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Good morning, Portland. Once again, it was too hot yesterday. Temperatures are expected to be in the low 80s today (still too hot, but a little cooler) and perhaps autumn weather will finally follow after that. 

And hey, at least we’re still here, even though I was told the rapture was happening yesterday. Maybe it’ll happen tomorrow? Or maybe I just wasn’t chosen. Things have been looking pretty fire and brimstone lately. 

IN LOCAL NEWS:

• Will the plan to replace and expand the current I-5 bridge between Portland and Vancouver ever commence? That’s the question for lawmakers and transportation leaders in Oregon and Washington, many of whom have been working on this project for years with very little progress to show for it. The project, which includes a plan to extend the MAX Yellow Line from Portland to Vancouver, was deemed significant by the Biden administration, who granted federal funding for the bridge replacement. The states have also promised billions in funding for the project. But the current cash reserve, while significant, is likely nowhere near enough to pay for the project, which is currently projected to cost around $10 billion. And previously-promised federal funding is not guaranteed under the chaos of the Trump administration. It seems particularly unlikely Trump’s Department of Transportation will be happy to grant money for a light rail extension, what with the communist nature of mass transit and so forth. NUMTOTs are Antifa, etc. Find out more about the current Interstate Bridge kerfuffle here. 

This summer season will be the last time some lower-income Oregonians will receive boxes of locally grown produce or meat as part of a federally funded program. That’s after the Trump administration abruptly ended the program earlier this year.

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— OPB (@opb.org) September 23, 2025 at 2:39 PM

• Earlier this week, ABC announced Jimmy Kimmel would return to TV following his recent suspension and the national outcry that followed. But two of the network’s broadcasting affiliates—Sinclair and Nexstar—are standing by their man (Federal Communications Commission leader Brendan Carr) and will continue to preempt Kimmel’s show, per Carr and the Trump administration’s wishes. The reason this is relevant to Portlanders? Sinclair and Nexstar are the conglomerates that own and operate Portland’s KATU and KOIN channels, respectively. What’s more, Nexstar is currently trying to merge with Tegna, which owns Portland’s KGW-TV. Willamette Week‘s Aaron Mesh summed it up well in a story yesterday, writing that if Nexstar is able to purchase KGW’s owner, “three of Portland’s four major local broadcasters will be owned by media companies that offered anticipatory obedience to the president.” 

So, what’s the big deal? Who cares if it’s a little harder for Portlanders to get their Kimmel fix? I’m glad you asked! It’s bad when the news media cannot operate independently, without the state and/or capital interests breathing down the necks of reporters. The media industry has always been susceptible to sway from powerful groups, but when only a few corporations hold all the power—and government officials feel free to weaponize the power of the state over those corporations—the situation becomes truly dire. I am sorry to the good reporters at these organizations who went into this industry wanting to make a difference. If things continue as they are, it will be much more difficult for them to do their jobs effectively. It’s also a major loss for society in general, which benefits immensely from access to an independent press. 

• In really awful news, there’s been a spate of attacks on trans women in Seattle, seemingly prompted in part by the transphobic rhetoric spewed by our top national leaders. Attacks on LGBTQ+ people are increasing in Portland, too. Cis people: Now is the time to fully back our trans siblings, even as you receive propaganda from bad (evil) actors telling you not to. For example, trans people in sports–totally fine. Silence, failed Democrats. 

 

• The Trump administration has made this year’s Covid booster shot situation complicated and confusing. It really shouldn’t be—just get it. Here’s what you need to know for getting it in Oregon: 

The COVID-19 virus is still evolving, and so are federal and state guidelines on vaccines. In Oregon, health officials recommend the booster for all adults 65 and up, children 6 months to 23 months, and other high risk groups like pregnant women and people with underlying conditions.

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— OPB (@opb.org) September 23, 2025 at 7:30 AM

IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS: 

• Donald Trump was truly soooo embarrassing during his appearance in front of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. He spent an hour spouting off grave misinformation about the climate crisis (“If you don’t get away from the ‘green energy’ scam, your country is going to fail”) and going on racist, xenophobic tirades against migrants, encouraging European leaders to “stop people that you’ve never seen before that you have nothing in common with” from entering their countries. I’ll just note that, like most Americans, I have nothing in common with Donald Trump.

Trump also accused Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London, of attempting to impose sharia law on the English city (an extremely racist and stupid lie), said he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize and explained his belief that, in general, he is “right about everything.” And these are only a few of many completely idiotic statements Trump made at the UN event. At this point, the best outcome for the world is that the US will cement its place as the laughingstock of the world, and other world leaders will move on without us. Perhaps his inane ramblings at the UN make that scenario more likely. 

