All of my friends turned out to be queer
Kaden / OutWrite I plead guilty to perpetually falling in love With the ritual of her hands weaving Watercolor sunsets into the shapes of women; With their voice, always the loudest in…
Between the lines: utilizing music to shape mood in fiction
Music is woven into our everyday lives. It starts our mornings, softens our nights and sustains us through the difficult moments between. A single song can brighten a day. A familiar melody can feel like coming home. It is no surprise, then, that music plays an equally vital role in the stories we tell. Music doesn’t merely sit in the background of our favourite movies and television shows; it shapes how we feel, what we notice, and what we understand about the characters before they even utter a word. Sometimes, music whispers secrets to the audience that even the story itself is too timid to reveal. This rings especially true in queer stories, where music expresses desire and intimacy and evokes emotion that the narrative might otherwise leave unspoken.
What Trump’s gender manifesto says about trans power
As you read this article, the Trump administration is attempting to rewrite history by erasing evidence of transgender Americans’ existence over time. At the start of 2025, the Trump administration released an executive order defining the parameters of sex and gender titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT,” also called Executive Order 14168. This order aims to limit the government’s ability to advance the goals of what Trump terms “gender ideology” (or the belief in the fact that sex and gender are two separate identities) by requiring government agencies to acknowledge sex and not gender, defunding gender affirming healthcare and excluding transgender resources from mental health agencies, prisons, schools and more.
UCLA Spotlight: Women’s Bodies, Women’s Votes, With Gloria Steinem
Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr On October 7, 2012, Gloria Steinem came to UCLA to offer a lecture called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Votes,” and, amidst the crowded hall in Broad (one which she would comment later as disliking—as she does many…
Viral on Twitter, But Are the Polls Immune?: A Response to Obama’s Endorsement of Same-Sex Marriage
On May 9th, 2012, President Obama made history. Or at the very least–he made Twitter history. In the first few hours after his statement of personal support for same-sex marriage, Obama’s official same-sex marriage endorsement tweet, which read “Same-sex couples should be able to get married” was retweeted a whopping 50,000 times! To get some perspective on this number, it is approximately half as many tweets as the number banked by the most retweeted post of all time: a promotional tweet by the esteemed Wendy’s restaurant in June of last year.
Obama and the Great Gay Marriage Flip-Flop
Photo via Pixabay Ahh, the Republican Primary – what a thrill it has been to watch that hot, sticky mess play out. And while Mitt Romney has emerged as the likely nominee, he hasn’t exactly come out clean. Observers across…
Ally Week Update
The second annual Ally Week began this year with a presentation on athlete allyship by Hudson Taylor, a wrestling coach at Columbia University. Though raised in a staunchly religious household, Taylor’s experiences in college shifted his perspectives on the LGBT…
Acting White: What’s Feminism and Queer Theory Got to Do with It?
As someone who often has questions about what it means to be a queer feminist of color surrounded by whiteness, I immediately saw this lecture to be of particular importance. While the very act of having this conversation is more…
Silence = Death: Lessons in AIDS Activism
Credit to ACT UP Over on Bruinwalk on a cold February day, at least three fundraisers are taking place. Most are for Dance Marathon, an event that enlists thousands of students to raise money to fight pediatric AIDS. They’re wearing…
Seeing With A New Spectrum: A Conversation About UCLA’s Vital LGBTQ Space
Co-written by Dylan Chouinard and Kim Lau “There are three kinds of gays. Party gays like to have fun and get drunk. Political gays are activist-y and fight for rights and stuff. Normal gays fall in the middle.” If that…