Interview With the Founders of Qu.ee/r Magazine -The Toast

“Forget genre jails. Forget the gay-bashing scene that still manages to be treacly. Forget furtive college kisses. Brilliant queer fiction the way fiction was meant to get writ.

Socrates did the meditative and philosophical. Baldwin did the engaged and enraged. Turing did it by the numbers. We’re doing it all—smart nonfiction, fresh and timeless…

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.”

Daniel Shannon (henceforth DS) is the sauciest late-night academic I’ve ever known (full disclosure: I know him. Consider yourself disclosed), while Alison Osworth and Sarah Hansen (henceforth AO and SH) are both contributing editors at Autostraddle, The Toast’s slightly (but ONLY SLIGHTLY) gayer sister. (We love you, Autostraddle. Your new haircut looks so good on all your hair.) Together, the three of them have created Qu.ee/r, an up-and-coming online literary magazine with an LGBTQ sensibility.

These are their stories.

DS: Hello all!

SH: Hello!

The Toast: AHOY-HOY.

DS: How are we all feeling on this blustery afternoon?

The Toast: It is LOVELY here. No bluster at all

DS: Is it blustery in L.A., Mallory? Does L.A. bluster?

AO: It is certainly blustery in South Carolina

The Toast: OAKLAND, Daniel. I live in OAKLAND.

SH: It’s perfect weather in Colorado. Just saying.

The Toast: This interview is OVER.

DS: California geography in my head is just a big off-ramp with an ankle tattoo.

The Toast: That’s fair enough, I still can’t believe that Boston is NORTH of New York

DS: I only recently learned that New Jersey was across from, not south of, New York.

The Toast: Wait, WHAT? New Jersey is NEXT TO New York?

DS: So we’re clearly a crack team of homo-terrorists here.

The Toast: Ugh.

The Toast: Okay, so I have to know — I was telling Danny about this, as someone who spent ages trying to find the perfect domain name and then gave up and bought something cheap with a ton of hyphens in it — I’m fascinating by the site naming process. How did you guys land on Qu.ee/r?

DS: It just happened that I had a bit too much vin blanc of an evening, and spent a while typing gay stuff into domai.n r. So, like, “ho.mo” was invalid, and “homosexu.al” seemed a bit much, and on and on, but a little Estonian top-level domain fit us just right.

AO: It took maybe three days of us trying to come up with something better?

DS: We actually have a fake registered contact in Estonia now, I just remembered.

The Toast: Ahh! What are some of the names you rejected??

AO: Like, we had this excellent URL. But we were like, can we do any better than this? And the final answer was no, one cannot do better than qu.ee/r.

AO: And qu.ee/r more fit the set of authors we were going for. As in, we wanted the broadest umbrella term possible to fit in the most community.

The Toast: Ahh! What are some of the names you rejected??

DS: https://domai.nr/fags/with/fa.gs

The Toast: STOP.

DS: Taken, taken, taken, taken, all around. But qu.ee/r worked.

The Toast: Yeah, the whole internet has pretty much already been claimed.

DS: But we staked out our homestead regardless. Hardy pioneer-folk of the Interplains.

The Toast: How did the three of you get to know each other? Had you all already been trying to work together on something for a while? Or did you all having the same burning desire to produce a queer lit mag and then discovered you shared a mutual dream?

DS: The two of us bumped into one another at The New School’s Summer Writers Colony in June, when I confessed that my big project was a thing on the Westboro Baptist Church and she made a face.

The Toast: !

AO: (It was a good face, as in, a face of admiration for Daniel and disgust for WBC)

The Toast: (thank you for the clarification)

The Toast: And Ali, you and Sarah (I assume) both kind of knew one another already from Autostraddle?

AO: Indeed we did!

SH: Yep! We’ve been writing together for a year, and we were on a Google hangout with a friend who was playing guitar way too loudly, and Ali said something about starting a queer lit mag and needing a poetry editor.

The Toast: That is the best and gayest thing I have heard in a long time

SH: So I signed myself right up, probably without permission or being asked to do so?

The Toast: Also, I mean, you guys know this, but The Toast has a deep and abiding affection for the ‘Straddle

AO: No, I definitely asked you, Sarah.

AO: We love you too.

AO: Like, a lot.

SH: We love you right back!

SH: Daniel can come too.

The Toast: And then you guys found Danny at the summer colony? (Because you knew you needed a Man?)

AO: Well, it actually more went the other way. Daniel and I were taking a seminar together, and we kept talking about our projects and realizing we had quite a bit in common, hopes and dreams for a literary publication-wise. Then one of our seminars was with Lauren Cerand, who’s a literary publicist in New York.

DS: I think the original idea goes to Ali. We were bullshitting back and forth about how frustrating it is that so many queer-identified artistic spaces can be a little lax in the quality department, and eventually slipped in what we were slinging and fell into this. With some prompting from the director of the program, Luis Jaramillo.

The Toast: Yeah, Danny, I guessed the bit in your manifesto about “soggy pulp tales of coming out in the suburbs” was related to that general sense of disappointment. At least, I assumed that was you. Was I right?

AO: (Yes)

AO: (You were correct)

DS: I am terribly not subtle about it.

The Toast: KNEW IT.

AO: Anyways, Lauren turned to us and said that and dammit if we hadn’t been talking about starting a literary magazine in the hallway before the seminar. So I grabbed Daniel, grabbed Sarah and we birthed qu.ee/r out of our collective brain-gina.

The Toast: I mean, let’s talk about that level of quality, absolutely! Were you thinking more about the general terribleness of mainstream queer narratives? Or more specific terribleness in the literary world?

AO: I think this might be a question to which we all have slightly differing answers.

DS: I mean, I can be a little over-the-top in snarking about it. But my feeling is that the queer artistic voice has this incredible, if fragmented, history, and that it’s always been sort of the basso profondo roar underneath the canon’s melody.

DS: And I was interested in trying to figure out how we could recover that.

The Toast: Baldwin and Diotima, I assume.

DS: Haha, absolutely.

AO: Now I actually don’t think there’s terribleness in queer voices nearly at all. I mean, look at the books and poems and readings we cover on Autostraddle. There’s this crazy wealth of queer work out there.

SH: It’s just not getting as much attention as it should outside of our community.

AO: Exactly.

The Toast: Oh, absolutely. I was just talking about this with our publisher – how he’d never heard of Autostraddle before I brought it to his attention, and he’s a fairly well-read person.

AO: Queer literature is part of how I found my identity as a human. Why should that be limited to the queer community?

AO: It’s not that queer lit taught me how to be gay, though it did do that as well, I suppose. It’s that it taught me how to be.

The Toast: And there’s no gay, I don’t know, n+1 yet (or is there and I missed it??).

SH: Give us time.

DS: Right. There’s a certain intellectual and artistic rigor that I think could be brought to bear.

AO: And don’t get us wrong, there are definitely other LGBT lit magazines out there; I think my main issue with those was access. As in, I couldn’t procure a copy of them. They’re almost all in print, but our publication is digital.

DS: (For now.)

DS: (Well, for always, but we WILL print, dammit!)

AO: Yes! But we will also have accessible, digital materials, even in our dream future where we print.

SH: I think really, we all just wanted to find a space where we could easily access amazing queer literature, so we made one.

SH: Or, well, are making one.

DS: Whereas I think my main issue is that I have the sense that THE queer essay still hasn’t been written. There are queer essays, and essays by queers, but I want to hear the voice as passionate and as loud as I can.

The Toast: Is this something you envision will be free to access?

SH: Yes!

DS: Totally, always.

The Toast: How queer!

SH: Thanks!

AO: We also envision selling digital copies.

AO: That way, those who can afford to do so can support us that way, and those copies will still make budgets happy

The Toast: Yeah, we have that on the site right now – we run ads, but people also have the option of donating money if they want to support a particular project. How did you come up with a budget? What are some of your expenses right now?

DS: I mostly defer to Ali on this, because she’s been on top of that in a way that is terrifying and admirable all at once, but I think we’re still sort of trying to find a trend. We’re so fresh-minted that we’re still adding things up. Right now it’s in part server costs, I guess, since all the development and administration is done in-house; the cost of incorporating; basic hit-the-ground-running fees.

SH: We’ve really lucked out that Daniel is an amazing person who can make things.

AO: The cool thing is we’ve basically put together a dream team. If we want something done, we sort of take care of it ourselves.

The Toast: That’s fantastic! (We very much had to hire for that. Nicole and I have a pretty basic working knowledge of ‘how to make a webbed site,’ which gets you about two hours’ worth of Actual Work accomplished.)

DS: Yeah, and there’s been such an enthusiastic response that we’ve got a lot of people to fall back on when, not if, we need them.

The Toast: Do you guys have any kind of official relationship to Autostraddle? Or is this a completely unrelated side project?

AO: This is entirely unrelated.

AO: But our fellow editors at Autostraddle are extremely excited to see the first issue.

The Toast: What kind of submissions have you been getting so far? Are they “distinctively queer,” as per the manifesto? WHAT IS distinctively queer? Does it have to have one of those hats all the kids wear now, the ones that look like little stuffed animals with tails?

AO: Wait

AO: Back up

The Toast: Okay

AO: Stuffed animals with tails hats?

AO: This is a thing?

The Toast: Oh my god, you know those hats.

SH: Like the wolves?

The Toast: Lemme find a picture!

SH: You haven’t seen the wolf people hats?

DS: Ahahahaha

AO: No, no I have never seen this.

The Toast: Oh, my god, Ali.

SH: Lucky.

The Toast: OH MY GOD. Do you leave your house ever??

AO: Yes, I promise!

The Toast: They’re like

The Toast: HATIMALS

AO: I have never seen this stuffed toy hat that you speak of!

The Toast: http://wizzley.com/winter-animal-hats-for-tweens-teens-and-adults-plush-and-knit/

AO: I leave my house to get wine with Daniel, Thai food with my girlfriend, books, readings, concerts and not once have I run into such a thing.

The Toast: http://wizzley.com/winter-animal-hats-for-tweens-teens-and-adults-plush-and-knit/

The Toast: HATIMALS

The Toast: “These plush Hat-imals are very popular with the tween crowd. Lots of teens and young women are wearing them too, especially if they have a favorite animal.”

The Toast: “Especially if they have a favorite animal.” If Qu.ee/r was a hatimal, what would it be?

SH: OH MAN, I just realised I have one.

AO: WHAT?!

SH: I have a giraffe one!

The Toast: SHUT UP!

SH: Clearly, I wear it all the time.

The Toast: SARAHHHH

SH: I got it for a birthday present!

AO: And this is not a thing you’ve ever worn in front of me?! We see each other twice a year, Hansen and you can’t get it together enough to wear this twice a year?!

SH: I HAD IT AT CAMP.

AO: BRING IT AGAIN.

SH: No way am I taking up precious carry-on space with it. It’s huge. Let me take a picture and send it to you.

AO: Okay, I will settle for that

SH: It was given to me by a camper.

The Toast: (Some of them come with built-in scarves and gloves.)

SH: MINE HAS GLOVES

SH: Sorry, go on.

DS: I think, in answer to your questions, that the “distinctively queer” thing is something we’re really excited to work out with our submitters. They’re the ones doing the bulk of the talking here, after all. We’re of course figuring it out among ourselves as well, but it’s more of a challenge we’d like to see met than anything we have a design for.

The Toast: “YOU TELL US.”

DS: And the stuff we’re getting is largely stellar, and we’re getting deeply and massively pumped about working with our soon-to-be authors and artists.

AO: I think the thing we’re getting at here is that there is almost no such thing as “distinctly queer” – at least, with the crazy diversity of the submissions we’ve been receiving, that’s something we’re quickly discovering.

SH: We have been getting some amazing submissions, for the record.

DS: Well I think that’s the among-ourselves figuring-out part.

AO: And I think one of the things that most frustrated me, at least, is the idea that things by queer writers are their own genre. When they really do run the gamut of things.

The Toast: Like, it’s just “gay/lesbian fiction,” never “literary urban science fiction with a queer sensibility.”

DS: Bingo. And I think the “queer sensibility” part is what we’re hoping to work out and develop and recover with this project.

AO: And we didn’t want to do the first one.

The Toast: Have they been more academic? More personal? The parts of your site I’ve seen have leaned toward the academic side of things.

DS: That’s just my pedantry to blame, on the site. We’re developing a great range.

The Toast: And I think there’s – as you’ve pointed out – an odd desire on the part of the public to see very standard gay/lesbian/bi/trans narratives.

AO: Which, by the way, is not the overwhelming majority sort of narrative we’re getting

The Toast: “I realized X when I was 7, it was really painful, I had to struggle, I achieved some sort of full consciousness and moved to a big city, now I am solidly this new thing.”

DS: OKAY I’M GOING OFF-MESSAGE: The public is deeply homophobic, and wants queers to look like queers. Sometimes we look like artists.

AO: That’s not entirely off-message.

AO: But I also feel that with most it’s not intentional. People like narratives.

SH: I’d say 75% of the poetry submissions I’ve been reviewing aren’t even about BEING queer, just experiencing life through a queer lens, which doesn’t always have to take priority.

The Toast: Who are some of your dream writers/artists to get to pitch you?

AO: We’re just hoping we’re going to publish great work, done by great queer writers that break out of standard narratives.

SH: How much time do you have?

DS: Oh god oh god oh god. Do they have to be living?

The Toast: YES. This is a REAL dream team.

AO: Yes, Daniel, they have to be living.

AO: Otherwise how would they pitch to us?

SH: From the grave, Ali. Duh.

AO: FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

DS: Okay. I want Tony Kushner and Leo Bersani.

AO: Hmmm. Hm hm hm. You guys, this is a really hard question. I think I would want Mark Doty for poetry.

AO: I’m a huge Ali Libegott fan, for fiction. And not just because we share a first name, but because she writes these deeply flawed, idiosyncratic characters that are just so real.

The Toast: The IHOP Papers was so fantastic.

DS: I’d like to work with Judy Butler, but not for the reasons you think.

AO: Unf, have you read Cha Ching yet?

The Toast: NO. Have you??

AO: Do it.

The Toast: Will do.

AO: But, like, have a lot of tea and chocolate on hand because the gambling scenes are so real.

AO: That book made me cry.

AO: (also most things make me cry)

AO: Sarah Hansen is writing the great american essay on her poetry heroes.

The Toast: How’s that going, Sarah?

SH: No, I’m completely blank. I’ve written down like four writers and then stared at the screen, confused.

SH: I keep writing down EJ Levy, but I feel like that’s try-hard because I’m taking a workshop with her.

The Toast: Have you tried blowing glitter on the screen?

AO: Of course I would die if Michelle Tea ever submitted anything.

AO: But have we told you, we wouldn’t know if she did?

AO: All our submissions are blind.

The Toast: I saw that!

SH: Blind submissions cause me a lot of stress.

The Toast: Do you contact the ones you decide to publish, then, and find out their real names?

SH: Yep!

The Toast: It seems like a lot of extra work.

DS: Yep!

AO: Oh, our computer knows their real names. We just don’t, not until we’ve made a decision.

SH: Daniel made something magic happen with that part of the submission system.

AO: Daniel probably has a more nuanced way of describing it, but basically our computer is a killer keeper of secrets.

DS: Well, it’s a scary thing, to write; scarier to write qua queer. I think it’s important that our authors feel safe giving us their work.

The Toast: Will you publish anonymous work?

DS: It hasn’t come up yet, and I suspect our collective hope is that it doesn’t.

AO: I would be okay with publishing work under a pen name, but not work with no name. But as Daniel said, no one has really expressed a concern yet

DS: And we’re very contactable if anyone wanted to, via the Masthead page, so…?

The Toast: All right, guys, I am going to wrap this up because I am very against formal interviews that go over an hour.

AO: Oh, there’s one question that hasn’t been answered. We’re aiming for first issue, middle of November.

The Toast: The queerest month.

AO: We recognize this is ambitious, but we’re ambitious homos.

The Toast: At some point, you just have to pick an arbitrary date and then work like mad to make the deadline.

DS: Absolutely.

SH: We’re more stubborn than ambitious at this point. We’ve said it will work, and now we’re going to make damn sure it works.

AO: And the submissions we’re getting?

AO: We’ll be ready.

DS: Though we could use s’more nonfiction!

AO: Every artist and writer that has submitted has brought their biggest, baddest, queerest a-game and we can’t wait to showcase them.