November is Men’s Health Awareness Month, and it is essential to recognize the challenges all men face, as well as how their identities and communities impact those hurdles. In general, men experience hardships related to societal expectations of their gender identities—the pressure to be masculine, maintain a specific appearance, and find fulfillment in their gender roles. This complexity expands when considering factors such as race, cisnormativity, sexual and romantic orientations, generational differences, and the intersectionality that all men carry.…
Continue Reading
On the Pride month episode of Asking for a Friend, host Dr. Laura McGuire sits down with Sunflower Summit, a queer Latinx artist, producer, and mental health professional, to discuss finding wholeness in their queer identity, how their music and mental health journeys have intertwined, and the importance of storytelling.…
Continue Reading
Wow, where has the time gone? 2021 has already raced by, and I can’t believe it’s already May. As vaccines are rolling out, it feels like the world is finally starting to open back up just in time for summer, with the prospects of travel and social life on the horizon. While some are chomping at the bit to emerge back into society, others are much less comfortable, still feeling the weight of the pandemic. The month of May marks…
Continue Reading
When dating someone new, I always tell them that I don’t “do” anger. I’ve had unwarranted anger wielded against me before and I know how lasting those marks can be. Anger is unpredictable, unfair, and terrifying. I can’t handle another person’s abuse, another relationship spent walking on eggshells and fearing rage.…
Continue Reading
The "new normal" of COVID-19 is hard, y'all. And it's definitely taking a toll on our collective mental health. Veer Queer interviewer Deondre B. Moore sits down with Kevin Anderson, founder and CEO of the T.R.U.T.H. Project—a Houston-based non-profit that educates and mobilizes LGBTQ communities of color through social arts that promote mental, emotional, and sexual health—to discuss coping with quarantine, tele-therapy, finding accessible and safe creative outlets, and more.…
Continue Reading
I must disclaim that I am in no way a health and fitness professional, I am a city boy who likes to be out in the city and a gym bunny who enjoys the rush of a good workout. What ever am I doing during the lockdown, then? Let me lay out some workarounds that have been good to me, physically and mentally. Perhaps, if you’re looking to get your own endorphins flowing (whether you’re a gym regular or not),…
Continue Reading
What a crazy time we find ourselves in. March has ended (finally!) and, in just a single month, the world has changed in ways we won’t fully realize for years and decades to come. Lives have been forever altered, destroyed, or lost completely. And now the ways in which we interact with one another, the best practices in every sector, the systems that are supposed to be there when we needed a safety net, and the planet we live on…
Continue Reading
I grew up in a time before social media. As fantastical as it sounds, there was a time before social media existed, where all socializing happened live and in person. Relationships were developed through physical and organic interaction—the old-fashioned way of getting to know someone. Bonds were built slowly and solidified over time. But as social media platforms and apps have entered the scene over the last two decades, the ways we connect were transformed, shifting to focus on increasing…
Continue Reading
Houston-native Dr. Kaden J. Stanley comes from a family that greatly values higher education. He spent his childhood cheering for his North Carolinian parents’ Atlantic Coast Conference basketball teams and dreamed of, one day, becoming a Duke Blue Devil himself. In the sixth grade, Stanley and his parents agreed that he would continue his schooling at a college preparatory academy. The school he would attend from sixth through twelfth grade was, as Stanley describes, southern Baptist and radically fundamentalist—Senator Ted…
Continue Reading
I think the last time I took an online quiz, it was to see what kind of hot dog I was. Spoiler alert, I’m a Chicago-style dog. While these benign online quizzes, first made famous by Buzzfeed, have become popular for passing the time (and escaping from the inundation of celebrity pop culture and political scandals), Houstonian Ryan Schwartz has created one that is actually here to help.…
Continue Reading
