Reading Queer preserves & promotes queer literary culture in South Florida.
We produce literary events that promote diversity and inclusivity within the queer literary community. Our primary projects include the RQ Literary Festival, the first annual queer centric literary festival of its kind in South Florida, the RQ Writing Academy, a series of creative writing workshops that fosters the careers of South Florida based queer writers & artists, the RQ – O Cinema Literary/Film Salon Series, a film series that fosters discussions about queer cinema and its impact on culture, the RQ Archive, an online archive of primarily South Florida based queer voices and the RQ Writers In Residence @ The Betsy Hotel – South Beach, a short term residency for emerging queer writers.
Our Promise is that all Reading Queer events & workshops foster a community and culture of inclusion. Our events & workshops are open to the public regardless of one’s ability to pay, sexual orientation, gender, race and/or any other form of identification. However, all of our events are safe spaces for all queer-identified people and are designed to address the writerly needs of marginalized communities who have traditionally been denied a voice. We count on your donations to keep our events & workshops accessible to the public.
Our Vision is to provide the community with a platform for self exploration and self-expression and will demonstrate how creative writing can be used as a medium to improve, empower, and enrich the creative lives of the community. Changing deeply-rooted misconceptions of queerness inside and outside of our community necessitates a new language. Reading Queer will foster a dialogue between gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans* and intersexed writers and the larger community. Individual voices will come together to connect, create and communicate what it means to be queer and to dispel myths that disempower and dehumanize. Our ongoing mission is to ensure that our community thrives and that our stories continue to be told. With dedication and compassion, Reading Queer aims to promote Miami as a vibrant and diverse center for queer literature.
Our Belief is that literature saves lives. As queer writers and readers we know this from personal experience. By inviting us to expand our sense of self to include the experiences of others, reading also lays the foundation for the building of strong and lasting communities, queer and otherwise, based on mutual care, respect and understanding. Writing, on the other hand, invites us to explore and create new possibilities for being and becoming in the world. The blank page can be a promise of new beginnings in a world eager to foreclose them, an invitation to take charge where we feel most powerless.
Why we chose “Reading Queer”: In Diane Raymond’s essay “Popular Culture and Queer Representation”, she defines “queer” as a universalizing term that embraces more fluid categories. This fluidity better reflects the diversity and complexity of identity. Raymond writes: “Queer is a category in flux. Once a term of homophobic abuse, recently the term has been reappropriated as a marker for some gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender (glbt), and other marginalized sexual identities….The term is itself open-ended, and its advocates argue that its fluidity is to be embraced rather than ‘fixed’….’queer’ is politically radical, rejects binary categories (homosexual/heterosexual), embraces more fluid categories, and tends to be ‘universalizing’ rather than ‘minoritizing’….” Read the full article here Popular Culture and Queer Representation or here.
Our Founding Sponsor: The Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit knightfoundation.org.
Sponsors & Partners
