Queer Summer 2023 Favorites

Our OutWrite staff loves queer media! Here are some of our favorites from this summer:

Why Pride This Year?

Picture this: it’s June 28, 1970, nearly a year after the monumental Stonewall riots, and you’re attending the first Pride Parade in New York City. Except it’s not a parade, and it’s not entirely about Pride: it’s the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. Here, we recognize the familiar names of Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and the lesser known names of the march’s organizers Craig Rodwell, Fred Sargeant, Ellen Broidy, Linda Rhodes, Brenda Howard and many more. Unlike today’s Pride Parade, this march in New York was dedicated to Gay Liberation in the forms of political speeches, demonstrations, and gay visibility.

FIFA Banned Rainbow Armbands at the World Cup: Here’s How Players Showed Pride Instead

In late June, eight armband designs were revealed that 2023 FIFA World Cup players could choose to wear on the pitch, including “Unite For Indigenous Peoples,” in partnership with United Nations Human Rights, and “Unite For Ending Violence Against Women,” in partnership with UN Women. However, despite the tournament’s theme of “Football Unites the World,” FIFA banned the “OneLove” armband or any armbands including Pride Flag imagery. This is ostensibly without reason; unlike Qatar which hosted the 2022 World Cup, the 2023 host countries Australia and New Zealand don’t criminalize LGBTQ+ people. Players receive a yellow card — a warning that could bar future participation — for wearing rainbow armbands, as was the case at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Queer Next Up: Atom Fellows

Atom Fellows (they/them) is a musician/filmmaker and YouTuber whose show, The Anarchy Funhouse, tackles the world’s most intractable issues using music, animation and puppets!

Straight Women Rules: A Guide to Being the Perfect Lesbian®

There’s a lot of wondering and a lot of waiting. I understand what you might be feeling. I know that you’re biting your tongue, and always waiting till you make them uncomfortable.

A Revisit

In July 2021, I decided to revisit my childhood school, Eisenhower Elementary. I decided to go because I had felt so many emotions from the culmination of so many situations, relationships, experiences, and lessons, and I was left with this feeling like I was losing myself. I had recently discovered I was attending UCLA, and much of what was tying me back to the Bay Area was slowly dissipating. The days felt like a blur, like reading the pages in a book and realizing you’ve made it to the end of a chapter and you remember nothing. The sense of liminality and being in a transition plagued me. I was looking for definition from the abstract, something concrete from the abyss.

Do Progressive High Schools Facilitate Queer Joy?

In the fall, I discussed how internalized homophobia produced complicated feelings about my old middle school’s increasingly progressive attitudes towards queer identities and rising numbers of “out” queer students. I unpacked my slight resentment toward those queer students, who seem to have an easier time exploring their queer identities out in the open since they exist in a less oppressive environment. 

Letter From The Editor: On Queer Joy (Spring 2022)

Dear Reader, I would first like to introduce myself. My name is Christopher and I am OutWrite Newsmagazine’s resident trans/(gender)queer Marfanoid and now Editor-in-Chief. I am finishing up my third year as a part of the OutWrite family and UCLA community, having grown from a hopeful, L-G-B-T, physically exhausted pure Mathematics major to the proud queercrip and rejected art student studying Communication and Disability Studies, who led two of the biggest disability rights actions in the University of California’s history. It’s been an interesting few years, and our collective isolation has allowed me plenty of time to reflect.

La Loteria Queered

This project was originally published in our Winter 2022 Volume 1 zine “Queer Rage, Resistance, & Renaissance.“ The artwork for La Loteria was originally introduced by the Spaniards in 1769 to the Indigenous people of what is now Mexico. It…

Achilles Lamenting The Death of Patroclus Queered

This series of photos was originally published in our Winter 2022 Volume 1 zine “Queer Rage, Resistance, & Renaissance.“ This photoshoot queers the iconic painting “Achilles Lamenting The Death of Patroclus” (Gavin Hamilton, 1963). Credits:Photographer: Zoë Collins (She/Her)Editor: Christopher Ikonomou…