The 250-Year-Old “Fad”: The Public Universal Friend and Gender Nonconformity Then and Now

1776 was a chaotic year: so hectic that barely anyone noticed that a young woman named Jemima Wilkinson lay dying. The person who awoke the next morning bore a different name and a different purpose: The Public Universal Friend was born.

The History and Stigma of HIV/AIDS: HIV Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day

Graphic by Christopher Ikonomou (Xe/He) In 1981, the first cases of what would later be known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) were reported in America. In hindsight, there had been deaths that would later be attributed to AIDS as early…

Uprooted

A comic about feeling disconnected from queer community, history, and elders.

The Lavender Laws

A deep dive into the history of legal rights for the LGBTQ+ community in the United States

From the Archive: To Live and Get Bashed in America! (October 1988)

Welcome to OutWrite’s new “From the Archive” series! This series is designed to provide an opportunity to interact with our organization’s archives, assess the opinions and relevance of our past content, and bring that content into the present. In doing…

Work! A Queer History of Modeling

Elspeth H. Brown, Professor of History at the University of Toronto, visited UCLA on Jan. 23 for the second event of the 2019-20 QueerCurrent Lecture Series.  The talk was named “Work! A Queer History of Modeling,” after Brown’s most recent…

LGBT History: transcending time, part 1

graphic by Ria Kotak   While the concept of a unified LGBTQ+ community is a fairly recent conception, the components that make the acronym are as timeless as time itself. Narratives around the LGBTQ+ community hint at it being a…