Vanessa’s Team Pick:

A thing to know about the team here at Autostraddle dot com is that we are quite fond of words. We like to write them, to read them, to eat them for breakfast or sometimes as a side with our coffee or our whiskey. We believe that words can bring about the revolution, and we’re really into queer humans telling our own stories so that no one messes it up and gets it wrong when they try to tell our stories for us. So imagine our excitement when we learned about qu.ee/r Magazine, a brand new literary and cultural journal “committed to encouraging LGBTQ contributions to the artistic canon through the publication of innovative and beautiful literary fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, and visual art.”

The publication, headed by Autostraddle’s very own editors Ali Osworth and Sarah Hansen along with essayist and scholar Daniel Shannon, promises to be “the cream of the crop from the soup of the alphabet,” which is a very clever tagline, don’t you think? qu.ee/r Magazine is invested in publishing LGBTQ authors and artists, but is not interested in limiting the work it accepts to common or tired tropes about our identities. “It’s really important to us that we showcase queer creators, but that the literary aspect is really the driving force,” says Ali, the magazine’s fiction editor. “We want anyone to be able to visit our site and find something, somewhere, that speaks to their experience as a human, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation. Much of the time, queer authors are relegated to telling stories about identity or queerness, but there’s so much more we want to write about!”

this queer kitty is writing the first draft of her qu.ee/r mag fiction submission — wish her luck!
via shutterstock

The publication literally just launched, so if you want to be involved from the very beginning now is the perfect time to submit your work. Details about submitting can be found here, and it’s worth mentioning that you can submit work that specifically speaks to the theme of the current issue (the first issue is titled “The Call to Adventure”) or work that does not. And again, don’t worry if the work is “queer enough” or anything like that. The submission guidelines on the magazine’s website quietly joke, “The safe word is ‘literary,'” and the page reiterates Ali’s sentiments: “If you’re an LGBTQ writer or art-maker of any stripe at all, we want to publish you! We’re interested in truly solid work that deals with just about anything, even if the thing isn’t explicitly queer. You wrote it, so that’s queer enough for us.”

For now the magazine is a strictly online publication, though Ali says they do have hopes and dreams in the future to make a tangible print thing that you can hold. In the meantime you know that you’re going to be able to hold all this literature very close to your heart, and frankly I cannot wait to see another queer-owned-and-run publication burst wide open with our words and our art and our stories, told the way we intend to tell them. So what are you waiting for? This magazine won’t create itself, so get outta here and submit, submit, submit!

this queer kitty is totally in awe of qu.ee/r magazine but she has to get her shit together and make some art because she’s really excited about submitting to such an excellent project
via shutterstock

Visit qu.ee/r Magazine’s website and read more about their first issue’s theme, “The Call to Adventure.”

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