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Tuesday 3pm - 11pm Wednesday 3pm - 11pm Thursday 3pm - 11pm Friday 3pm - 1am Saturday 3pm - 1am Sunday 3pm - 7pm

Thirsty's RVA, 3516 Forest Hill Avenue, Richmond, VA (2026)

09/02/2026

🏳️‍🌈🗓 What the gay is going on this week at Thirsty’s? 🗓️🏳️‍🌈

1st Week of September 2026

🎵 Tue: BYOV Be Your Own Vinyl DJ + Board Games in the lounge at 6:30

🥤 Wed: NEW TIME! N/A Lounge 7-9 — dry, alcohol-free games, books, pool & couch relaxing with wait service
💅🏾 Wed: Hot Girl Drag 9pm with Amber St Lexington

⚔️ Thu: NEW TIME! Try TTRPG at 6pm sharp — new system monthly! This month: Paranoia, a darkly comedic sci-fi romp against the AI overlord. It’s got your best interests at heart, as long as you’re not a mutant co**ie.
🍿 Thu: Q***r Fan Cinema kicks off a new Pride & Historic Films series with Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks & Denzel Washington

🎤 Fri: Karaoke with Jason at 7pm — but NOT next week! No karaoke Sept 11, we’re hosting 🌚 Pride After Dark 🏳️‍🌈, the kinky side of Pride, at 5pm

🐶 Sat: Pup Night — Puppy Pride Power! Rock your colors, red/white/black/blue, rainbow, or your own blend! 9pm w/ DJ Amy Alderman

🧷 Sun: ABDL 5-8

📅 Next Wed: Q***r Horizons discusses Spear Cuts Through Water by Jimenez at 6pm!

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🌈 THE GAY NEWS 🌈

1️⃣ 🖤 Three dead outside Tucson gay bar Venture-N — a gunman confronted two men in the parking lot, killed them, then died of his own wounds. Police call it a hate crime; the shooter had a list of local LGBTQ+ businesses on him.

2️⃣ 🇵🇱 Poland began recognizing same-s*x marriages performed abroad — though it still won’t perform them at home.

3️⃣ ⚖️ Trump is appealing his trans military ban loss to the SCOTUS, calling the ruling against it “gravely erroneous.”

4️⃣ 🇫🇷 A brutal homophobic attack in Paris’s Marais district left a man with facial fractures and internal bleeding.

5️⃣ 📚 Arkansas librarian Patty Hector won $275K after being fired for refusing to pull LGBTQ+ books from the kids’ section. “Libraries belong to everyone.”

6️⃣ 🏥 New survey: LGBTQ+ people are significantly more likely to skip medical care and struggle with bills than non-LGBTQ+ people.

7️⃣ 🗳️ Anti-trans ballot measures are landing in four states ahead of the midterms.

09/01/2026

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🇮🇳

Just as Persian influence spread west to Rumi’s Turkiye, a bi man named Babur reignited it east in 1526, founding the Mughal Empire, of Taj fame.

Babur was a teenager, newly married, & bored by life. Then he saw a boy in the camp bazaar. The boy’s name was Baburi—close enough to Badur that he thought it cute.

‘May none be as I, humbled & wretched & love-sick. No beloved as thou art to me’

In his memoir, he says that until then he had never wanted anyone, had never even talked about love. He says Baburi would come into his presence & he could not look at him, could not make conversation, could not manage words at all.

He was so love-sick he wandered, rude to friends & strangers alike.

“Nor power to go was mine, nor power to stay / I was just what you made me, o thief of my heart.”

This is the founder of an empire, the man who took northern India, but the most emotionally bare passage in his memoir is about a boy he was too shy to speak to. His autobiography, the ‘Baburnama’, famously, records defeats as honestly as victories, in love & battle.

The empire he founded kept his taste, lavish tombs, poetry & boys. Mughal courts ran on Persian, & the best beautiful boy loving poets came east to Agra & Lahore, the inheritance from Baghdad, flowering now on the subcontinent.

Here the genre called ‘rekhti’ would give women their own poems of women loving women, with their own vocabulary & conventions.

’Urfi of Shiraz, who came to India young & attached himself to the Prince, the future Emperor Jahangir. They were close enough that writers a century later were still gossiping about it.

Even before Babur, three centuries of the Delhi Sultanates there were poets like Amir Khusrau, who continued the Sufi Persian poetry. And although the Fatawa 'Alamgiri prescribed a somewhat mild punishment of lashing(more for Muslims), homos*xuality continued openly in the Persian tradition for 300 years more.

