Fuel Coffee, Dough Joy, and More Places for Floral Beverages

by EverOut Staff

If you’ve spent any time at all on queer TikTok, you probably already know that lavender lattes—especially iced with oat milk—are widely considered the gayest coffee order around. I’ve been drinking this trendy sapphic beverage since I first encountered it at a cafe in Tacoma in 2013, but it’s been tough to find until recently, so I’m pleased to see it proliferating across Seattle menus as of late. Here are seven favorites that I’ve found, in case you want to celebrate Pride Month with some floral refreshments.

Cafe Flora and The Flora Bakehouse
The vegetarian haven Cafe Flora and its bakery sibling are both serving up a “Lavender Fields Latte,” featuring local raw honey infused with aromatic lavender buds—the most cottagecore beverage possible, if you ask me.
Madison Valley, Beacon Hill

The Stranger

Some Congressional Candidates Support Marijuana

Times have changed and so has campaign for a a national office, some congressional candidates support marijuana openly!

The post Some Congressional Candidates Support Marijuana appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

One really great thing to do every day of the week.

by Audrey Vann

WEDNESDAY 6/19  

Juneteenth Freedom Fest

(JUNETEENTH) On Juneteenth, Africatown Community Land Trust and King County Equity Now are “commemorating the liberation of our ancestors from chattel slavery and collectively envisioning and exploring what future freedom and equity can look like.” Socially conscious hip-hop duo Dead Prez will host a panel on reparations and freedom, “Bed” singer J. Holiday will headline a lineup of music performances, and attendees can check out over 100 market and food vendors. The festivities will take over Jimi Hendrix Park, next to the Northwest African American Museum. See our full list of Juneteen events here. (Jimi Hendrix Park, 2400 S Massachusetts St, noon–8 pm, free, all ages) JANEY WONG

THURSDAY 6/20  

Vampire Weekend

(MUSIC) Portland Mercury arts and culture editor Suzette Smith writes: “I started listening to Vampire Weekend in design school for their consistent versatility: You can draw to it, talk over it, or you can take it and the rhymes by singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig pretty seriously. With the departure of the group’s synth player and all-around genius Rostam Batmanglij in 2016, fans stepped into the new record cautiously, and waited for their subsequent albums patiently.” And, luckily, the five-year-long wait for Only God Was Above Us was well worth it. Drawing inspiration from 20th century New York City, Koenig and co. ponder the generation’s existence in the shadows of the past; notably, long gone famed New Yorkers and defunct storefronts. Guitarist, vocalist, and founding member of Phish Mike Gordon will open. (Climate Pledge Arena, 305 Harrison St, 7 pm, $29.50–$89, all ages) AUDREY VANN

FRIDAY 6/21  

Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture

(VISUAL ART) Even if you consider yourself a counterculture connoisseur, you might not be familiar with the West Coast’s alternative art history, which tends to be left out of art history classes. Enter Poke in the Eye, a new exhibition spotlighting ’60s- and ’70s-era aesthetic practices that shirked the minimalist, chilly movements coming out of the East Coast at that time. Seattle and Bay Area artists were “intentionally offbeat,” splashing color across figural and narrative compositions and making weird mouth sculptures. Hey, it’s always been a little irreverent out here, right? (Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Wed–Sun June 21–Sept 2, free–$32.99, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

SATURDAY 6/22  

1st Annual Georgetown Pride

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A post shared by Seattle Tavern & Pool Room (@seattletavern)

(PRIDE) Georgetown decided it was about time the neighborhood had its own Pride party! Swing by Bloom Bistro for an all-ages afternoon hang with music, food, face painting, and a clown appearance, but make sure to head over to Oxbow Park by 3 pm for the first annual parade, escorted by Dykes on Bikes and a brass band. There won’t be any organized floats, but folks are invited to join on foot, roller skates, and other human-powered wheels. Shotgun Ceremonies will offer free shotgun weddings at Georgetown Trailer Park Mall all day, before DJs including Wax Witch and Rainbow Tay spin at bars along Airport Way into the night. (Multiple locations in Georgetown, 1 pm, free, all ages with some 21+ venues) SHANNON LUBETICH

SUNDAY 6/23  

Cutie Fest Pride

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A post shared by Cutie Foundation (@cutiefoundation)

