Vice launches multimedia project celebrating queer culture

Global youth media company VICE has launched a multimedia creative hub celebrating a breadth of queer culture.

Dubbed Queers Built This, the hub is a gallery of historical LGBTQ ephemera, downloadable artwork, videos, articles, and events oriented around rethinking the tradition of Pride and envisioning the future of for the community.

The multimedia project looks back on queer people’s long history of DIY innovation and highlights LGBTQ people who are changing the ways we live and think today.

Sarah Burke, Special Projects Editor, VICE :“Changing the world relies, in large part, on the ability to envision a new way of life. This Pride, we’re focusing on the many ways in which queerness inspires us to invent. Queer people—particularly queer people of color—have long been expressing identities without blueprints, finding resources and family where there were none, and building platforms when no one would listen. Queers Built This champions that ability to change what we value in the world.”

The initiative includes an archive gallery focusing on little-known examples of LGBTQ history; a print-at-home zine by Jeffrey Cheung of Unity Skate; downloadable posters and phone backgrounds from queer artists of color such as Michelle Zhu, Broobs!, and Yetunde Olagbaju; an editorial series of twenty-five LGBTQ articles that will run throughout the month; a DIY Pride Parade, for which commissioned artists and readers made shoe-box sized floats to imagine what a Pride parade without corporations would look like today and more.

Throughout the month, a series of digital events will invite VICE’s audience to rethink Pride Month as a physical entity and return to the celebration’s roots in DIY independence, inclusivity, and invention.

The live events will be hosted on QueersBuilt.Vice.com and include:

 June 15 (4-5pm EST): Queer, Black Histories and Futures Through Filmmaking benefiting Marshal P. Johnson Institute How Black, queer artists are using experimental media to look back at LGBTQ history and project into a utopian tomorrow.

June 17 (6-7pm EST): Queer DIY Crash Course benefiting Black and Pink A set of presentations by some of VICE’s favorite groups and organizations: including Black and Pink, Queer Appalachia, and Genderfail Press.

 June 24 (4-5pm EST): How to Take Care of Eachother with Adrienne Maree Brown and Jenna Wortham benefiting the Ali Forney Center A conversation focused on how we can care for queer community and rethink the tradition of Pride for the future.

www.vice.com