ABOUT

Throughout my research into queer history, I felt especially drawn to each and every sneer, insult, and jibe that was thrown at the LGBTQ+ community. These remarks were casually thrown around on the street, used in official reporting, and range from silly sentiments like, you’ll know a queer by their inability to whistle, to the more damaging deeming of queer people as biological dead ends. As I read and took note of these different forms of commentary, I started thinking about the relationship queer communities have with reclaiming and reinventing language. I felt especially drawn to the word invert, a sort of earlier version of the word queer. I started thinking about ways to reclaim this history, to honor it in all its truth and messiness and I thought: what better way to honor that than to name a whole project after it and to let that project act as a vessel of queer life. Hence, INVERT was born. INVERT is a queer archive project that takes the form of a newspaper. It’s a project that recognizes that if queer existence is not archived, it will be lost. That if queer joy is not highlighted, it will be overlooked. It asks questions like: how do we collect, preserve, and share queer experience? How do we navigate queer possibility and foster a sense of belonging? How do we honor the past while celebrating the present and making room for the future?