(PRIDE) Founded by Kaitlin Fritz in 2022, Cutie Fest is an alternative craft market that offers an accessible, inclusive alternative to other similar events, requiring no vendor fee. Since its inception, the festival has also spawned a nonprofit called the Cutie Foundation focused on empowering young artists. In the past, Cutie Fest has taken place at Cal Anderson Park, but excitingly, this iteration will be the first to take place at Bell Street Park in downtown Seattle and to be supported by the Downtown Seattle Association, meaning there will be capacity for food stalls, live music stages, and amenities like bathrooms. It’s been so heartening to see this scrappy grassroots movement grow, and I can’t wait to be there with a fun beverage in hand, ready to throw money at everything from handmade Crocs charms to Shrinky Dink keychains. Prepare to make lots of new queer friends. (Bell Street Park, 340 Bell St, Sat-Sun, noon-7 pm, free, all ages) JULIANNE BELL

MONDAY 6/24  

Spend Your Money at a Queer-Owned Restaurant

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A post shared by Frelard Tamales (@frelardtamales)

(FOOD & DRINK) Posting a little rainbow flag emoji on your socials can be a nice gesture, but you know what’s even better? MONEY. Today, celebrate Pride Month by giving a queer-owned business your cold hard cash. We’ve put together a list of 20 queer-owned restaurants, bakeries, and bars so you can make a whole night of it! Grab dinner at Frelard Tamales, Terra Plata, or Biang Biang Noodles (mmm, hand-pulled noodles) and follow it up with something sweet from A La Mode Pies, Dough Joy, Tres Lecheria, or R&M Dessert Bar. (The latter has afternoon tea service on select Saturdays if you want to get really fancy.) You can grab a post-dinner cocktail at the Velvet Elk, Saint John’s Bar and Eatery, Little Tin Goods, or Wildrose or, if you don’t drink alcohol, I highly recommend Kamp Social House. They understand that booze-free drinks can be so much more than Sprite with a splash of cranberry juice. MEGAN SELING

TUESDAY 6/25  

I Used to Be Funny

(FILM) I never anticipated needing to explain that Rachel Sennott is “currently funny,” but this flick’s title leaves me eager to confirm that she’s hilarious. (Although, if you’ve seen Shiva Baby or Bottoms, you’re already well aware.) In Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny, a stand-up struggling with PTSD seeks out a missing teen who she used to nanny. Sennott always understands the assignment, so I’m anticipating something vulnerable and comical and a little weird. (Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St, various showtimes through July 3, $9-$12) LINDSAY COSTELLO

The Stranger

Kudos to you, my good man!

by Anonymous

Dear Macklemore, 

I almost ran you over on 15th once. I knew it was you because I was way too close, and you did the classic deer-in-headlights stand-and-freeze thing. Sorry about that!!

I’m especially sorry about that because you seem like a nice guy who’s doing celebrity right. Dropping out of music for a couple years because you felt like getting into golfing? Great! Well-balanced and healthy! A cool move!

Even cooler is your advocacy for Gaza. I disagree with you about not voting for Biden (Plan 2025 scares the shit out of me), but kudos to you for having an articulated stance and for giving a shit.

You’ve written some goofy lyrics, and also you’re a good-as-hell guy. Seattle, or at least this Seattleite, is proud of you.

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we’ll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

The Stranger

The Kennedys Are The Most Famous Weed Gardeners

Considering all they had going on, it is not a surprise the Kennedys are the most famous weed gardeners.

The post The Kennedys Are The Most Famous Weed Gardeners appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Measuring economic activity and the distance of stars are directly related.

by Charles Mudede

The Puget Sound Business Journal is looking at the bright side of things. Yes, Seattle’s tech sector shrank not too long after the pandemic ended (or, more precisely, was normalized—it is still with us, still killing lots of people), but the space industry, which has its roots in Boeing’s former domination of the region’s economy, is expanding thanks to the investments by two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The former, who runs SpaceX, “doubled [his] Puget Sound-area workforce to roughly 2,000 employees in the last year.” The latter, Bezos’s Blue Origin, “saw its Seattle-area workforce climb by more than 300 employees over the past year.” Bezos also owns Project Kuiper, a subsidiary of Amazon that plans to compete directly with Musk’s world-famous Starlink by launching a total of “3,236 low-Earth orbit internet satellites by mid-2029.” Starlink presently has 6,078 satellites in space. 

And so this is what has become of our stars: commercial projects that will eventually obscure Earth-based scientific observations of real stars, the galaxies they form, and the universe they wander through from “remote eons to infinitely remote futures.” 

Seattle’s 1962 Century 21 Exposition, which gave the city its only iconic building, the Space Needle, promoted the region beyond our atmosphere in terms that owed their inspiration to a cultural movement we still confusedly call the Enlightenment. Recall JFK’s 1962 speech at Rice University. Also recall its most memorable moment:

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

This enlightened feeling of wonder, which was with us as late as 1998, as the sample at the opening of Gang Starr’s track “Above the Clouds” attests, is gone in our post-neoliberal age of the billionaires. Space is now about “market potential.” In fact, science as a globalizing cultural project has never been about the wonder expressed by certain religions and philosophies in the scattered history before the 17th century. It began (and will end) with investment opportunities whose returns required not only the uniformity of time but its domination over space.

