Issue 18
Issue 18
In Another World
We’re presenting you with the ways that bright, thoughtful, ferocious people are creating their own space. Worlds within and outside of this slippery one, full of answers and questions and buoyant hope tunnels.
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Kamala Puligandla Curator, Editor
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Carmen Phillips
Editor
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Rachel Kincaid
Editor
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lnj
Curator
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Sarah Sarwar
Art Director
Letter From The Editor: In Another World
You can’t win in a world not meant for you, so I’m offering up the In Another World Issue as my attempt at creating some other option. We’re presenting you with the ways that bright, thoughtful, ferocious people are creating their own space. Worlds within and outside of this slippery one, full of answers and questions and buoyant hope tunnels.
I’m Not a Fabulous Queer
Being invisible is in some ways a privilege. QTPOC who are visible are subject to scrutiny at best and violence at worst. I don’t want to talk about visibility. I’m still ashamed of the lonely, aching part of me that longs for recognition.
Always In The Middle: On Being Biracial & Bisexual
Perhaps my identity oscillates at times but in a world that attempts to force me to choose one side of a binary, I remain firmly in the middle.
Bonus Time: Living To Be Queer Elders
In QTPOC community, the future can feel precarious. If queerness is so often associated with action and survival, how do we learn to slow down and rest so we can live long enough to grow into the queer elders we always dreamed of having?
The Utopian, Queer Promise of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend”
“Call Your Girlfriend” is not just a song that holds up as a classic sad bop — but as a work of art that asks us to radically reimagine how we might uncouple ourselves from each other in gentler, more entangled ways.
How to Make the MTA $Free.99
Even if it’s not overnight, New York does have the money and economy to bankroll a $Free.99 MTA. If New York were a country, it’d have the 11th biggest economy worldwide, between Canada and South Korea. If much smaller cities like Tallinn, Estonia, Kansas City, USA, Dunkirk, France and Luxembourg have rolled out free public transit using taxes and subsidies, then NYC can too.
What Would the Decriminalization of Sex Work Look Like?
As Vermont became the second state to introduce a bill to decriminalize sex work, the real possibility of decrim future is on our horizon. But how would decrim take shape in the United States? Would the police still arrest sex workers? Will sex workers get labor rights? And what about human trafficking?
Seven Sensual Drag and Burlesque Acts Bringing Black Joy to D.C.
Spaces that center and uplift Black performers create a magic you can feel. Meet seven of Washington D.C.’s drag and burlesque performers bringing palpable Black queer joy to the stage.
The Future We Lost in the Fire
Book archives and research on queer identity from the Institute for Sexual Science were destroyed by Nazi book burnings. Our history and culture got lost. What else had I missed about the queer past of my city?
A Wild Dare
For a long time, my wildest dream was my parents’ acceptance, it seemed so far off. Those years of silent dinners, no questions, no answers. I didn’t dare dream of anything else.
5 QPOC Visionary Fiction Projects to Look Out for in the Not-So-Distant Future
Our ability to conceive of ourselves surviving and thriving into the future is a crucial part of manifesting it as a lived reality.
Making Lovers Of Friends: My Bisexual Account Of Women Who Don’t Belong to Me
When it comes to my queer desire, my favorite feeling is a juicy lack — I don’t have the person or thing I want and that tastes like salted caramel perpetually not in my mouth. The distance is not only enjoyable, it’s my edge, but sometimes it feels like there’s something missing.
Roundtable: The Undocumented Activists Organizing a Strike and Building a New World
In a country that hates immigrants, every day immigrants are on the front line of imagining and enacting another world: One where they can safely live with basic dignity, respect, and protection.
Fat Liberation Is the Future
It’s time we stopped telling people to “love themselves” and started demanding fat liberation at every level, in every way. Here’s how we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of diet culture, and why that matters for the betterment of our communities and our future.
A Better World: Transformative Justice and the Apocalypse
As COVID-19 brings the world as we know it to and end, queer, trans and marginalized communities need to transformative justice more than ever. But what does it mean to believe in a world without punishment in the apocalypse?
Enduring “Straight Time” to Build Our Own Radical Queer Utopia
The world tells us that we should not want anything beyond what is here and now, right in front of us, but what’s in front of us is violent and harmful. What’s in front of us is killing us. Wanting for more is such a queer project.
For Queers, by Queers, in Strait-Laced Boston
There’s a staunch Puritanical and traditionalist bent that persists in New England, now resulting less in atrocities like the perennially invoked Salem Witch Trials and more in people being doggedly polite: here, that means ignoring each other in public, not making small talk when you can be direct, and extreme propriety around personal questions to the extent of depersonalization. It can leave a queer kid uninspired, and in communities where, for better or worse, coding is still a vital method of communication, it can make the world feel small.