• Back to Jimmy Kimmel, who returned to his ABC slot last night (except, of course, on certain local channels). Kimmel reiterated the importance of free speech (“What’s important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this”) and acknowledged the importance of speaking out against attempts to quash dissent. Of course, Trump was not pleased with Kimmel’s return to the screen, calling the late night comedian an “arm of the DNC” and threatening legal action against ABC. 

“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.”

Whatever, man. 

• A lawyer in California is in hot water after using ChatGPT to write a court appeal. As generative AI tools are wont to do, ChatGPT apparently made up a bunch of stuff, including fabricated quotes, which the lawyer copied into a court appeal back in 2023. Now, the attorney is on the hook for $10,000, and others in the legal industry are taking note. You should, too, if you rely on ChatGPT. Even after several updates to the AI software, the chatbot still conjures stuff up all the time, and is absolutely not a substitute for your own brain. 

• To make you smile this week: Kids in Mexico City riding their bike bus. Happy Wednesday, folks. 

This story was first published in The Stranger. Warning: This story contains descriptions of violence.

“Go to Pony, go to Pony, go to Pony—there’s more people there,” said a frantic woman as she approached Madison Carstens and her friends next to the Maserati dealership on 12th and Union Street in Seattle. Six or seven young men followed close behind her.

It was September 2, about 11:30 pm on a Tuesday night. Tuesdays are unofficially “dolls night” on Capitol Hill, when trans women hop between Time Warp and Pony, two bars in the city’s queer neighborhood. The frantic woman the men had followed is trans, as are Carstens and her friends, Michelle Caywood and Denise Throckmorton.

The men fanned out on the sidewalk. “Bitch, bitch, bitch” one of the men shouted repeatedly. “Tr—y,” another yelled. To the side, one danced like a boxer before a fight. He grabbed at his waistband, Carstens said. It could’ve been a nervous tic, but she worried that he had a gun.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to, like, run away from this,” she remembers thinking. Sidling up to her friends, she withdrew the pepper gel canister on a keychain in her purse.

Caywood was trying to deescalate the situation as a man got in her face.

“What’s going on, what’s the problem, we’re just hanging out here,” her friends remember her saying. For her, the details are fuzzy. Carstens clearly remembers the man who was dancing on the sidewalk lunging forward.

The pepper gel hit his face, then his eyes. He flinched, wiped at it, and began throwing wide, wild punches.

Caywood was knocked to the ground. A different man came at Carstens with a running punch, and she fell, her head smacking the wall and landing on the pavement with a “gnarly” thud, says Throckmorton. Sensing the man would pummel Carstens while she was on the ground, Throckmorton leapt in.

They wouldn’t know until later, but he’d knocked Carstens out cold. His next punch hit Throckmorton behind the ear. Hers gave him a nosebleed.

“And then he ran off,” she says. He wasn’t the first to run.

Carstens regained consciousness, and saw one of the fleeing men jump and kick Caywood in the head. According to a police report, the suspects fled westbound on Union and turned south on Broadway. Police attempted to get security camera footage of the crime, it said.

A man who saw the attack called 911 and bystanders waited with the women as police and EMTs arrived. Caywood bawled on the sidewalk. She’d never felt unsafe in her neighborhood before, she says.

“Obviously, this kind of stuff happens,” she says. “I didn’t really think it’d happen to me.”

Throckmorton’s biggest bruises were on her knuckles.

Caywood’s x-ray was inconclusive, but she suspects the attacker broke her nose. She couldn’t breathe from it for several days and “it does a weird crackle thing,” she says. She’s getting a CT scan, she says.

Carstens suffered a concussion during the attack. The impact also ruptured her left eardrum. Her injuries forced her to miss the Turnstile show at the WAMU Theater.

“Such a good lineup,” she says, speaking to The Stranger on a phone call with an earbud in her left ear, but not her right. She says doctors told her the hearing loss may be permanent. She tries not to think about that. Funnily enough, she says, the fact that she’s recovered from gender-affirming procedures has helped. Even if one day doesn’t feel like it improves, she knows to trust the process.

Carstens’s doctors have given her a long list of things to avoid: screens, sunlight, loud sounds, and books that “make you think too much,” she says. As a gag, her friends bought her coloring books.

“And I’ve used it,” she says. “My friends are amazing. Everyone has been helping out a lot.”

She’s “slowly, slowly,” improving and has a referral for the brain injury rehabilitation clinic at University of Washington. Still, her injuries could keep her from work for weeks or months. Light and sound hurt—so much that she can’t go outside for more than 20 minutes at a time without becoming nauseous.

Carstens is a server and bartender. To cover rent, she started a GoFundMe. She never expected to raise so much.

The Seattle Police Department’s Bias Crimes Unit is investigating the group attack, but had not yet filed charges or identified the suspects at the time of this story’s publication. The violent group attack on Carstens, Caywood and Throckmorton is not an anomaly, according to Yessenia Manzo, the hate crimes prosecutor at the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

This is the fifth case like this in the last year or so. The prosecutors’ office has filed charges in four group beatings of transgender women in the Seattle area so far.

