As I’m sure you know if you’ve been on literally any website today, the VMAs were this weekend. What you might not know if you didn’t catch it live is that it was a pretty gay affair. And I’m going to highlight some of the gay goings-on for you, in case you don’t feel like watching the whole dang thing.

First up, some queer people who took home a coveted Moonman:

Lady Gaga won Artist of the Year, Best Direction, and Best Art Direction (all before heading directly to Madison Square Garden to perform to a sold-out audience…just a casual Sunday). She also won Best Collaboration for her joint venture with Bruno Mars, Die with a Smile.

KATSEYE won Push Performance of the Year, Doechii’s won Best Hip-Hop, Best Choreography for “Anxiety”, Lisa ft. Doja Cat & Raye took home Best K-Pop, and Charli xcx’s Guess Featuring Billie Eilish won Video for Good because of the over-10,000 pairs of underwear donated to I Support the Girls, a charity that provides underwear and period products to women in need.

A stand-out moment of the show was when Sabrina Carpenter took to the stage to perform her new song, “Tears”, and included in her retinue of backup dancers were RuPaul Drag Race queens, including Denali, Willam, Symone, Laganja Estranja, and Lexi Love. The backup dancers all held signs that had pro-trans (and pro-LGBTQ+ in general) messaging on them, including but not limited to, “Support local drag,” “DOLLS DOLLS DOLLS”, “Good bi”, “In trans we trust”, and “Protect trans rights”. In her acceptance speech when she won Best Album, Sabrina Carpenter addressed the queens and expressed her gratitude to be part of something so positive amidst all the negativity and discrimination going on in our world.

Watch the full performance here:

Also worth mentioning: Ariana Grande thanked us in her acceptance speech! Okay maybe not you and me specifically but also not NOT you and me specifically! When she went up to accept one of her three awards won last night, she said, “Thank you to my therapists and gay people, I love you.” And while this is very cute and sweet — especially now that she’s now a “gay icon” to gay men AND a queer icon to the sapphics who love Wicked — it’s also more than that, especially in 2025 when there are literal “don’t say gay” bills being passed.

I’ll leave you with this handy dandy list that Them pulled together of what some of the LGBTQ+ celebs wore on the red carpet. And this bonus video of Rebecca Black being AT the VMAs but still having to watch Tate McRae’s performance on her phone because she went to get food and they wouldn’t let her back in until the commercial break. Stars, they’re just like us!

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And The Award for Links I Thought You Might Like Goes To…

+ Ayo Edebiri gracefully responded to an absurd journalist question that implied the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements were over and also that they were a net negative

+ Young Sheldon star Raegan Revord comes out as non-binary and publishes a queer novel at 17 — the kids are alright

+ If you heard a high-pitched squeal earlier today it was just me finding out that one of my favorite gay video games, Life is Strange, is going to be turned into a live-action television series by queer, nonbinary creator Charlie Covell

+ The movie Christy about a queer boxer starring Sydney Sweeney and Katy O’Brien premiered at TIFF

+ The good news is, we’re apparently getting a third Camp Rock movie over 15 years after Camp Rock 2 came out…the bad news is, it seems unlikely Demi Lovato will return (but maybe Alyson Stoner will??)

+ Amita Suman (Shadow & Bone) and Lara Rossi (Horizon Zero Dawn) play girlfriends in the latest NCIS spinoff: Tony & Ziva

+ Roxane Gay will be receiving the wordily named but much deserved 2025 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community

+ Ruby Cruz is proud to be able to play so many queer characters, including her character in her upcoming movie Threesome

+ Chrishell and G-Flip are apparently planning on having a wedding every year; this year was medieval themed, the next one might be Wednesday themed

+ The video game Marvel Rivals has introduced a lesbian Asgardian princess (Thor’s half-sister, in fact) whose wife is a trans Angel

+ And last but not least, Reneé Rapp would love it if people would stop bringing her “big fucking lesbian name” into drama that has nothing to do with her

This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

The following iteration of The Parlour is how I initially envisioned this series: nascent essays oriented around themes but without much of a “point” or lesson to be learned. So let’s see how this goes!

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We’ve been under a heat advisory for a number of days, I couldn’t tell you exactly how many. They’ve melted together like the That’s It fruit bar I accidentally left in the backseat of the car, gone gummy and flacid. I’m writing this from Orlando, but I bet I could be writing it from other places, too, perhaps the place you are reading this from now, a place made hotter than usual by this midsummer heatwave sweeping the nation. That’s what it is: hotter than usual. Because Orlando summers are always hot. But this heat, it’s different. Ten degrees up from daily averages.

