The service, event, product and app you should be into right now
One of the best parts of my job is discovering all the dynamic new people, places and things expected to interest the LGBT community. Every once in a while I stumble upon a few gems that catch my fancy — hopefully they will catch yours, too.
REVRY LGBT streaming service. You have to tip your feathered caps to Netflix, Hulu and other popular streaming services for providing (for the most part) satisfying LGBT programming options, like trans creator Jill Soloway’s award-winning Transparent at Amazon. But now you can effectively eliminate all the hetero noise clogging up your queues and go full “queerated content” thanks to REVRY, the first dedicated LGBTQ+ digital streaming platform. Available on Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, plus iOS and Android devices (with Pluto.tv and Amazon Fire capabilities coming soon), REVRY, which recently celebrated its first anniversary, features original content like 3030, a series about platonic black lesbian roommates living in Las Vegas; the newly added Bob the Drag Queen comedy special, Suspiciously Large Woman; as well as international shows and movies, like the subtitled Free Fall, characterized as “the German Brokeback Mountain.” Spoiler alert: They bang in the woods using nature’s lube.
OUTshine on the Sea. Earlier this year I attended the 10-day OUTshine LGBT film festival in Miami, which featured some of the best LGBT films I have ever seen (not an exaggeration; find French-Canadian film 1:54 and have a box of Kleenex handy). So I’m pretty pumped for OUTshine on the Sea, the fest’s seven-night Eastern Caribbean Cruise (hitting Nassau, Punta Cana and St. Thomas), from Feb, 17–23, 2018, aboard Celebrity Equinox. If you’re a film and cruise lover — two of my favorite things! — pack your movie-marathon sweatpants and let’s gain 10 pounds of popcorn weight on the open ocean together.
Hornet app. If you’re fed up with all the blatant racism on your gay dating/hookup apps, take a break and zip into Hornet, a gay social-networking app oddly popular in France, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Taiwan (you want to expand your horizons, right?), but whose user base is consistently growing here at home. Aside from finding likeminded men nearby (the app includes a GPS component like Gindr and the gang), you can tap into and share LGBT-focused new stories on its companion website UnicornBooty.com; discover local queer hotspots around your home and when you’re traveling; and keep your social calendar lit with curated homocentric events.
Handmade Sexy Time. My boyfriend and I are adventurous, especially when it comes to our bodies and bedroom activity, and we had an arousing at-home date night with Haus of Betch’s hand-crocheted jock straps. It was like Captain America himself was calling me hither in his blue three-starred weiner basket (sorry, no photos) and an arts-and-crafts project making vibrating dildos of our own dicks with kits from Clone-A-Willy. The latter was a bit stressful because the process moved ultra-fast — we had to get and stay hard while mixing the plaster at an exact 90 degrees and cast our cocks in under three minutes! — but we shared laughs along the way, amazing sex afterward, and now we’ve got life-size replicas of our own wieners that we’ll probably just use to go fuck ourselves whenever we have a tiff. (Sorry, still no photos).
— Mikey Rox
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition July 21, 2017.