In King County, Manzo says in all four cases, every suspect was a cisgender man; most of the beatings took place in broad daylight; and in every case, male friends, associates, or, in at least one case, complete strangers joined in.

Race is the most common motivation for hate crimes, and no other group is targeted more than Black people. But Manzo says, in King County, only transgender women are being targeted in this way. The crimes stand out for both the “extremity of violence” and the small size of the population. Estimates vary, but it’s likely that 1 percent or less of the population is transgender, with transgender women representing a fraction of that number.

“I don’t have any other category, I don’t have any other protected status, I don’t have any other marginalized group that is being attacked in this pattern, in this egregious way where a group joins in,” Manzo says. “I think that is very unique, and I think it is telling about the level of animus and bias and hatred that trans women have to endure and how scary, how vulnerable it is for them to just exist, for them to just be in the world, for them to just go on an errand in the middle of the day.”

The Seattle area isn’t the only one experiencing heinous assaults of trans people. Since 2015, Portland has recorded 256 incidents involving bias against gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans people. Last year, Portland Police Bureau reported 346 total bias incidents (cases that have a bias nexus) and 164 bias crimes—the highest numbers since 2015.

Just like Seattle, LGBTQ+ people in Portland make up the second-highest percentage of bias crime victims, behind Black people, who are most frequently targeted. The vast majority of suspects in each incident are white men in their 30s and 40s.

In King County, two transgender women were walking near a pier during a senior skip day event at Lake Union Park last June. One of the women was topless. They encountered Onosai Popio Faumuina, who told her to put a shirt on.

When she refused, he pressed his forehead to hers. She was offending his high-school aged cousins, he said. She pushed Faumuina away. He punched her in the temple. The woman’s friend tried to intervene. He punched the friend. Then, other men joined in, dragging the friend into the water. It’s unclear what Faumuina’s relationship was to those men, Manzo says. She feared they would drown her, she told police.

When a high school boy pulled Faumuina off the women, Faumuina pulled out a handgun and fired it at him several times. He missed the boy, and the crowd of people around him. One bullet went through a window at the Museum of History & Industry.

Faumuina pleaded guilty to a count of second degree assault for shooting at the teen and a hate crime for beating the trans woman. In July, he was sentenced to a year in jail, but was given credit for the time he had already served.

“In this case, being topless wasn’t causing any reasonable affront or alarm to anyone,” Manzo says. “This individual was offended, but I think what’s important in this case is that they didn’t just assault her—he started by assaulting her and then the group joined in to assault both trans women.”

This February, Michael Martindell followed a transgender woman off the bus, demanding to know why she went “around showing people you like to fuck children” as she walked home, court documents say. Martindell called her a “f—t” and a “pedophile.” She was returning from the bank, according to charging documents.

The attack was captured on a surveillance camera. Martindell was yelling across the street when the woman reached her apartment. She started recording Martindell with her phone. He charged, his finger pointed at her.

The woman tried to escape. Yelling slurs, Martindell grabbed her neck. She tried to hold onto a street sign. He knocked her down and pinned her to the ground. He scratched her eyes, pulled her hair, and smashed her face into the sidewalk, according to police and court documents.

As Martindell was beating the woman, two men on the street ran over to join in the assault. One man kicked her in the head and groin. A second man leaned over her and called her a “f—t” repeatedly. When Martindell tossed the woman’s phone into the street, the man who kicked her took it. According to Manzo, they did not know Martindell. There’s every indication that they were strangers.

A jury found Martindell guilty of second degree robbery for taking the phone and a hate crime for beating the woman. A judge sentenced him to 17 months in prison. Martindell had a lengthy criminal history, including a 2017 conviction for failing to register as a sex offender. He also had an active case for failing to register again.

As The Stranger reported in March, a trans woman and veteran was beaten outside her U District workplace by a group of four men shouting “Semper Fi,” the motto of the US Marine Corps. Before the assault, they called her a “f-g” and a “drag queen” and told her to “take off her fucking makeup.” All four men punched her in the face, knocked her down and kicked her on the ground. She briefly got away, but they caught up to her to continue the beating. They broke her front teeth. Before the attack, she told them she was a decorated Navy veteran, police documents say. The suspects retorted by saying “Trump got rid of your ass anyways and kicked you all out of the military.” Police arrested one of the assailants, Andre Karlow, at his apartment building. According to arrest records, his girlfriend had called police on him the day before, alleging he’d thrown a can of food at her.

Karlow was already awaiting trial for attacking a transgender Sound Transit fare ambassador in the Chinatown-International District light rail station in September 2024. (After he beat the woman in the University District, Karlow’s $3,000 bail was posted by the Northwest Community Bail Fund.)