08/27/2026

🏳️‍🌈🗓️ What the gay is going on this week at Thirsty’s? 🗓️🏳️‍🌈

4th Week of August 2026

🎵 Tue: BYOV Be Your Own Vinyl DJ + Board Games in the lounge at 6:30

💅🏾 Wed: Hot Girl Drag 9:30 with Amber St Lexington

✍️ Thu: Rainbow Carnage Poetry at 8:30

🍿 Thu: Q***r Fan Cinema 7:30 — I Carry You With Me (2021) a Mexican film that crosses boarders and decades for love, free popcorn!

🎤 Fri: Karaoke with Jason at 7pm

🌈 Sat: Pre-Pride Party 9pm with DJ Amy Alderman!

📅 COMING UP:
🎲 TryTTRPG Night, Playing Paranoia 1st Thursday at 6
📖 Q***r Horizons is reading Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez! 9/10 @6:30

🌚SAVE THE DATE Fri. Sept 11 — no karaoke
we’re hosting Pride After Dark, the official Kink at Pride party: demos, dancers, markets & mayhem.

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🌈 THE GAY NEWS 🌈

👢Dolly Parton never backed down on protecting Q***r and Trans people and spent her well erned fortune giving back. She will be missed.

1️⃣ 🏀 The WNBA Shuts the Circus Down — After weeks of the Sophie Cunningham/Riley Gaines saga, a league source said they won’t “give oxygen to efforts designed to mock the league or demean or marginalize others.”

2️⃣ 🩺 Buttigieg Shuts Down a Sports Question — Pressed yet again on trans athletes, he snapped: “I’m here trying to take on the health care crisis and big pharma, and you’re asking me about who gets to play what sport?”

3️⃣ ⛪ Catholic Schools Want Public Money — While Discriminating — Catholic schools are demanding state funds even as they turn away the children of gay couples.

4️⃣ 🇮🇷 As the US war in Iran grinds into its sixth month, advocates warn two gay Iranian asylum seekers still face deportation to a country where they could be executed.

5️⃣ 🇳🇱 Dutch PM’s Viral Gay Kiss — Rob Jetten, the Netherlands’ first openly gay PM, went viral kissing his fiancé, Argentine hockey star Nicolás Keenan, at the World Cup. Pure q***r joy.

6️⃣ 🕊️ Smithsonian curator Katherine Ott says the oath she took to uphold the Constitution means preserving q***r history — even as federal institutions are pressured to erase it.

thirstysrva.com

08/26/2026

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

‘Go, friends, fetch our beloved; bring me that fugitive idol.’ -Rumi

In 1244, Jalal ad-Din Rumi was thirty-seven & very respectable—a jurist in Konya, modern Türkiye, a legal scholar & teacher who preached at the mosque. Then a dervish named Shams-e Tabrizi walked in & Rumi fell in love.

Shams had wandered from teacher to teacher his whole life, never satisfied. He was in his sixties by then, a strange old man in coarse black felt. Rumi looked at him & saw the midnight moon. They shut themselves away together for months, & Rumi stopped doing everything respectable.

His own son wrote: “after Shams, my father danced all day & sang all night. He had been a scholar & became a poet. He had been an ascetic & became drunk with love.”

Rumi’s disciples were furious, & the tension got bad enough that Shams left for Damascus. Rumi was bereft. He sent his son to bring Shams home, carrying a love letter poem. The son found Shams depressed, playing chess.

He came back, & they were happy together again for months. Then one day Shams disappeared—almost certainly murdered by those who thought he was corrupting their teacher.

Rumi didn’t believe it. He went to Damascus & walked the city searching for him, fearing the worst. Exhausted in grief, he began to turn in the street, one hand raised, & the poems came out of him in a flood transcendent. The original whirling dervish. A man spinning because the person he loved was gone, turning grief into beauty & love.

He wrote thousands of verses. He never signed them with his own name. He signed most ‘Shams-e Tabrizi’

Which brings us to modern Coleman Barks, whose versions made Rumi the best-selling poet in America. But Barks did not read Persian, the language Rumi wrote in, he rewrote older translations & cut out the Islam, & cut out the shameless love of one man for another. Millions love Rumi through a straight-washed version, by a man who never understood what he was reading.

The spiritual q***r love was always in the Persian

Rumi closed that letter: ‘Take my greetings & my service to that jewel without price.’