This heat advisory has collided with my preseason tennis training weeks. I’ve got league matches and tournaments coming up in September, and I made a promise to myself to train hard this summer, no matter the weather. There’s nothing I can do about rain, but heat I can push through, have to really. I watched a video recently where a tennis coach to the stars says the only way to prepare for playing in the heat is to play in the heat. He’s talking about touring professionals and in particular the way the record-breaking temperatures in London threw many players off at this year’s Wimbledon, where spectators kept passing out in the stands because it was so hot, halting play on the court. No one was used to the heat. The players, he reasoned, should have booked their practice court time for noon, not morning. They needed to get their bodies ready to play in extreme heat. I’m not a touring professional. It’d be a triumphant feat for me to get to Wimbledon just as a spectator. But I took his instruction to heart. I’m always doing this, applying advice for the pros to my amateur rec tennis life.

So I sign up for an advanced tennis clinic at 6 p.m. on a Monday. It’s supposed to be 94 degrees. I spend the day hydrating, eating well. Ever since I got home from a week in Portland, I’ve been doing this: hydrating, eating well. I’m not drinking. I’m in the gym training hard while summer storms churn outside. Drinking fruit-filled and protein-packed smoothies. Carbing up after cardio. Lifting heavy. Waking up fifteen minutes before sunrise because I’m working on a novel and two short stories and a long essay about my name and early morning hours are the only time I can find to actually do the work. But on the Monday before the two-hour tennis clinic under a heat advisory, I’m extra on top of taking care of my body. I want to set myself up for success. I drink electrolytes beforehand, prepare more to bring along. It won’t be enough.

Before I head out, my wife says don’t get heatstroke, and I’m sure we’re both thinking of the times in Vegas, during lockdown, when our only glimpse of the outside world was when we’d step out into desert mornings with frozen-through water bottles that became liquid in a matter of minutes. I craved those morning walks, needed them, but I also suffered under the scorching Nevada sun. I didn’t yet know how to care for my body in these extreme climate conditions.

Recently, I sat around with a bunch of other writers, friends, and we discussed which natural disasters scared us the most. Our answers were predictable, largely hinging on the regions where we’ve lived the longest. The west coasters: earthquakes. Tsunamis as an aftereffect of earthquakes. The east coasters: floods and hurricanes. The Midwesterners: tornadoes. Me: all of it. I’ve lived many places.
Tennis is brutal, right away. We’re only warming up, and I’m hot. The acquaintance who has been trying to get me to come to this class isn’t here. She texted me a few hours before to say she was skipping due to the heat. I recognize some of the others here: the husband of a woman I played a couple times on a flex league, a guy from the Sunday round robin I used to go to, a woman from that round robin, too, who is the kind of player I’m trying to be.

I’ve been playing in Portland all summer, so I’m re-acclimating to Florida! I tell the others when I need to break for water before they do. I’m always doing shit like this, trying to explain away weaknesses only perceived by myself. No one cares that I’m drinking water between drills. One of the coaches leading the session encourages it, tells me to break as many times as I need.

Seeing him here is a shock. A year and a half ago when I was just starting to get back into tennis, he was the only coach who took me and my goals seriously, didn’t condescend when I made it clear I wanted to be a shark of a rec player. He disappeared after a few weeks, ghosted me over text, and another player told me off-handedly he’d been caught blackmailing other pros. For what? I asked, and she could not tell me. I never fact-checked this absurd story. And now here he is, like he was never gone. Maybe he never had been as disappeared as I thought. Maybe he’s a mirage in the heat.

The Portland line is a bit of a lie. I hadn’t been playing in Portland “all summer.” Yes, it was true I was in Portland for almost the entire month of June and then returned for nine days in July for a writing conference, but I’d said it as if this were a regular occurrence for me, as if I “summered” in the pacific northwest, got out of the heat for a bit. God I wish. I only played tennis once, sometimes twice a week in Portland. Plus, the city experienced two separate heatwaves while I was there, so it wasn’t like I was playing in cooler conditions. There was no re-acclimating to do. Florida heat is already a hard thing to slough off.

But I wanted this, a legible excuse for why I needed more water breaks, why I was panting like the feral cat in the backyard we’d tried to offer water and treats to earlier in the day. Knowing I was already one of the weaker players that had shown up, I’d been trying to prove myself before the heat even settled into me like a possession. I should have been focusing more on my own game, on challenging myself. Instead, I was beating myself up for my body’s natural reaction to the heat, something so far out of my control.

Later, I reach out to the reappeared tennis coach to book a private lesson. He’s a blackmailer, and I’m a liar. We make a good fit.

The only way to play well in the heat is to play in the heat. I feel less sure applying this logic to the simple fact of living in the heat. The only way to live well in the heat is to live in the heat? The only way to survive the heat is to live in it? None of these sound right.

Next summer will be hotter. The next, hotter still. No body should become acclimated to this.

After the clinic under heat advisory, I take a cold shower run by my wife. I ice roll my face. I played well, I think, given the heat. All this, given the heat.