Floats drift down blockaded streets. Eyeliner wings are painted on cheeks sharp enough to kill. Iridescent body glitter shimmers beneath the hot sun on the hands of a queen who yells, “you are who you are!” into the microphone, into cacophony. Streams of holographic confetti burst from canons over the crowd. She wears the flag on her back for all the hearts beneath it, a chromatic storm of rainbows tracing her steps as she struts around the moving stage. She is defiant because she has come into herself. 

Our issue’s name, A Spectrum of Identity, is a celebration of the multitudes that queerness holds. The whole idea of queerness is that it is not singular but kaleidoscopic. This issue aims to honour this spectrum in all of its brilliance, and to remind us that identity itself is infinite, radiant, and forever changing. As elaborated in the piece You Deserve by Lucas Lui, queerness is “fluid, different or alike, beyond the known to humankind.”To speak of a spectrum is to speak of light, how a single beam fractures into colour, and how what was invisible suddenly reveals itself in brilliance. 

In the piece Fragments, Ballarini writes: “I am incapable on my own. Reliant on others. Codependency.” Our identities do not arrive perfectly, they are learned by the ones we love, in the hands that stitch our wounds and in the mirrors held up by those who see us. Our spectrum is inevitably reliant on dependency, and our survival is communal. We borrow the strength of those before us who walked the path first, we accept rescue from the ones beside us now, and we must lend our light back to those who will come after. Everyone we will ever meet adds a new hue to our spectrum, and a new shade of possibility. 

Here, we aim to honour whatever is complex and fluid, a testimony of our power to reimagine, to demand, and to celebrate. In this issue, we celebrate the perseverance of queer people despite a world that fetishizes, pities, politicizes, and attempts to erase queer love. While writing this, the three of us learned that pride parades aren’t universal. We hope this issue brings a bit of it to those who would like a queer mirror, past, present, and future. Every queer identity is worth throwing a parade for.

Much love,

Sosena Audain, Assistant Editor-in-Chief

Penelope Julienne Chua Mien, Assistant Editor-in-Chief

Isha Mullapudi, Editor-in-Chief

It’s time to riot in sequins.

This special Pride issue does exactly that. It shrapnels into pink heat and smoke, glittering in the queer army of resistance. It clings even after the world has tried to bleach out the anomalies. The queers are the flares they can’t contain, can’t grasp, can’t extinguish. When you’ve always known how to scarf scraps, you learn to drag the butt-end of a match against a bruised night, to kindle, to burn, to riot.

What you’ll read here places queerness in the scream of an eyeliner. There’s a manifesto pulsing in the throbbing of prose. It sweats and shimmers, words casting disco light across the sex floor of sentences. They blind. They spill their guts. They kiss bloody in verse and dance barefoot through the shards of policing.

The dystopia is breathing down our necks now. It’s closer than ever, but so is the blaze, that lick of flame cupped between fingers, waiting to snarl its mouth. It’s a fire that will flood, will spread, will dazzle, will devour.
Wait for it.

This issue brings you closer to that burn. Holy and homo, furious and free. The queer agenda was always about glitter and survival. The only direction is toward the flame. And everything will burn soon.

Dan Aries Amian
Editor-in-Chief, Queer Gaze Magazine
Instagram: @heatherishz

Check out some pages designed with love by The Queer Gaze Magazine in our issue, “A Spectrum of Identity”