It’s possible they had a platonic-love, but it was deep, spiritual, & true

08/19/2026

🏳🗓️ What the gay is going on this week at Thirsty’s? 🗓️🏳️‍🌈

3rd Week of August 2026

🎵 Tue: BYOV Be Your Own Vinyl DJ + ♟️ Board Games in the lounge at 6:30

💅 Wed: Hot Girl Drag 9:30 with Amber St Lexington

🎭 Thu: NEW TIME! Deception! Social Deduction Games moves to 3rd Thursdays, 6pm sharp — Blood on the Clocktower & other liar games

🍿 Thu: Q***r Fan Cinema 7:30 — Joyland (2023). The youngest son of a traditional Pakistani family becomes a backup dancer in a Lahore burlesque and falls for the trans woman who runs the show. Free popcorn!

🎤 Fri: Karaoke with Jason at 7pm

🐻 Sat: Bear & Bo***ge Night 9pm with special guest DJ ErnieElGato
🔗 Sat: Dungeon Demo 10:30 — Fi***ng, Plugs, Machines, & Gaping

👀 Sun: IYKYK in the lounge 5-8

📅 COMING UP: Bear Book Club next Wed 6:30 (Sunflower Boys) + Pride Kick-Off Party next Sat with DJ Amy Alderman!

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🌈 THE GAY NEWS 🌈

1️⃣ 🏥 Connecticut Children’s became the THIRD hospital to cave to the DOJ, ending trans youth care and setting aside $500K for people “harmed” by it. The DOJ never named a law it broke — just pressured until they folded. 20+ centers have now stopped treating trans youth.

2️⃣ ⚖️ A federal judge blocked the DOJ from seizing trans records from Boston Children’s, calling the subpoena “bad faith” and part of an effort to “demonize and eradicate an entire population.”

3️⃣ 🗳️ LGBTQ+ candidates swept Tuesday’s primaries. In Michigan, Joanna Whaley — a trans woman and conversion-therapy survivor — won her House primary with 66%, one step from becoming the state’s first trans lawmaker.

4️⃣ 🇨🇦 Health Canada ended its s***m-donor ban for gay and bi men, dropping screening questions about s*xual behavior — “ending decades-long discrimination.”

5️⃣ 🏀 “In a world of Sophie Cunninghams, be a Cheryl Reeve.” The WNBA trans-athlete fight rolled on, with the Lynx coach’s “Trans Kids Belong” stance the rallying cry.

thirstysrva.com

08/18/2026

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

The Sassanids fell to the Arabs in 651 but Persia did not disappear into Islam but transformed it. In less than a century, the Abassid Caliphate brought Persian bureaucracy, Persian style, & the w**e and the beautiful boys to a glittering empire.

“In the bathhouse, everything clothes had been hiding is suddenly on full, unhurried display, and he tells you flatly to look your fill, drink him to drunkenness”

—the greatest poet of the age, Abu Nuwas, born to a Persian mother, but writing in Arabic, & drinking at all the court parties. His poetry drips sensuality. He wrote about w**e & he wrote about ‘ghilman’—the young male cupbearers who poured it. He never needed a closet, but wrote openly about the love of men, & the Caliph paid him handsomely for it.

He actually turns up as a character in the ‘1001 “Arabian” Nights.’ He is shown recruiting cupbears for court, helping slave girls, and of course always with a man and w**e cup in hand.

That Caliph’s son, al-Amin loved the poetry & the male attendants so much that his mother, worried about grandchildren. She dressed slave girls in boys’ clothes—cropped hair, painted-on mustaches, which succeeded in producing an heir. The look caught on & became a court fashion, girls dressed as boys.

As usual women are sidelined in what survives but the ‘Encyclopedia of Pleasure,’ a tenth-century s*x manual, devotes chapters to ‘sahq’—lesbian love, and plenty more to boy love.

Al-Jahiz, the finest prose writer of the age, wrote ‘The Boasting Match Between Girls & Boys’—a formal debate where an advocate of male love & an advocate for female lovers argue it out. Both arguments are treated as valid and neither framed as sin. Homos*xuality and gender non-conformity were open subjects of discussion and completely valid, if illegal.

Islamic law at the time technically prohibited homos*xuality or ‘liwat’ & the penalties were severe on paper. But it required four eyewitnesses, prosecution was close to impossible. Law on the books, w**e poetry in the palace. The Persian tradition.

And the Persian language was coming back. Next week Rudaki, Rumi, Hafez.

ThirstysRVA.com.

08/12/2026

🏳️‍🌈🗓️ What the gay is going on this week at Thirsty’s? 🗓️🏳️‍🌈

2nd Week/3rd Weekend of August 2026

📚 Wed: Q***r Horizons Book Club 6:30 — Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
💅🏾 Wed: Hot Girl Drag 9:30 with Amber St Lexington

🍿 Thu: Q***r Fan Cinema 7:30 — Doña Herlinda and Her Son (1985) + free popcorn! A crafty Mexican matriarch quietly builds a household where her son, his boyfriend, and his new wife all live under one roof. Everybody wins, nobody says a word.
✍️ Thu: Rainbow Carnage Q***r Poetry 8:30 in the lounge

🎤 Fri: Karaoke with Jason at 7pm

🧤 Sat: Leather Night — UNIFORMS 9pm with DJ BearBonez, bootblack on duty. Wear any uniform that turns you on: cop, ranger, overalls, classic leather. No modern law enforcement or fascist insignia.

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🌈 THE GAY NEWS 🌈

1️⃣ ⚖️ Texas Forces the First “Detransition Clinic” — Paxton’s settlement with Texas Children’s: $10M to the state, doctors stripped of privileges, Cleveland Clinic signed a similar deal in June.

2️⃣ 🤖 Also Texas, a pro-Paxton Super PAC remade LBJ’s 1964 “daisy girl” ad, swapping nuclear armageddon for anti-trans fearmongering.

3️⃣ ✊ Neo-Nazis Pay Up — NSC-131’s leader and 19 members admitted breaking New Hampshire’s anti-discrimination law for surrounding a 2023 drag story hour. Fines, community service, permanent stay-away order.

4️⃣ 👁️ SF Gay Bars Drop Face Scanning — Badlands and Toad Hall dumped Patronscan after a boycott. As one patron put it: it’s really not great to have lists of gay people.

5️⃣ 🇧🇴 Bolivia’s First Same-Sex Marriage — Fabiana Banzer and Scarlett Rocha married Aug 7 after nearly four years of fighting. The constitution still bans it. They won anyway.

6️⃣ 🇨🇦 Canada is dropping the s***m donor screening questions aimed at gay and bi men, after one Toronto donor spent three years fighting them.

7️⃣ 🏀 Two ex-NBA players declared for the 2027 WNBA draft claiming they identify as women. The league is now rewriting its eligibility rules — so the stunt may cause the exact harm they claim to expose.

8️⃣ 🤡 Boebert Watch — She calls us groomers. Her son was just arrested on three counts of s*xual exploitation of a child.

thirstysrva.com

08/11/2026

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

“It does not suit the rulers that their subjects should think noble thoughts” —Plato on gay love in Persia

Iran, the theocracy that hates every tolerant value the West claims to own, or so Fox News says. No, this is an old game, that buries 2.5K years of one of the most q***r cultures on earth. The Shah’s regime scrubbed history to appear more modern & European. The Islamic Republic finished the job while claiming to reject western homos*xual influence of the Shah. Everyone now wants a Persia that had never been gay
It was always gay.

After only a m generation of the formation of Persia, Lovely Boys were common and acceptable presence in every noble and satrap haram.

The oldest evidence is Artaxerxes II, Great King of the Achaemenid Empire, he loved a eu**ch named Tiridates, ‘the most handsome & attractive man in Asia’ according to Aelian. When Tiridates died young, the King refused to leave their bed. A concubine named Aspasia finally got through to him—by dressing in the dead boy’s clothes.

There’s Bagoas, a eu**ch of extraordinary beauty who belonged to Darius III, then after Persia fell, to Alexander. Plutarch says that at a festival in Carmania, Bagoas won the dance competition & sat down beside Alexander, & the Macedonian army roared for their king to kiss him.

Hellenistic homos*xuality was common during the Seleucid Empire that covered much of the Middle East.
Alexander’s generals brought the Greek gymnasium east, as far as Bactria, at Ai-Khanoum, archaeologists dug one up—dedicated to Hermes & Herakles, patron gods of beautiful youths. Persian taste for lovely boys met Greek institutionalized boy-love. Although more archeological than textual there is strong evidence that homos*xuality was practiced in Bactria and was commented on by ancient Han Chinese visitors and said to be common further west throughout Persia.

The later Persian Parthians called themselves ‘Philhellene’ on their coins. At a wedding the court’s entertainment was Euripides’ ‘Bacchae’—the play where a god in women’s clothing destroys a king for policing gender. The actor used the actual severed head of Roman general Crassus as his prop. They can love good q***r drama and still hate Rome.

The Zoroastrian Sassanids kept the court & its beautiful boys despite a strong resurgence of Zoroastrianism. King Khosrow summoned a ‘redag’—a lovely well-bred youth—to his bed chamber and spends hours questioning him on food, the sweetest music, the most beautiful flower. The text plays up the sensuality, the aging king who cannot get enough of a pretty boy’s ‘company’.

