Students Looking for Story Submissions From LGBTQ+ Youth
For our SIP Impact Project, Simon Listiak ‘23 and I are working on an online comic collective featuring stories of and by LGBTQ+ teens in the LA area. LGBTQ+ are still underrepresented in the majority of the mainstream media. Though we, as two teenagers, probably cannot affect the amount of LGBTQ+ characters and creators in blockbuster movies or major TV shows, we can still make changes on a smaller scale. Did you know that the first openly gay superhero was Northstar, an X-Man and member of Alpha Flight, and, although his sexuality was hinted at beforehand, he didn’t come out until 1992? Probably not, because it’s unfortunate, but true, that LGBTQ+ characters in comics have been… well, lacking. (On a related note, there are only four asexual characters in Marvel comics. Only two of them have any real presence, Yelena Belova and Nadia Van Dyne. Indeed, there are merely five canonically pansexual characters, and four of them are different versions of one character, Deadpool.)
The public sentiment against mainstream LGBTQ+ comic book characters is made evident when an LGBTQ+ character is introduced or comes out. For example, when a current iteration of Superman, Jon Kent, came out as bi, there was homophobic backlash from right-wing comic fans. We hope to provide at least some respite from the onslaught of heteronormativity by giving easy access to comics by and starring people of all identities and orientations. In service of this goal, we’re hoping to have the website fully up and functioning by the end of the school year, but we need a sizable backlog of submissions to do so. We would like submissions of stories both written and already drawn into a comic format, so if you are willing to volunteer to draw a short 2-4 page comic, please do so. The more, the merrier.
The following are the guidelines for those formats, which also appear on the submission form:
Here are examples of a comic-form script and its drawn comic counterpart (each one reclaims the term “Queer”). The script below began as a paragraph and that was later supplemented with action and dialogue. In this specific case, Listiak knows the people discussed, but if this is not the case, you may want to include a physical description, if their appearance is significant to the comic:
Please submit your work through the following form and email me if you have any questions: https://forms.gle/eLuYzFL4iqY3m9g87
Here’s the full version of our first comic below:
