July 2025 - Munsee

Resist! Reclaim! Rejoice! Queer Liberation March takes back Eighth Avenue

The 2025 Queer Liberation March banner leads the way.

Donna Aceto

The Queer Liberation March, a protest march organized annually by the Reclaim Pride Coalition, returned to the streets of Manhattan on June 29 for the seventh time.

“I’m hopeful that people are going to be angry enough to turn out,” Reclaim Pride Coalition co-founder Jay W. Walker said in a pre-march interview with Gay City News at the NYC AIDS Memorial Park in St. Vincent’s Triangle.

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Since 2019, the Queer Liberation March has called upon the spirit of the Stonewall Riots to reclaim Pride as a space without cops or corporate sponsorships. The first official march in 2019 commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, and the Queer Liberation March route is modeled after the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March route uptown from the Stonewall Inn to Central Park at Columbus Circle, which Reclaim Pride Coalition chooses to reclaim as Lenape Circle.

Paying tribute to the late Cecilia Gentili.Donna Aceto

Walker said that last year, people were in a “more complacent place” leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, but the majority of Americans have seen their rights jeopardized in some way since January.

“All these people that are threatened — we are one. We’re…

This Tiny New England Island Is Filled With Literal Treasure—Here’s How to Find It

Block Island has always been a favored destination for those who love a touch of intrigue. The tiny teardrop-shaped land mass 12 miles off the coast of mainland Rhode Island has a long and storied history with marauders wading ashore, the most famous being Captain Kidd, a privateer turned pirate who visited in 1699 in the days before his capture. He would eventually be executed in London, but not before he told the world he had left behind some buried treasure. While a piece of his fortune was found off the coast of Madagascar, the rest of it could be anywhere, even here on the island. While you’re unlikely to discover his gold, there are some modern-day treasures to discover: Eben Horton’s glass floats.

Horton is no marauder, privateer, or pirate. Rather, he’s a mild-mannered and downright friendly glassblower from Newport, just across the Block Island Sound. He didn’t mean to become a celebrity. But when he inherited a box of cracked paperweights from his mentor that were destined for a landfill, everything changed. “I filled a backpack full of these things and I hid them all along the beach,” Horton said of his first go-around with trash-turned-treasure in the late ‘90s. “And I just thought, This is gonna make some people really happy.”

Each of Eben Horton’s glass floats is hand-blown.

Courtesy of Glass Float Project

That simple act of gifting something beautiful for free, with no strings attached and no Instagram tag required, planted the seed of what would become the Glass Float Project, a Block Island tradition that officially began in 2011.

Every year, starting in late May or early June, Horton and a crew of volunteers…