Q***r life was widely accepted until 250CE, when reactionary Zoroastrianism priests codified the Vendidad, condemning s*x between men as a sin with no atonement, a demon’s work. It forced the practice underground, just as Rome was embracing Christianity and slowly less approving opinions on homos*xuality and gender fluidity. Hilariously the Roman’s blamed the east for soft Lovely Boys and the Persians blamed the west for Boy Love. Both claiming Q***rness was foreign. But as always, rich just continued behind closed doors.

08/05/2026

🏳️‍🌈🗓️ What the gay is going on this week at Thirsty’s? 🗓️🏳️‍🌈

1st Week of August 2026 Second Saturday

🎵 Tue: BYOV Be Your Own Vinyl DJ + Board Games in the lounge at 6:30

⚔️ Wed: TTRPG Night 6pm sharp — Paranoia, a comically dark sci-fi future RPG
💅🏾 Wed: Hot Girl Drag 9:30 with Amber St Lexington

🥤 Thu: N/A Lounge at 7 — the lounge goes dry & 18+. Wait service, board games, books, pool & arcade, all alcohol-free. Please don’t enter if you’ve been drinking.
🍿 Thu: Q***r Fan Cinema 7:30 — The Blonde One, part of our Global South series, free popcorn!

🎤 Fri: Karaoke with Jason at 7pm

🎲 Sat: Greyhawk Legends D&D One-Shots at 4:30 — drop in!
🏳️‍⚧️ Sat: Trans Joy 9pm with DJ collective NBphobic

🤼 Sun: Singlet Sunday for IYKYK at 5pm

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🌈 THE GAY NEWS 🌈

1️⃣ 🏀 The WNBA has fully lost the plot over trans athletes. Fever’s Sophie Cunningham called banning trans women “common sense,” then doubled down. Riley Gaines showed up courtside to cheer her on — and got asked to lower her sign while anti-Cunningham signs stayed up. Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve coached in a “Trans Kids Belong” shirt. Cunningham got booed all night.

2️⃣ 🏫 The Dept. of Education will stop tracking bullying, harassment and assault of trans and nonbinary students — and dropped them from its definition of r**e victims. It says the costs “outweighed the benefits.”

3️⃣ 🎓 The University of Alabama rolled back its own nondiscrimination protections for s*xual orientation and gender identity.

4️⃣ ⚖️ A judge ruled Michigan’s ban on conversion therapy for kids violates Catholics’ free speech — punching a religious hole in the state’s protections.

5️⃣ 🇧🇼 Botswana’s High Court heard a landmark marriage equality case and reserved judgment. A win would make it just the second African nation with marriage equality, after South Africa.

6️⃣ 🚻 After a new bathroom law, Idaho activists launched a digital map of trans-friendly bathrooms across the state. Grassroots defiance.

7️⃣ 💰 The Stonewall National Museum & Archives launched a $40M campaign to expand — preserving q***r history as federal institutions try to erase it.

thirstysrva.com

08/04/2026

🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

300 years ago, on a London Sunday night in 1726, William Griffin came home to a room he rented above a coffeehouse on Field Lane in Holborn, tucked behind a tavern called the Bunch o’ Gr**es. Dozens of other men were visiting in the parlor hosted by his landlady Margaret Clap, called affectionately Mother Clap.

Sunday was the busy night, forty men were there including the lodgers, for a night of music, dancing, drinking, some men in gowns & talking in ‘molly’ slang. There were public rooms they called the chapel for getting together. It was a camp paradise, one of many hidden throughout England known as Molly Houses. It was also just a gay bar centuries before they could exist openly.

Mother Clap wasn’t running a brothel, in fact she often kicked out prostitutes. She kept her customers safe, she bailed them out, she lied for them.

But an ‘ex-gay’ new member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, was hiding in the crowd that night. He reported 30 men “making Love, as they call’d it, in a very indecent Manner.”

Soon after the constables came & arrested more than 40 people, Mother Clap among them.

So**my was a hanging offense under the Buggery Act. William Griffin—43, an upholsterer, a father of two—said he’d lodged there over a year & had no idea what kind of house it was. He was hanged by the Old Bailey alongside Gabriel Lawrence & Thomas Wright.

Mother Clap got the pillory at Smithfield. The mob beat her so badly she fainted & was carried back to prison in convulsions. No one ever heard from her again. But her name lives on 300 years later as the Mother of Gay Safe Spaces.

Find your own safe space and look out for each other.

Thirsty's RVA

09/02/2026

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