An audio zine that explores the outdoors from queer perspectives

www.queerouthere.com

The idea for this audio zine took shape in 2015-16, when my my friend Jonathan and I were struggling to find media focussing on queer people's experiences of the outdoors.

We knew that queer folk were spending time outside, but we couldn't find any audio-visual channels where we could hear about these people and experiences in one place. There were feature articles in magazines, there were a few blogs, there were people in the public eye who we knew were queer and outdoorsy. Unlikely Hikers was just starting to take off on Instagram, when Carrot Quinn’s Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart was on its way to becoming a queer outdoors classic, but films like Climbing with Pride and queer podcasts had not really started to proliferate. We spent a year or so looking for the kinds of stories we wanted to hear before deciding that if we really wanted to have a variety of queer perspectives on the outdoors collected together in one place, we might as well do the collecting ourselves.

As we are both sound nerds, we were interested in going beyond straightforward interviews (though they're great, too!) to include field recordings, sound art, music, spoken word, documentaries and more. Our hope was (and is!) that the zine format of Queer Out Here would encourage people to create a variety of pieces, exploring and interpreting the outdoors in different ways.

Listen to all past issues on your favourite podcasting platforms, or directly on our website where high quality audio files are available to downlaod.

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