Palomino Festival Displays Country Music’s Progress Toward Diversity

As a queer Indian-American, the country genre has always seemed antithetical to my existence, a mix of hypermasculinity and overwhelming whiteness. Observing country artists like Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan, I perceived country as music for the white man and…

“Diversity”: A Piece Lost to the Pandemic

Art by Christopher Ikonomou (Xe/He) Right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, OutWrite participated in the early stages of a still-unnamed Community Issue, a print compiling pieces from all of UCLA’s newsmagazines. Unfortunately, the project fell through in Spring 2020. As…

RuPaul and The Never-Ending Struggle Of Visibility

Graphic by Christopher Ikonomou (Xe/He) After thirteen seasons, RuPaul has finally let his first cisgender, heterosexual performer on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Her name is Maddy Morphasis, and she is a cishet man that does drag! At first glance, this is…