16 October 2025 |
As the current administration attempts to decimate the rights of LGBTQIA+ people, this incredible groundswell of New York City artists and entrepreneurs are doing the honorable work of protecting their own.
A week after the 2024 election, Julie Wernersbach noticed something happening at her bookstore, Hive Mind Books—notably the only queer bookstore in very queer Brooklyn. “There were so many people walking through the door, looking for a place to come and talk,” says Wernersbach, a longtime bookseller who founded her business in part because she was fed up working at places that used the word “community” as a marketing gimmick, but with little basis in reality. Behind the register, Wernersbach found herself playing therapist to her customers while books about queer activism flew off the shelves. “People were looking for literature, but also how to understand and change the world,” she says.
It’s hard, after all, not to feel a little lost these days— searching for answers about how we got here and why queer people have unwillingly been thrust into the center of the culture wars. It has become all too clear we’re living through a backlash: Trump spent his campaign and the first half of his presidency railing against everything from pronouns to trans people. On Inauguration Day, he announced in an executive order that there are “only two genders.” The Supreme Court, this summer, essentially ruled that any state may ban healthcare for trans minors; soon after, the Justice Department began demanding doctors hand over medical records for their trans patients. Even that seemingly most settled of queer issues (and what the youth today might call the most “homonormative”), gay marriage, has seen a decline in public acceptance.
It’s on this occasion that 10 decided to assemble a dozen queer New Yorkers who, despite the seemingly constant scariness of this time, are making a legitimate difference—big and small, in the city and far beyond. Wernersbach is featured here with her partner, McKenzie Wark, a New School professor, author, and familiar face on Brooklyn’s rave scene. (Needless to say, her books—including her incredible coming-out memoir Reverse Cowgirl, which at one point instructs the reader to roll the book up and fuck it—are on the shelves at Hive Mind).
from left: McKenzie Wark and Julie Wernersbach
from left: Cat Fitzpatrick and Emily Zhou
There’s also Cat Fitzpatrick, an award-winning poet and the co-founder of LittlePuss Press, a trans-run feminist imprint at the forefront of the trans literary renaissance. She’s pictured with one of her authors, Emily Zhou, the group’s resident Gen Z “trans Mary McCarthy,” and the author of Girlfriends. They’re currently working on LittlePuss’s next project, republishing a Nineties-era Canadian magazine called Gendertrash from Hell, which during its brief run included sections like Hooker of the Month and interviews with trans women in prison.
This portfolio also features a troupe of ground- breaking queer performance artists, pictured with their chosen queer family. The first couple is Maxfield Haynes,withtheirmentorand“spiritualdancemother,”
another fabulous multihyphenate, Djassi DaCosta Johnson, at her home in Brooklyn. “I’m blessed to come from good people. Though they can be beautiful sources of love and inspiration, there are inevitable barriers of understanding between us and our families,” Haynes says. “Luckily, we as queer people get to choose our families.” They met in the studios at NYU and have been dancing together ever since. “Djassi inspired me to never settle for being boxed into just one identity or expression.” In 2022, Haynes became the first non- binary soloist at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
The inimitable Mx Justin Vivian Bond, who first began performing during the AIDS crisis as one half of the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb, and recently nabbed a MacArthur Genius Grant, is seen with her friend and fellow performer Garnet Williams at Joe’s Pub, where both of them perform.
Xavier Cruz and JP Gomez run Barba Grooming Boutique, a gay barbershop in Chelsea, where they founded Strands for Trans—a nonprofit they started in 2017 after they heard about a trans man in California who’d been denied a haircut because of his gender. Years later, Strands for Trans now serves as a network of thousands of salons across the country, from small towns in the Midwest to big cities on the coasts, that have pledged themselves to be—apologies for a buzzword—safe spaces for queer people looking for a haircut.
from left: Xavier Cruz and JP Gomez
from left: Mars Hobrecker and Glossy
Finally, there’s Glossy and Mars Hobrecker, two tattoo artists who met each other on New York’s nightlife scene over a decade ago. Hobrecker is also a nightlife producer behind some of the city’s most noted queer parties: Doll Invasion, a trans-focused weekend of debauchery in the usually abs-and-Speedo-dominated gay vacation destination of Fire Island; and Thirst, an annual strip night featuring queer sex workers during Pride Month. (It is, he says, much more “wholesome” than it sounds.)
Like Wernersbach, Hobrecker started his practice out of a feeling of need. When he moved to New York, it seemed like the only places to get inked up were bro- friendly tattoo shops on St. Mark’s Place. He focused on his queer friends, offering to tattoo them in his apartment. He’d gotten his first one back in high school (sneaking away during his lunch break), where he was a self-described “weirdo little alt kid” at a Catholic all- girls school looking for ways to rebel. “It was the first time I decided on my own for my body that someone else wasn’t able to undo,” he says.
People get tattoos at inflection points in their lives: after breakups, after graduations, when the going gets rough, or when it gets really good. In Hobrecker’s studio, he’s not only fostering his community, as it fights to remain visible, but there are other perks too: “People feel hot getting tattoos,” he jokes. “Being hot is also gender affirming for me.”
from left: Mx Justin Vivian Bond and Garnet Williams
from left: Djassi DaCosta Johnson and Maxfield Haynes
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 05 – TRANSFORMATION, BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE – on newsstands September 18. Order your copy here.
Text BROCK COLYAR
Talent MX JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND, XAVIER CRUZ, CAT FITZPATRICK, GLOSSY,
JP GOMEZ, MAXFIELD HAYNES, MARS HOBRECKER, DJASSI DACOSTA JOHNSON, MCKENZIE WARK, JULIE WERNERSBACH, GARNET WILLIAMS, AND EMILY ZHOU
