pride 2022

Donna Battaglia knew she was born in the wrong body from a very young age, but it wasn’t until she got older that she learned the words to explain what she knew was true.“The anxiety of having to take a shower — having to know that I had…

Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month.I am from a very conservative, rural part of California in the San Joaquin Valley, and the town I grew up in was…

“We think of men wearing makeup and embracing femininity as a modern concept, but it’s been happening for hundreds of thousands of years,” says makeup artist Darian Darling. Throughout her career, Darling has channeled her encyclopedic…

I grew up in Houston. My family was Catholic, and I went to church, youth groups, Sunday school—that kind of stuff. I went to quite a conservative all-boys Catholic school, very academic and kind of old world, with priests teaching. But…

I formally came out in my freshman year of high school, but it has been such an evolution over time. When you think about what queerness means as an idea beyond gayness, which is about sexual attraction—there’s a lot of other sociocultural…

Growing Up, Coming Out is a series of personal reflections from queer American designers, released every day this month.Some of my earliest memories from elementary school are just always carrying a notebook with me and sketching—I would…

In first grade I had a crush on one of my classmates and just said to his mom, “Oh—I think your son is really cute.” I don’t think she was expecting that. I was fully naive of what I may have been presenting or revealing to someone. This…

I was born in Jamaica, and grew up there until I was nine, but even when I came to America, I was still so immersed in my culture—we still ate the food and talked in patois. As a kid, I was always curious, but I never had the proper…

Going to Harvey Milk High School in New York was the first time that I felt a sense of community—where there were people who were like me, people who understood what I was going through. It was created as a safe haven not just for LGBTQ…

I identify as pansexual. I grew up very straight, but around the age of 40, my attraction to people changed: I stopped being attracted to someone through their gender, and became attracted to people through who they are and their energy. I…