© 2025 University of Missouri - KBIA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
What radical courage does it take to love in the face of hate? Through portraiture and personal narratives highlighting joy, belonging, found family and meaningful romantic and platonic relationships, KBIA’s Alphabet Soup challenges the notion that Missouri’s LGBTQ+ community is a monolith.Tucked away within the amalgamation of letters that makes up the LGBTQ+ community and the complex identities each represents is joy: rebellious, resistant, radiant. If you have a story you would like to share, visit https://tinyurl.com/LGBTQJoy or contact news@kbia.org.Created by Bailey Stover.

Kat & Aly Wright: "I'm here. I'm queer, and I'm absolutely thrilled that you are here and queer, as well."

Wives Kat Wright, left with blue hair, and Aly Wright lean in to kiss on their couch while reading through Aly’s wedding vows to Kat on Monday, April 1, 2024, at their home in Columbia.
Bailey Stover
/
KBIA
Wives Kat Wright, left, and Aly Wright lean in to kiss on their couch while reading through Aly’s wedding vows to Kat on Monday, April 1, 2024, at their home in Columbia. The couple, who met while playing roller derby, will celebrate their second wedding anniversary in August.

“For me, queer authenticity and queer joy, I think that there's a narrative out there that says that you wouldn't know joy without also knowing struggle, you wouldn't know the good times without also having the bad times. And I don't think that's necessarily a fair narrative,” Kat Wright said. “I don't think we should have to struggle. I don't think we should have to experience bad times. But I do think that in the society we live in, for me, queer authenticity and queer joy is knowing all of the risks that come with being fully yourself and doing it anyway in every aspect, from your personal relationships to being out in the workplace to wearing your pride flag. I think it's knowing that there is risk and knowing that it is worth it to do it anyway.”

Kat and Aly Wright are a queer married couple in Columbia. Kat is queer and nonbinary, and Aly is a bisexual transgender woman.
 
They met and fell in love while playing roller derby. They spoke about how some unexpected circumstances changed their original wedding plans – perhaps for the better.

Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives. 

Kat Wright: I just had an alert pop up on my calendar the other day that said, “Book your wedding venue if you haven't yet.”

Laughter

Aly Wright: Oh, my God.

Kat Wright: Because my timeframe was 2025.

Aly Wright: That's right – because it would have, like the dates would have lined up really well.

Kat Wright: Yeah, it would have been 8/9/25, and it would have been, I think, on a Saturday, I'm not sure.

Aly Wright: Yeah, that's why.

"We skated into the gazebo from different sides of the lake and met in the middle and got married on skates."
Kat Wright

Kat Wright: Yeah. But that plan, kind of blew out of the water a little bit –

Aly Wright: Yeah, it was 2022 when Roe v. Wade got struck down –

Kat Wright: – and I was like, “Oh, this is happening, and terrible things could happen because of this.” So, we gotta cover our butts. We got to take care of the marriage – so that we are married, so that if we have to go to a different state, if we have to go to a different country –

Aly Wright: So, we decided to accelerate our timeline just a little bit.

Kat Wright: Just several years.

Laughter

Kat Wright: Just several years and a way smaller budget.

Aly Wright: Yeah, we did something very tiny, and we told our families, or at least my family, I think your family too.

Kat Wright: Yeah.

Aly Wright: That we would do a larger ceremony a few years down the road when we had time, when we had money, and all of that, and that was not a lie.

Kat Wright: I think even though that was a really terrible sort of catalyst for us deciding to get married that year, I love, we love – we've talked about it, we love the way that the wedding turned out.

Aly Wright: Absolutely.

Kat Wright and Aly Wright’s handfasting knot in the colors of the lesbian pride flag from their wedding sits atop the wives’ roller skates on Monday, April 1, 2024, at the Wrights’ home in Columbia.
Bailey Stover
/
KBIA
Kat Wright and Aly Wright’s handfasting knot from their wedding sits atop the wives’ roller skates on Monday, April 1, 2024, at the Wrights’ home in Columbia. The Wrights wore their skates during their wedding ceremony to incorporate their mutual love of skating. The night before their wedding, the couple braided together their handfasting knot, using ribbon in the colors of the lesbian pride flag, and tied the knot during the ceremony itself.

“Roller derby helped me feel for the first time like I was in my own body, which was massive for me. I love Derby to this day just for that,” Aly Wright, who is a transgender woman, said. “I feel bad because my body—for all the progress that I've made and all the ways that I feel really good about it, especially compared to before I came out—sometimes I still feel really bad in my body. I look in the mirror, and it just does not match what my brain expects to see there. Or I get really sad because my body doesn't work the way most other women's bodies work. And not just that but, like, I'm exhausted at having had to think about this and deal with this my entire life. But especially most potently the last 10 years I've had to navigate the world with [this] trauma on my shoulders, these weights that I've been carrying. And so when that gets particularly exhausting, and I just start sobbing, Kat is always there to pick me up.”

Kat Wright: We were up super late the night before braiding our handfasting knot, which was gorgeous –

Aly Wright: – and writing vows

Kat Wright: – writing vows.

Aly Wright: And Kat had had their vows written for months.

Kat Wright: Yeah, definitely not since the April you said you want to might want to get married…

Laughter

Kat Wright: I hadn't been working on them since then – that would be crazy and very gay of me. Oh, no!

Laughter

"I'm here. I'm queer. And I love you very, very much."
Aly Wright

Kat Wright: Yeah, we had about 25 of our closest friends and family under the gazebo at Stephens Lake Park –

Aly Wright: In the middle of the lake,

Kat Wright: Yeah.

Aly Wright: Which was so perfect –

Kat Wright: Yeah.

Aly Wright: – because that was one of the places like that was one of our first dates. We just got lunch from, I think, Main Squeeze, and we went out and sat on the hill at the park and just like, watched the water. And so, but it's, still to this day, one of our favorite places, and we roller skated around the little path together all the time. And so, one of the parts of our wedding –

Kat Wright: – we skated into the gazebo from different sides of the lake and met in the middle and got married on skates.

Laughter

Kat Wright: I'm here. I'm queer, and I'm absolutely thrilled that you are here and queer, as well.

Aly Wright: Thank you. I'm here. I'm queer. And I love you very, very much.

Kat Wright: I love you very very much.

Aly Wright: Stop! I love you.

Kat Wright: We’re going to go way past our time limit if we get into this battle.

Bailey Stover is a multimedia journalist who graduated in May 2024. She is the creator and voice of "Alphabet Soup," which runs weekly on KBIA.
Alex Cox is a Junior in the Missouri School of Journalism. They're a reporter and producer for KBIA.
Rebecca Smith is an award-winning reporter and producer for the KBIA Health & Wealth Desk. Born and raised outside of Rolla, Missouri, she has a passion for diving into often overlooked issues that affect the rural populations of her state – especially stories that broaden people’s perception of “rural” life.
Nick Sheaffer is the photo editor for KBIA's Alphabet Soup. He graduated with a Bachelor's in Journalism from the University of Missouri in May 2024.
Related Content