It’s Time To Go Back To The Queer Future!

You wake up to the sound of Lady Gaga playing, your neck cramped from sleeping on the sofa. Your brain feels super foggy, but you’re pretty certain this is not your house. It looks like you’re in a tiny apartment, the kind of cramped space you haven’t seen since you last crashed with a friend in NYC.

Two women with slightly dubious noughties alternative lifestyle haircuts are hunched over some vintage-looking Macbooks, deep in concentration. You peer at what they’re working on, which seems to be some kind of blog with a mild Geocities vibe. How quaint! You do a double-take when you clock that it’s the Autostraddle front-page, but from way back when it first launched!

When Poker Face comes on for the third time in a row, the whole room starts wavering before your eyes and you realise that something is seriously wrong. You’ve somehow been thrust back to the year 2009, and something is playing havoc with the space-time continuum. The laptops suddenly power off, to panicked yelps. You look down at your arm and see your stick ’n poke tattoo has vanished. It’s like something is removing everything queer from existence! Before you know it, the room collapses in on itself, and you have been sucked into a swirling time vortex. Oh boi!

Will you jump through 100 years of queer history, across 10 posts during the 13 Days of A+, solving puzzles to help out LGBTQ icons to ensure the queer timeline remains stable and Autostraddle comes into existence?!

Your journey begins on the next page…

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Sally

Sally lives in the UK. Her work has been featured in a Korean magazine about queer people and their pets, and a book about haunted prisons. She never intended for any of this to happen.

Sally has written 81 articles for us.

31 Comments

  4. AS team, this is so awesome!

    But also, I’m having flashbacks to the logic games section of my LSAT exam…

    • When I was looking up different sorts of puzzles I discovered about the LSATs having a load of logic puzzles and was amused/horrified by this!

      I’m thinking anyone that completes this series of puzzles should get a QSAT!

      • I’m GOOD at logic games like this, and genuinely enjoy them, so that section caused less pain for me than for a lot of other people I know. But even still, 5 games like this in 35 minutes?!? It was 12 years about and I still shudder at the thought.

  7. This is amazing, thank you! I got it on the second try but I still think my first answered works too? I must be missing some gossip, good thing I’m not hosting historic homosexuals for the holidays!

  8. I feel immensely fulfilled at this chance to live out my childhood dream of solving a logic puzzle to advance in a challenge just like Hermione!!!

    It’s actually even better than that because instead of solving a puzzle written by a TERF so the storyline of some dumb boy can get advanced, I get to solve a puzzle written by Sally to save the future of all queerkind!!! Words simply fail me!!

  12. EXCUSE ME is this a perfect holiday gift designed JUST FOR ME (and a bunch of other excited nerdy queers)!?!?!?!?! Sally you are rivaling Shelli’s perfect strap week for queer pulitzer candidates this year.

  13. Okay wow I finally got it when I realized…

    SPOILER

    Natalie considers everyone she slept with her exes because she’s a Scorpio.

  17. Ooh! This solidified for me that while I have the skills, I do not have the desire to put together a seating chart for my wedding. Bitches can stand if they can’t figure it out for themselves.

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