Last week, a trans woman was attacked in the Renton Transit Center, allegedly by three teen boys and a 25-year-old man. Prosecutors have submitted charges for the man and two of the teens. Another teen is expected to be charged today.

In addition to the anti-trans beatings, there’s also been a rash of anti-gay attacks in Seattle since the presidential election.

In the early hours of November 6, a man flying a white Trump/Vance flag on his Porsche allegedly hit a gay man in the arm with a metal baseball bat after instigating a confrontation. In February, a woman, a man and a teen boy allegedly drove circles around Pony, firing gel water beads at the people standing outside from a toy gun. In early June, Seattle police arrested a 23-year-old man after he put someone in a headlock while screaming anti-gay and anti-trans slurs outside a gay nightclub on Capitol Hill. Charges have been filed in all three crimes, but none have yet gone to trial. The pre-trial process is lengthy, Manzo says, and considers victim input when prosecuting hate crimes. Trials can be traumatic.

Over the phone, Carstens says she has a complicated relationship with the Seattle Police Department, but that she wants them to find the young men who beat her and her friends on Capitol Hill earlier this month.

“I think, when somebody goes out of their way and comes up and tries to target a group of people just purely based on hate, it’s really important to catch them and hold them accountable,” she says.

With a potentially long recovery ahead of her, and books and screens off the table, Carstens spends a lot of her time with her friend Michaela. Michaela, who did not want to use her last name for this article (and you’ll see why), works as a paralegal from home and lives close to Carstens. (Even on the short walk over, Carstens wears sunglasses to protect her sensitive eyes.)

Carstens was at Michaela’s when a photo of Michaela started circulating on right-wing accounts on social media, suggesting she was the “trans shooter” who killed Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in Utah.

As so many terrible things do, it started with a tweet. Before the shooting, Michaela saw a post on X that said “Dr. Pepper” was an “anagram for Epstein Island.” She screenshotted the post and drew random lines between the words.

“And just none of it matches up,” she says. “It’s a shit post, as they would say.”

Coincidentally, a user with the name “Omar” and handle @NajraGalvz” reposted Michaela; and coincidentally, this “Omar” had also posted that Kirk was coming to their college tomorrow “and I really hope someone evaporates him completely” and “Let’s just say something big will happen tomorrow.”

It did. In a flurry of internet “investigation,” the post went viral. Eventually, Michaela did, too. When someone Googled “Omar’s” handle, her profile photo popped up in the images tab. When “Omar” deleted their account, users suspected Michaela was “Omar.” The rumor spread from X to TikTok and Instagram.

The transphobic and violent comments escalated to “hundreds” of direct messages, with “many people telling me they were going to kill me, some people telling me I should just kill myself.” The possibility of real danger settled in when authorities released a second suspect and she realized there “actually was a large swath of people online that think I’m Charlie Kirk’s murderer.”

The accusation persisted even after suspect Tyler Robinson turned himself in, with users posting side-by-sides of her face and his. People lined their photos on top of each other, and faded one into the other to compare their faces. There were photos of his sunglasses edited onto her face.

“I mean, it was ridiculous,” she said, but it’s mostly died down now.

Michaela and Carstens are recent friends. They met on Twitter, and both moved to Seattle to escape what they felt were unsafe places. Carstens moved from Spokane last year. Michaela came here from Texas in May. (Yesterday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that makes it illegal for trans people to use the bathroom of their choice in government buildings.)

Michaela says it’s a strange coincidence that she met Carstens on X shortly before all this happened. Both women told The Stranger they’ve bonded over their shared experience of intense transphobic hate at a time where it felt like transphobia was coming from all sides. From the government, from a president who has issued several executive orders targeting transgender rights and medicine, from far-right podcasters, and from the culture writ large.

Before anything was known about the shooter, far-right influencers and many elected Republicans blamed Kirk’s death on transgender people. Several called for President Trump to designate them a terrorist threat.

Though some officials have attributed the shooting to “left-wing ideology,” it’s still unclear if Robinson even has an ideology. Officials also say Robinson was dating his trans “roommate,” but it’s unclear how this person identifies. Officials also say this person is cooperating with the investigation. There’s no indication that Robinson is trans, or was motivated by so-called “trans ideology.” In an alleged transcript included in charging documents, Robinson allegedly wrote that he killed Kirk because he was “tired of the hatred” and that “some hate can’t be negotiated with.”

Michaela says what happened to her and her friend is emblematic of the “two things that this rhetoric leads to.”

“For Maddie, it was on the local level that some boys now felt emboldened that they can go out and go queer bashing,” she says.

“On my note, it shows it on the national level. We can’t escape it, whether you’re trying to just live your life online and connect with other trans women, because a lot of us don’t have the privilege of living in an area where you can be out and open without fearing for your safety. It just kind of shows that whether you’re in a city that you think is safe, or whether you’re not even going outside at all and only limiting yourself to online spaces, this harassment and hate campaign is coming for all of us.

