WUSSY friends and fam, we need your help! We’ve been serving up hot, original, 100% independent, Southern-fried queer content since 2014, and ten years later, we’re more determined than ever to keep the goodies coming. But we need your help to steer this baby into 2024. So we’ve launched a fundraiser to make WUSSY bigger and better than ever. Can you help us meet our goal of raising $20k?

The money we raise with our WUSSY Mag fundraiser will help us expand our print and digital editorial: think more interviews, more original art, more essays penned by great queer writers. Your dollars will help us to pay our brilliant contributors, commission new work from queer artists, and fund the growth of our editorial and design teams. We’re also cooking up a monthly subscribers’ newsletter, where you can get the best of our exclusive WUSSY content, scandalous gossip, and scalding hot tea delivered directly to your mobile device.

Our mission--to connect y’all with the work of the best and brightest queer creatives—has always been a big lift, and that’s truer now more than ever. WUSSY was born and raised in the South, a part of the country that is getting more dangerous for queer people by the day. The HRC has put the entire region under a State of Emergency for unprecedented legislative attacks on the rights of queer and trans Southerners. Here in Georgia, where WUSSY is based, Republican lawmakers have banned gender-affirming care for trans youth, blocked transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams in school, and pushed through a draconian 6-week abortion ban. Drag queen story hours have been canceled at public libraries, and books with queer characters are being yanked from school shelves all over the state. Meanwhile, Southern conservative lawmakers are all looking to Florida to see which dystopian wet dream to pursue next.

Even beyond the regressive politics of the American South, the national landscape for independent queer media is looking pretty grim. Small, community-centered outlets like ours face steep odds when it comes to survival, and over the last few years, we’ve lost too many beloved queer-centric rags, from Bitch to gal-dem and the publishing house Nomadic Press. The last few months have seen extinction-level layoffs across media, with hundreds of journalists losing their jobs at Pitchfork, the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, Business Insider, and TIME in January 2024 alone. As tech bros vacuum up newspapers and magazines to squeeze out every last drop of culture in the name of capital, surviving on the independent fringes gets harder every year.

But we’re queer—determined, resilient, used to beating the odds. Since our managing editor Jon Dean launched WUSSY in Atlanta in 2014, we’ve been fiercely committed to highlighting LGBTQIIA+ creators from all over the world. We’ve built a multimedia platform and events program that champions queer artists and amplifies historically marginalized perspectives. From film screenings to drag brunches, hosting comedy podcasts to profiling queer artists on the up-and-up, the WUSSY media ecosystem has become a site of unapologetic queer brilliance. But more than that, we’ve built a community. At WUSSY, the conversation is by, for, and about queers: Here, we are deciding collectively what defines queer culture in the 21^st century. We don’t need a corporate interlocutor, and we don’t want one.

But we do need you.

The WUSSY community has made us what we are: A vital multimedia organization with its finger on the pulse of contemporary queer arts and culture. But as the old saying goes, fingering is expensive. We need your help keeping this scrappy little passion project going! With the money we raise from this campaign, we can take WUSSY to the next level, and burn bigger and brighter than ever into the future. We promise that each and every dollar you contribute goes towards paying queer creatives and putting the best queer content into the hands of our readers. That means more issues of our gorgeous print magazine, more digital content, more podcasts, more screenings, more parties, more drag shows, and more community outreach. That means more stories about your favorite (or soon-to-be favorite) queer artists, and more vital work from your favorite creatives.

You don’t need to give a lot: We’ll take whatever you can give. Your support means the world to us, and every cent you give us will go into providing you with more of the brilliant content you’ve come to expect from WUSSY. We’re endlessly bowled over by the creative genius in this community, and we hope to share that work with the world for as long the world will have us.

Thanks for being part of WUSSY, and for helping us keep queer media alive long into the future.

Where WUSSY money goes:

WUSSY Vol. 13, the next installment of our print magazine featuring artist profiles, original poetry, photography, illustrations and mixed-media, longform reporting, and other work by dozens of queer creatives from all over the world.
An expanded digital editorial division, featuring more original writing, news coverage, criticism, and art from queer makers.
A WUSSY subscribers newsletter with original content, hot-off-the-press event info, and exclusives with your favorite WUSSY alums.

Support Queer DIY Publishing with our WUSSY Mag Fundraiser!

Help us keep queer media weird, wet and wild through 2024 and beyond…