The period in which Kennedy delivered his famous space speech, and during which the Space Needle was built, the Cold War, obscured the economic foundation of modernized technological and scientific development. It presented instead a noble (or humanistic) race between the US and the USSR. One or the other was to become, as the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss put it in her 2000 book Dreamworld and Catastrophe, “the legitimate heir” of the Enlightenment’s defining political moment, the French Revolution. Which would be the best measure of “man”? The measure of progress, a social concept that obsessed the Victorians? The Eagle or the Bear?

In short, would the dream of total human emancipation be achieved by capitalism (in its state form)? Or Socialism (also in its state form—the world has yet to experiment with anarcho-socialism)? The latter would lose this legitimacy race because it was more confused about the root and function of the enlightenment than the former. The same confusion is also found in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s 2002 book The Origin of Capitalism. She incorrectly believed that “the Enlightenment project [was] distinctly non-capitalist” and that many of its features “were [instead] rooted in non-capitalist social property relations.” And so, for Wood, as with state socialism, rationalization (also called modernization), existed before every society was unified by Newtonian time, the time of work, the time of paying bills, the time of vacations, the time education, the time of retirement, the time of reading wills, the time now organized by clocks synchronized by satellites to prevent the minute leakages described by Einsteinian relativity.

It is no accident that Sir Issac Newton was also Master of the Royal Mint, the master of British money, a fact that cost a number of counterfeiters their lives. Nor is it an accident that the man who gave us the most powerful theory of time and space, special relativity, spent a good part of his life as a patent clerk. Nor must we find it strange or even absurd that the most rewarding chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Ithaca,” moves between the cosmic and the commercial with great ease. The two cannot be separated. Measuring economic activity and the distance of stars are directly related. The accounting intensity (or mania) of the former, made the latter inevitable. How much did you spend today? How bright is the moon tonight? How long does it take for a ship to cross the ocean; how long does it take for light to arrive from that galaxy? What are the assets in your mother’s will? What is the composition of water? This is the stuff of “Ithaca.”

All that space will ever be is all that the present mayor of Everett, Cassie Franklin, could say about it: “I am thrilled to welcome Amazon’s new Project Kuiper facility to Everett. This investment not only strengthens our region’s reputation as a hub for [space] innovation but also creates valuable job opportunities for our residents.”

The Stranger

The Stranger’s morning news roundup.

by Vivian McCall

Happy Juneteenth! On this day in 1865, Union soldiers marched on Galveston Bay, Texas to announce that the more than 250,000 enslaved people in the state were free. It’s a nice day ahead for those celebrating in Seattle. After more than a week of below normal temperatures, we’ll ascend to the high 70s today and stay warm until Sunday, when we drop down again.

Cafe Racer is closing: Just six months after linking up with Allied Arts Foundation and reopening as a nonprofit arts space, Cafe Racer is closing its Capitol Hill venue on 11th Ave on June 30th. According to Capitol Hill Seattle blog, it will live on as a “nonprofit community driven arts organization” and continue supporting Washington-based music online.

Save Scarecrow video! The University-District-video-store-turned-nonprofit-video-library could close unless it raises $1.8 million by the end of the year. It’s the same story dogging all of our city’s arts organizations: donations are down and costs are up. Fuck! I genuinely shouted into a quiet, empty office when I read the Seattle Times story about this. Scarecrow is a Seattle treasure, an institution, one of the genuinely cool places. Ephemeral, ever-disappearing streaming video can’t replace their robust physical library, one of the biggest publicly available video collections in the country. Losing it would mean losing a piece of our municipal soul. Don’t let it happen!

SOS – Save Our Scarecrow

Read our open letter to the communityhttps://t.co/rtFtMtUShl pic.twitter.com/7u7p3MQ7Zq

— ScarecrowVideo (@ScarecrowVideo) June 18, 2024

Seattle fines the Belltown Hellcat guy: Miles Hudon, 20, driver of the most hated Dodge Charger in Seattle (which is saying something) is accused of racing through the city at night and waking people with a thunderous, coughing exhaust pipe. Yesterday, a Seattle court ordered him to pay $83,000 in municipal fines for not responding to a City lawsuit against him within 20 days. Hudson, who didn’t fully comply with an SPD inspection of his car last week, arrived at court wearing a balaclava and dark sunglasses.