“I started transitioning nine months ago,” she says. “I wanted to come up here to hide, you know what I mean? I was not going to be public, I never wanted to be an activist or anything like that. But at the same time, because this happened to me, and because people have wanted me to speak on media [Michaela spoke to KUOW and Seattle Times about being falsely identified as the Kirk shooter] and I have an opportunity, I feel like for the community, I’m obligated to communicate that this was not random.”

Carstens has been thinking about how the queer community organized to protect itself from queer bashing in the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. That’s where people’s heads need to be right now, she says.

“People who want to harm us know exactly where to find us, and that’s starting to happen more, and it’s terrifying.”

Corbin C doesn’t think of himself as a photographer, even if Buckman Publishing just released a 170-page book of his snapshots, Choice Cuts: Disposable Camera Archives 2015-2023. “First and foremost, I’m a showgoer,” he says. “I love going to shows. I love dancing at shows. I love being at the front, right up by the band.”

Visitors to his web archive, corb.in, will clock aesthetic echoes of freakscene.us—a DIY show message board he co-founded with developer Nico Daunt—in its black background and blocky neon-green text. They’ll also notice the artist’s 13-week-old baby features prominently in recent uploads, but even new parenthood hasn’t slowed his love for live sets. He says his son has “been to five or six shows already.”

Pulling from nearly a decade of work, Choice Cuts captures Spoon Benders floor thrashing, rosy cheeks at Nonbinary Girlfriend, Reyna Tropical in a ski mask, and multiple nude drummers behind their kits. However, the artist’s lens isn’t limited to music; you’ll also find indie wrestlers stunting, Raging Grannies ready to counterprotest fascists, and show house pets staying stoic amidst the chaos.

Choice Cuts‘ book release, on September 25 at Tomorrow Theater, boasts rapper Karma Rivera as emcee, HI8 music videos onscreen, and plenty of behind-the-photo tales. We spoke to Corbin C about his new collection, and he revealed that we’d met at a show house called Human Flesh Body World years before. It rang a bell.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MERCURY: In your eyes, how is the house show scene in Portland doing?

CORBIN C: You know, the great thing about house shows is that there’s a very low barrier to entry. You don’t need to own a house. You don’t have to have a fancy sound system. When I threw shows at Crush House, the musicians brought their own.

Off the top of my head, I can list a handful of active show houses right now, but the DIY community is in many other kinds of places—an empty parking lot or an abandoned warehouse. There’s plenty going on; I’m always finding out about new stuff.

This collection isn’t just photos; there are band names, dates, and stories behind the images. How much research goes into your work?

I love going into a show totally clueless. If I see four bands on a poster with an address I’ve never been to before, that’s gold. When I get photos back—it takes a while to get the pictures back—I create pages for new artists on my website, and I do whatever amount of research I feel like doing at the time.

[Buckman Publishing co-founder] Rich Perin, who wrote the intro, curated the book. He went through my website, chose photos, and then he would email them to me. The words that are in the book are my replies. The captions are my thoughts about what’s going on in the scene.

How did you start working with disposable cameras?

I grew up using a small digital camera. Then I went on to a DSLR, which I never really loved. I’d pick up a disposable camera here and there, and use it at a party. You develop it eventually; you don’t think about it again for a while. Then, back in 2014, I was going to a party, and I figured I’d drop by the pharmacy on the way and grab a disposable camera. It ended up being $15 per camera, which seemed way too expensive, so afterward, I looked at some online auctions, and the first auction that I found was something like 32 cameras for $48. I just got into the habit of putting one in my pocket as I left the house for the day, like: phone, keys, wallet, camera.

Choice Cuts captures some beautiful scenes—perfectly suspended in time—thanks to use of flash. Do people get mad at you for using flash in the pit?

I’ve been in situations where photographers are using the flash, and I’m like: For the love of God, stop taking pictures. The flash on a disposable camera is bright, but it’s fast. So it hits quick, and then it’s gone. To be honest, when I started uploading photos of shows, I was influenced by Facebook thumbnails. I would generally only take five pictures because five pictures are what Facebook would show for each upload.

And that stuck?

Yeah, I ususally take no more than five pictures of a band. I sort of feel like I’m taking pictures the whole time. but I’m just only pressing the button once.

The book is dedicated to Ricardo. Who’s that?
That’s my dad; he passed a couple of years ago. He’s a big part of why I got into photography in the first place. He wasn’t a professional photographer himself, but we just had cameras around the house because of his interest. It wasn’t a particularly artistic household, so photography was the one medium that was always kind of around.

Do you have a favorite Portland band?

