About ConQueer
Contemporary Queer is the evolution of an earlier project. In the summer of 2011, I started a blog called Bromo Say What?! with the goal of curbing youth lgbtq suicide through entertainment. I wrote fun pieces that were intended to not only make readers laugh, but subtly give them the lifestyle tools necessary to forge community amongst their friends. If I do say so myself (and I do), it was pretty solid and had positive life-affirming messages.
I wound up taking it and to a class of mine as a class project and worked with a partner to see how it would be if it were a nonprofit organization. Conclusion: It was awesome! But I wound up taking a hiatus from the blog after the assignment ended so that I could focus on the remainder of my college career.
Acceptance, encouragement, and opportunity on our own terms
A year later, I decided to revamp the blog, but the spark for that particular venture just wasn’t there, and neither were the resources I would need to expand the way I planned. So I started at the drawing board again. Bringing in a slew of ideas from BSW?! and creativity from the stars, I tried figuring out how I could provide a necessary service for queer youth communities.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people that do best when I’m doing my own thing. While I’m not anti-social and I’ll probably never have the mark “doesn’t play well with others” cryptically scrawled in a file about me, I like to find problems and solve them. So what problems did young queers have that weren’t already being tackled that I could make a clean start with?
Acceptance, encouragement, and opportunity on our own terms! If I learned anything from the research I conducted in my senior year of higher education, it’s that engaging others with whom you identify and vice-versa is much more powerful and self-affirming than having someone you don’t really click with try to be besties with you. So I am basically going about and soliciting interviews from cool contemporary queers you might enjoy. Some who might inspire you to do your own thing and be awesome at it.
About Sage Nenyue
Sage Nenyue is a liberal arts graduate student with a BA in communication studies from The College of Wooster, his focus being in media and cultural aspects of communication. His expertise in contemporary queer matters comes from years of activism, forums, panels, lectures, direct diversity-engagement, and publication.
He's a writer, artist, and a problem solver based in Pernambuco, Brazil. He loves culture, reading, words, lists, and the Oxford comma. He also likes to talk about himself in third person, oftentimes coupled with his usage of the Royal 'We'.