THE QUEER UPSTART: “What queerness is as a word, what it represents, is ideological. The word itself is trying to define something that is undefinable. The word queer has shifted meaning because it's allowed it; it's whatever doesn't fit in.” - Alejandro Ghersi

Illustration by Fernando Monroy

TRANS PIONEER: 'Writer, model, socialite, activist and trans-pioneer April Ashley - still thriving in her 80s - has lived an inspiring life of extraordinary and almost unthinkable bravery.'

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy.

POP ICON: Madonna. Just Madonna.

Illustration by James Davison.

THE ARCHIVIST: Nestle was an iconoclast. Beginning in the 1970s, she wrote erotica, which not only had Women Against Pornography calling for the censorship of her stories, but drew criticism from some factions of the lesbian community. In her writing, she focused on butch-femme relationships, with the intention of showing that “the butch and femme relationship isn't just some negative heterosexual aping.”

Illustration by Elena Durey

THE ADVICE GIVER: 'When I was asked to write about Bear for Queer Bible I assumed that I’d focus on how he’s inspired me as a genderqueer trans-masculine person, as a writer, and as an advice-giver - probably the three key aspects of our lives that we share. But I actually think that the biggest thing Bear gave me was that hope that I would be able to find my own family...'

Illustration by Elena Durey

THE POET: 'I discovered Hart Crane because of an arrow. Specifically, an arrow painted in the bottom-right of Periscope, a Jasper Johns painting that I’d seen at an exhibition, aged nineteen. A perfunctory note explained that the arrow was a tribute to Crane, a modernist poet who’d ended his life by throwing himself from the deck of a steamer ship.'

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

PUNK WRITER: 'For some, discovering the work of American writer Dennis Cooper, is something akin to a queer rite of passage. Like so many Cooper fanboys, I found his novels when I was in my late-teens slash early-twenties, in the midst of my own sexual and queer awakening.'

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

DOWNTOWN PHOTOGRAPHER: 'Subversive, charismatic and vehemently true to himself, Hujar walked an unconventional path, chronicling the precarious lives around him with a brilliant eye, until his premature, AIDS-related death at the age of fifty-three.'

Illustration by Fernando Monroy

'Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star and Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, are essential reading for the queer community, 'These two novels – both products of the very different years (2011 and 1994 respectively) in which they were written – represent the best of what “gay literature” has to offer us.'

Illustration by Fernando Monroy

'Before Amy, before Adele, pre-Paloma, Pop Idol & Autotune, there was a British Soul Singer who stormed the world and her name was Dusty Springfield.'

Illustration by Luke Thornhill

Remembering Divine on the 30th Anniversary of her death, 'I love Divine because she was a drag queen like no other: fabulously fat, fearlessly confrontational, effortlessly funny. Divine died nearly 30 years ago on March 7, 1988, at just 42 years of age, but her legacy lives on in every queen who busts out of the mould and stomps right across the line of good taste.' 

Illustration by Severus Heyn

'And as the world we live in seems increasingly strange and ominous, comfort yourself by remembering that only last year a tiny film about black queer kids was the Best Picture at the Oscars. And that this year, an LGBT film where the greatest threat to the characters lives is heartbreak, could do the exact same thing.'

Illustration by Joshua Osborn

Author of A Single Man and Goodbye To Berlin - which would become the Oscar winning film Caberet, 'Homosexual lust they could laugh at, now, and tolerate in a sophisticated way. Homosexual love they put to death by denial.'

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

'Trans role-models, in art, film and music come few and far between. Sure, they exist, however as a child I had no outlet. I had conflicted feelings. I knew I was different. I felt detached from my body and had no means of articulating that...' 

Illustration by Fernando Monroy 

The Harlem Renaissance Man: 'Black people invented swag! This is an undeniable truth that is not up for debate. With that said, around the world our history along with our impact and influence on culture, commerce and art is usually or completely swept underneath the rug. As an African-American I couldn’t tell you much about my culture if I solely based my knowledge on what I was taught in the American public school system.'

Illustration by Fernando Monroy

The Dandy: "Bunny Roger didn’t so much defy convention as eviscerate it. In his eighty-six years of life he was an aesthete and businessman; a muscular homosexualist and a dandy with a 29-inch waist; a couturier and war hero; avaricious and the greatest giver of parties in the later part of the twentieth century."

Illustration by Fernando Monroy 

"Frank’s films were all so wildly ahead of their time, rooted in their historic moment by the force of his voice singing out in each whip-smart turn of phrase, parsed to perfection. He made sitting in a cinema feel like overhearing a succession of brilliant conversations on a bus."

Illustration by Elena Durey based on the poster by Jamie Reid

Juno Roche on photographer Lola Flash, 'Activism is tough, despite the insidious attempts across social media to denigrate it with accusations of 'snowflakery' smothering free speech, activism - seeking to create a better, kinder world is draining.'

Illustration by Elena Durey.

"The mere fact that someone who lived half a millennium ago was willing to put their reputation — possibly even their life — on the line to outwardly present as a “sodomite” is, to me anyway, inspiring enough."

Illustration by Elena Durey.