I kind of lean away from having favorites, but there’s a lot of artists that I love. I mean, several will be at the book release party. Karma Rivera is going to emcee and host—I reached out to her because I love her performances, love her music, love her crowd control. There’s no one in Portland who can manage a crowd better than Karma. Dim Wit is going to perform too and James from Nonbinary Girlfriend. If people haven’t seen their solo performance, it’s really, really wonderful stuff.

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Choice Cuts Book Launch: An Evening Celebrating Portland DIY is at Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division, Thurs Sept 25, 7 pm, $25, ticket includes a copy of the book, more info, all ages.

I need help figuring out how to tell my kids I am non-monogamous. I’ve been non-monogamous for over five years and have been married for nearly fifteen years. My husband and I have three kids together, the oldest of which is now 14. My husband and I have not been sexually active for nearly eight years, but we’re best friends, fabulous co-parents, and wonderful nesting partners, and I still love him very much. I reclaimed my sexuality and intimacy about six years ago and have been in a relationship with a wonderful man for nearly four years. My husband, dad, sister, and friends have all met and like him. I love him very much. But my kids do not know that their mom is non-monogamous! Being ethical is very important to me and telling them that I am “just going to see a friend” is wearing me down. I am concerned my oldest see might his mom holding hands with someone who isn’t his dad or hear from a friend who saw us. I do not want to hide my relationships from anyone but have waited because I just don’t know how to say it. What advice do you have for coming out to kids about being non-monogamous? I am scared they will hate me or feel betrayed. Or worse yet, that it will change my relationship with them forever as we are very close.

Mulling Over My Secret

Most kids don’t wanna think about their parents fucking each other, MOMS, and no kid wants to think about their parents fucking other people. But you’re not just fucking this other guy, MOMS, you’re in a relationship with him. You’ve taken steps to integrate your boyfriend into your life —something we all owe our romantic partners — and your boyfriend has been embraced by your husband, your dad, your sister, and your friends. But you have to tell your kids, arguably the most important people in your life, that you’re “seeing a friend” when you’re heading out to see your boyfriend and that gloss — I’m not going to call it a lie (he’s also your friend, right?) — doesn’t square with your ethics and being ethical is very important to you and blah blah ethics blah.

So, here’s an ethical question for you: If unburdening yourself — if no longer having to keep a secret from your kids — means shifting the burden of secret keeping onto your kids, is telling them the truth the more ethical choice?

Take your plan to tell your 14-year-old son, but not your other kids: If you tell him but not his siblings, you’ll be putting your son in the position of having to lie to his younger siblings or other people in your orbit who don’t know. I’m no ethicist, but it seems to me that asking your eldest to lie for you is worse than continuing to tell him a glossy lie yourself until all of your kids are old enough to know that your marriage is companionate and that you have another romantic partner.

You could tell all of your kids at once — you could rip that bandage off — and there are poly parents out there who are out to their kids, and their kids are fine. But do you live in a place where you can be out as open or poly couple in your community? Because if you don’t — if this is something your kids will have to keep from their friends, your neighbors, relatives who don’t know, etc. — then you would be asking all three of your kids to lie for you. And while your eldest child might be able to wrap his head around mom and dad’s marriage being loving, stable, and companionate, knowing you’re in love with someone else could make the younger ones worry their parents might split up at any moment.

So, I would ask you… what’s more ethical: waiting to tell your kids that your good friend is your boyfriend until they’re all old enough to understand the complexities of adult lives and relationships — to say nothing of the complexities of their parents’ marriage — or dumping some very complicated shit on them so that you can feel ethically pure?

If you do decide to tell them — all of them, all at once — you will need to pour on the reassurance. It won’t be enough to tell them you, and your husband are solid, MOMS, you’re going to need to show them. And seeing your husband and your boyfriend interact without tension will help, but you shouldn’t force your kids to interact with your boyfriend if they don’t want to be around him and/or don’t want him around.

And if you decide not to tell your kids until they’re a little older, then you need to be discreet. That means no public displays of affection — no holding your boyfriend’s hand — in places where your eldest or one of his friends might see you. You won’t have to sneak around forever, but sneaking around right now, while your kids are young, might be the more ethical choice.

I’m a 40-year-old married man who has had one male lover (who is also 40 and married) since we met in college. We are not married to each other. We’ve both been married to women. We were best friends for several years before we had sex and began our sexual affair before we got married. Our wives and children are all friends, and we often take joint vacations together. In addition to having sex with our wives during these joint vacations, we also have sex with each other. Our wives and families are ignorant of this arrangement. We’ve only had gay sex with each other. We are in love with our wives, but we have admitted that we love each other more. While we have many more opportunities to have sex with our wives (all the time, at least in theory) we have sex with them one to two times a week. While we can’t be alone overnight very often, we have sex five to six times when we do spend a night together. All the information I can find about bisexual men who are married to woman and sexually active with other males focuses on “hook-ups” and never on a relationship like ours. I know that there are variations in everything, but have you ever come across men like us?

