After fifty years (or so) of Gay Liberation, several rights seemed enshrined. Marriage was once considered impossible, yet we have lived with marriage equality since 2001 (in the Netherlands). Now thirty-eight countries recognize same-sex marriage as the same as heterosexual marriage. GLTBQ identity has been considered a protected class for over 100 years in some countries. Since the 1970s, homosexuality has not been considered a mental illness in the United States. We have lived through many iterations of “gay rights” where some identities are acknowledged and others are not, where some concerns are central and others are not. These have largely been around gender, race, class, disability, religion and nationality. These fissures around GLBTQ identity continue to impact educational, economic, social, and political opportunities.The umbrella of Pride parades, for instance, remain a vital means to be public and take up space, even as they cater to certain parts of the community. Those audiences vary depending on the location. Where some Prides are more amenable to GLBTQ people with children, others to circuit party queens, still others might center young people, and some may privilege allies. Other events have emerged for experiences and identities that were once pillars of all Prides such as Black Prides for African diasporic folks, the Folsom Street Fair for the kink community and the New York Drag March for trans and gender diverse individuals. These other events are endemic to the exclusionary practices of Prides, yet they each perform an urgent function for the communities they bring together.All that is to say that queer is dynamic. José Esteban Muñoz considered utopia a direction and a motion, rather than a fixed place.1 One does not just announce a thing is queer and it remains in that category. Sexualities change, gender expressions are constantly expanding, and what was once considered taboo becomes mundane. Where phenomena like foot fetishes or heterosexual male butt play used to be a secret, they now thrive on pornography and social media. Sexualities and gender expressions are not static.We live in a rapidly changing world, where anti-GLBTQ policies and sentiment continue to increase. New laws targeting GLBTQ people are rising domestically and internationally. The United Kingdom's Supreme Court has denied the existence of trans women. In the United States, more and more school and health-care systems are being punished if they provide services or acknowledge trans people. Antigay laws have been passed in Uganda, and continue to be introduced in Ghana and Kenya. Some countries, like the United States, are aggressively enforcing border control on GLBTQ people, especially those who are trans.And still we find each other. The GLBTQ community is brilliant in its connectivity, whether on social media or parks. We build websites and technologies to seek out others like us. We have parties to celebrate, even in places where our identities are criminalized. We see QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking as another intervention in building connections for our community.In 2025, we remember Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years, where she describes a prison camp for queer people. When she wrote this in 1983, Reagan had proven immensely powerful, built partially on a platform of homophobia, racism, patriarchy and AIDS stigma—known colloquially as “family values.” She writes, “I think of leaving my lover, imprisoned. But immediately I understand that we must, at all costs, remain with each other. Even onto death. That it is our being together that makes the pain, even our dying, human.”2 This journal is about bringing us all together, and raising the voices of our whole community. In this moment, to be queer is to be together, holding one another closer even as authoritarianism spreads and tightens its grip.As the incoming editors of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking we recognize the moment: where research, education, and human rights are under attack. Precarity and austerity are more than buzz words in academia: they have been a central part of the university since the 2008 (at least) recession. This has meant less research money, less support for interdisciplinary and social justice endeavors (where “social justice” can still be uttered at all), and less tenure-track jobs justified through the “precaritization” of the professoriate. Each year, the university enterprise in the United States, where QED is published, assumes the form of an established business apparatus, looking to increase profit margins through innovations in extractive practices, and cutting into tenure-track faculty and in turn research efforts while lowering the benefits threshold for all workers. Precarity and austerity are discourses that drive current authoritarian control set to dismantle ideas like education, foreign aid, social support net, and public arts funding in order to increase police and military budgets.In the 1980s comic V for Vendetta, Alan Moore entered similar territory. In a near-future United Kingdom where dissidents are brought into camps and experimented on, one woman, Valerie, leaves a letter for the next prisoner. Valerie has been kidnapped along with her lover for being lesbians. The letter describes her situation and closes with, I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don't know who you are. Or whether you're a man or a woman. I may never see you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.—Valerie.3This is the value we hold central to our tenure at QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking: integrity. A queer journal can never be just about career advancement in academia: it has to do work in building community, raising concerns, and making an argument for our rights and well-being, and chronicling our histories and futures—particularly in this moment.QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking has had several iterations. Under our editorship, we are deliberate in maintaining the high level of queer scholarship featured, as well as expanding the notion of queer worldmaking. We will still review, accept, and publish original academic research, as well as book and performance reviews. To these established points of focus, we are adding: Forum—Collection of short articles responding to a specific topic, concern or question. Past Fora included Queer Debility/Disability, Queer Asia, Cisheteronormativity and Concealing Phobias, Responses to The Pulse Nightclub Shooting. To launch our editorship, we are beginning with The First Ninety Days in this issue.Queer Legacies—A specialty forum where academics, artists, and activists reflect, respond, and review the work of a now-deceased queer academic.Queer Worlds—Profiles of organizations doing queer worldbuilding in the United States and globally.Queer Conversations—Transcribed dialogue between two or more queer academics, artists, and activists on a particular subject. In this issue, Angela Lababor and Ruepert Jiel Cao engage Martin Manalansan.We thank Chuck and Tom for trusting us in moving forward, as well as the hundreds of academics and activists who have been part of the QED journey. Here's to the next ten years!
LeMaster et al. (Wed,) studied this question.