrible Decision for Trans Women, But Who Cares?

Any fool, and there appear to be plenty, can see how trans women being placed in all male prisons on the basis of biological background is a terrible idea.

It seems as though our leaders, and those holding the arm of the law, have unlimited capacity for making hundreds of bad decisions, but they learn very little from the death, pain and devastation they cause.

🔑 Read more of this story by Sarah Scorze

The US Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Transgender Segregation in Sports

The Supreme Court have turned back the clock on modern gender science and reintroduced the segregational logic of the Plessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 ruling which legally justified “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites.

His (Justice Kavanaugh’s) opinion takes on a different light if you substitute white male athletes for biological female ones in his argument.

🔑 Read more of this story by Emma Holiday

July Writing Prompt & Responses

What Next, We Queer People Ask. What Road Do We Take?

Can we find optimism again? It’s not just the U.S., though constant anti-queer headlines here are overwhelming. It’s everywhere.

Gay tourists barred from entering Turkey [and Egypt] on the grounds of “morality.” Gay people being rounded up and imprisoned in Niger, Senegal, Ghana, Malaysia, Russia, and elsewhere. In the U.K., a judge just ruled that trans prisoners must, as a matter of law, be housed according to their birth sex, despite the fact that trans women will certainly be assaulted and raped in consequence.

Read the writing prompt by James Finn

Finding Queer Hope and Belonging on a Country Road in Rural Ohio

I live on a country road in rural Ohio, surrounded by cornfields, a handful of neighbors, and conservative values. I am also a gay man.

For me, my country road is more than pavement leading into town. It’s a metaphor for my life in this place. Like many small-town and rural queers, I spent years operating under the heavy, isolating belief that I was walking a lonely road.

🔑 Read more of this story by Tom Bilcze

Essays & Creative Nonfiction

The Making of Marvin — a Gender-Bender Story of Closeted LGBTQ Proportions

This Independence Day, I’m blasting with…well…independence. All the scent of masculine perfume around us in this Trump era makes me recognize the feminine part of me. From my perspective, gay or straight, as humans, don’t we all have that?

As an obvious LGBTQ person, my birth represented a gender-bender baby. I mean, I watched soap operas from my crib, my mother tells me. My great-uncle was a gay man who owned a house of prostitution in Buffalo, NY. The former may have been a signal that there was a gay person coming along in our family. That would be me.

🔑 Read more of this story by Matthew Bamberg

An Annotated Litany of Explanations for Why I Am Not Really Transgender

At what point is the number of explanations itself considered to be evidentiary of the more elegant answer? Let’s find out…

It’s been just over a year since, at the tail end of 49, my proverbial egg began to crumble and I informed my wife in a tearful, drunken panic that I had been harboring some long-standing questions regarding my gender. Nothing drastic…

🔑 Read more of this story by Name Withheld

Poetry

Oh God, Dear God: A poem

Your beloved children, individuals, crucified, without understanding, but we know why.

🔑 Read more of this poem by Patsy Starke

That’s it for this week. Courage to our 29,000 followers on Medium!

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