Friends And Longtime Lovers

My first thought reading your letter: You should be less concerned about whether I’ve come across a relationship like yours, FALL, and more concerned about your wives or kids coming across the two of you fucking the shit out each other on one of your shared family vacations.

My second thought: This is a case for Dr. Joe Kort, the psychotherapist, sexologist, and author who specializes in marital problems faced by couples in “mixed orientation” marriages.

“I am non-judgmental and can even be supportive of a situation where a man has another guy or guys on the side,” said Dr. Kort. “However, I draw the line when the wife knows the other guy and the guy is in their friend group, as it is insensitive and unfair to the wife. Many people will feel it’s unfair to the wife that her husband is with anyone else, but it is more problematic when the two guys are the kind of friends who vacation together with their families.”

There is a name for the kind of relationship you describe: two married straight-identified/straight-perceived men who only have gay sex with each other are in a “closed loop.” The term was popularized by swinging couples where the men were open to their wives about being bisexual, Dr. Kort explained, and their wives consented to the arrangement, FALL, which doesn’t describe your situation. (Also, if a “straight” married man is having sex with other men, it’s important that he get the consent of his wife and take precautions to protect her sexual health. If the husband and wife are no longer intimate with each other, the man should be taking steps to protect his own sexual health and the health of his male partners, e.g., getting on PrEP, getting tested regularly, using condoms when appropriate, etc.)

Like me, Dr. Kort, who has written extensively about straight and/or straight-identified men who have sex with other men, is concerned about how this is going to play out when — not if — your wives find out.

“Given that they are doing this right under everyone’s noses, discovery seems inevitable,” said Dr. Kort. “And when they are discovered, the scale of this betrayal will make it very hard to recover from. The show Grace and Frankie made light of a similar situation — two old friends who were lovers leaving their wives for each other — but once exposed these things rarely go the way it did on that sitcom, where everyone remained friends. A revelation like this devastates everyone — including the men involved. When this comes out, their relationships with their wives and kids will never be the same.”

Maybe you and your male lover will continue to get away with it and your wife and kids will never discover that you’ve been something more than close friends for decades, FALL. But if you want to up the odds of getting away with this — if you wanna take his loads and your secret to the grave —you gotta stop fucking the shit out of each other while your wives and kids are sleeping in the next room.

 

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Read the rest of this week’s column here! And this week on the Lovecast: 

A gay man is lucky to be in a throuple relationship. But he worries that he’s having too much sex, and thinking about sex so much that it’s distracting him at work. Is he a sex addict? What can he do to cool his fevered libido?

Our guest this week is Elise Loehnen, the New York Times bestselling author of On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good. She is also the host of the podcast, Pulling the Thread. She and Dan talk about the role that envy plays in the scrutiny of women, slut shaming, lust, and how to work on our relationships with right-wingers. They had a lot to talk about! Some of it is on the Micro, the whole thing is on the Magnum. LISTEN HERE!

If you’re reading this, you probably know the value of the Mercury’s news reporting, arts and culture coverage, event calendar, and the bevy of events we host throughout the year. The work we do helps our city shine, but we can’t do it without your support. If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support!

Good morning, Portland, and welcome to the Good Morning, News rapture edition. In case you’re not a person who’s chronically online, today is the day Christians get swept up into the sky with Jesus, according to a large swath of people on TikTok. The sheer number of people who believe in earnest that the world as we know it will end on September 23 is puzzling, but also inspires hope in those of us who know we’ll get left behind and undoubtedly have fewer people to fight with for resources like housing, food, jobs, and that last pack of key lime La Croix.

Aside from a major biblical event, today we can expect sunshine and a high of 82. If you’re still around tomorrow, expect the same weather.  

IN LOCAL NEWS:

• Portland Police Bureau shot a guy last weekend in what the Bureau called an “exchange of gunfire” while responding to reports of an armed suspect “threatening employees at a service station before fleeing.” Officers eventually found the suspect and engaged in a high risk traffic stop, which ended in the guy firing at police and police firing back, injuring the suspect who was later transported to a hospital with what’s described as non-life threatening injuries. Bullets hit a PPB SUV, as well as a bystander’s car. For some reason, the Bureau didn’t call the incident an officer-involved shooting as it typically does when officers deploy deadly force, but the involved officers are on paid administrative leave, which is standard after an officer-involved shooting. You can track PPB’s uses of deadly force here.

• In other city bureau news, Portland Parks & Recreation’s (PP&R) Urban Forestry division reports there are 15 percent more street trees now than there were a decade ago. The division did a three-year analysis by mapping, measuring and identifying more than 252,000 street trees across the city, according to PP&R. “The data shows there is still room for improvement, but key findings include a 15% increase in Portland’s street trees over the past decade, greater species diversity, and about 90% of street trees are in good or fair condition,” the bureau reported Monday. 