ICYMI: The Seattle Public Library is still reeling from last month’s cyber attack, which took out the WiFi, printers, Interlibrary loans, and the ability to return physical media. SPL wouldn’t let our freelancer Charlie Lahud-Zaher talk to library staff or admin, so Lahud-Zaher just hung around instead, observing how librarians were making do.

Most Americans like DEI: Last year, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action and kicked the door down for conservative challenges to “woke” Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in the public and private sectors. Turns out, people like them, meaning these programs are probably not the reeducation camp conservatives say they are. (Well, it’s either that or America must have already gone full communist). Roughly 6 in 10 Americans told the Washington Post and Ipsos pollsters that DEI was a good thing, a number that rose to 7 in 10 when the term was well-defined for them. Most said the effect was either neutral or positive. Only 14 percent of respondents said DEI hurt them personally. 

Thailand gets gayer: Thailand will become the first nation in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage after the kingdom’s senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of marriage equality. Only four members opposed the bill. The law won’t officially be law until the King signs off on it, but that’ll most likely happen. Gay couples in Thailand should be able to legally marry this year.

Club Q shooter pleads guilty to 74 charges: Shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five people and injured a dozen more at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2022 accepted a plea deal in connection with federal hate crime charges. He’ll never get out. A judge sentenced him to 55 concurrent life sentences, followed by 190 years imprisonment. Last year, Aldrich was already sentenced to 2,000 years imprisonment.

Noam Chomsky is alive, but we thought he was dead for a second: Here’s what happened. Last year, a stroke put Chomsky in the hospital. Yesterday, the doctors discharged him from the hospital to continue treatment at home. The hospital put out a statement about it, and then rumors of his death circulated the internet. The New Statesman and Jacobin published obits, which the latter headlined “We Remember Noam Chomsky,” before changing it to “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky,” which is a charming way to fix a grievous journalistic oopsie. Surely, this event has prompted newsrooms across the world to prepare their obits for one of the world’s most prominent leftist intellectuals, if they haven’t got them in the can already. The man is 95, after all. We wish him good health.

pic.twitter.com/eg5x2786QH

— Mr. Thank You (@c0mmunicants) June 18, 2024

Northern heat wave: A heatwave is hitting an area that stretches east from Maine past Chicago with triple-digit heat dangerous enough to kill people. With projected temperatures ranging from 10 to 25 degrees higher than average for this time of year, more than 100 places are expected to break record highs through the weekend.

Get up to date on the conservative master plan for Trump’s reelection: If America is a beach, Project 2025 is the tsunami wave that threatens to slam into the shore and carry off our umbrellas, chairs, and sunscreen right along with our democracy. People are talking about it after a John Oliver segment this weekend, and if you’re not up on the particulars, then there’s no time like the present to become horribly, miserably familiar with them.  As described in this New York Times article, extremist conservatives are already laying the groundwork for Donald Trump’s return to office. Also for the Times, this guy read every page of the behemoth. NPR did a half-hour on the plan. Here’s Oliver’s segment:

John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.

I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it’s too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB

— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) June 18, 2024

Girls to the front: After 39 years of sidelining the series named for her, Zelda is finally getting her legend. Nintendo announced The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom at its Nintendo Direct showcase Tuesday. I’m excited for this one.

The Stranger

Do You Want A Smell To Go With Watching Porn

CamSoda has released a product called OhRama, which is a mask that connects to your VR headset which will allow you to “smell” the sex happening on screen.

The post Do You Want A Smell To Go With Watching Porn appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Do You Know The Marijuana Emoji

Do you know the marijuana emoji? It is a bit of secret for those in the know….but here you go.

The post Do You Know The Marijuana Emoji appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

A new episode of Savage Love.

by The Stranger

A straight woman wants to explore her bitchy side. She feels like all her edge got sanded away, and now she wants to try out the dom role. How can she find a man who wants a selfish, in-charge lover?

Meanwhile, a straight man is frustrated that his lady won’t let him go down on her.

Our guest this week is Lyz Lenz, author of the NYT best-selling This American Ex-Wife. Raised a conservative Christian, Lenz found herself trapped in a joyless marriage, doing all the work, and getting gaslit like crazy. Now, she makes for a fiery, indignant, righteous interview. The first bit is on the Micro and the whole thing is on the Magnum. Highly recommended.

And, a straight couple are fornicating their way through America’s beautiful national parks—but what officially counts as sex? If he goes down on her under a domestic sequoia, did they just have sex? If she rims him in full view of Mount Rainier, did they “do it?”

Oh, and here’s the piece Dan mentioned in the intro about a woman who was asked to leave a gay orgy.

The Stranger