• Kaiser Permanente nurses and other health care workers in Oregon and Southwest Washington authorized a strike last week. The Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP) voted to authorize the work stoppage amid ongoing labor contract negotiations with Kaiser. OFNHP members say the health care organization isn’t doing enough to raise wages that will attract new employees, which are needed to adequately staff Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas, Westside Medical Center in Hillsboro, and other surgical centers and medical and dental clinics spanning the I-5 corridor. OPB previously reported that Kaiser offered staff a 20 percent pay raise over the next four years and the Oregonian notes Kaiser is “pushing back on the union’s concerns about staffing and quality of care” saying more than 6,300 employees were hired last year, including nearly 4,700 front line health care workers. If a strike occurs after OFNHP’s contract expires at the end of the month, Kaiser would get 10 days notice.

• Several food carts were damaged after a propane tank exploded at Springwater Cart Park (formerly Cartlandia) early this morning. KGW reports residents up to 40 blocks away from the pod near SE 82nd and Harney heard the blast just before 5 am. Apparently a propane canister at one of the carts had a leak that trapped gas inside the cart and exploded once it reached an ignition source. No one was hurt, but eight carts were damaged, along with two permanent structures on the site after cart doors were blown off and glass shattered across the pod. 

Update:

8 carts affected along with the 2 structures. Preliminary investigation indicates this likely a propane tank explosion and accidental in nature. Investigation continuing.

— Portland Fire & Rescue (@PDXFire) September 23, 2025

• We’re here to remind you of Portland’s thriving arts and culture offerings and help you plan your next outing. This week’s Do This; Do That! provides a bevy of suggestions, including a Spike Lee film series, OG art rockers Sparks at Revolution Hall, and the works of Yoshida Chizuko at the Portland Art Museum. 

The autumn equinox is today, and Do This, Do That has you covered with a weekful of events to start your season right. Inside: two touring comedians, ’70s art rock, and a Q&A with director Sean Baker.

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— Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury.com) September 22, 2025 at 1:53 PM

IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS:

• Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel will be back on the air tonight (if he isn’t sucked up in the rapture, of course) after being suspended and having his show taken off the air last Wednesday. Disney suspended Kimmel for what the company deemed insensitive remarks Kimmel made following the death of Charlie Kirk. Kimmel said the MAGA movement is attempting to paint Kirk’s killer as “anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points.” Disney, which owns ABC–the network that airs Kimmel’s show–faced threats from the FCC over Kimmel’s comments. Disney also faced intense public backlash for its assault on free speech, with several calls to boycott the company and its products. Adding to the pressure was an open letter from the ACLU signed by hundreds of actors, urging the company to reverse its decision. 

Breaking: Jimmy Kimmel to return Tuesday.

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— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 12:33 PM

• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to roll out a live demo of his new Meta Ai glasses went as awfully as it possibly could have last week. Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses use AI to display messages, texts and other prompts right onto the lenses using a neural wrist band that’s supposed to use muscle movements to navigate the features of the goofy $800 frames. During the demo, Zuckerberg tried to answer a call using his glasses, which failed to react, leaving the endearing nerd-turned tech bro douche on stage in silence several times, waiting for the glitches to resolve, before eventually blaming the building’s WiFi. “I don’t know what to tell you guys,” Zuck told his crowd. Things didn’t get any better when the demo pivoted to a chef using the glasses to help him find a recipe for a Korean steak sauce. The chef asked the live AI feature for ingredients, then asked what the first step should be to make the sauce. “You’ve already combined your base ingredients,” the AI voice responded. Whoops. 

Zuck fumbles the Meta Ray-Ban Display AI glasses video call demo on stage at Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #MetaRayBanDisplay

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— Shacknews (@shacknews.com) September 17, 2025 at 5:48 PM

• Trump is claiming, without conclusive evidence, that Tylenol use during pregnancy can cause autism. He and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who now heads the US Health and Human Services department, said Monday that that drug labels will soon be updated to warn pregnant women against taking acetaminophen due to increased risk of autism. There is no clear scientific evidence of any link between the drug and autism. There is however, a recent study that examined findings from other studies and concluded there is an association between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and elevated risk of autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and neurodevelopmental disability. NPR noted one of the study’s authors cautioned that “stronger evidence” is needed before the government changes its health guidance on the matter.

• In unsurprising but frightening news, Trump also signed an executive order deeming antifa a terrorist organization. Emboldened by the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump is capitalizing on the moment in order to target left-wing groups. “Antifa” isn’t an organization or singular group. It’s a decentralized movement comprised of individuals who often use protest as a means of pushing back against fascism and fascist government entities. 

Speaking of government overreach … don’t get me wrong, I want the guvment to back off from that authoritarian power trip and stay out of my business, but I absolutely want to be all up in everyone else’s biz. 

@ringodanyan I just want to know the tea😜 #cute #cat #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound – Landon