Q&A: For UCLA’s queer magazine, OutWrite, a bright future from a complicated past

May 21, 2023

UCLA

UCLA's OutWrite Newsmagazine, originally called TenPercent, was established in 1979.

Christopher Ikonomou is atoning for some of the ghosts in the OutWrite Newsmagazine archives. Ikonomou, a fourth-year student and the magazine's editor-in-chief since 2022, has an office in the student media wing of Kerckhoff Hall. In the corner is a short filing cabinet that holds decades’ worth of back issues.

Some of them date back to the magazine's inception in 1979 as the nation's first queer publication on a college campus, and Ikonomou, who joined the magazine staff as an illustrator four years ago, knows them from front to back.

"We are far from hunky gay daddies taking out ads in our paper and dozens of ‘Homo Happenings’ gracing our pages like they did in the 1980s and ’90s," Ikonomou wrote in a recent letter from the editor. "We are also far from being a publication that excluded transness from its collective identity until the mid-2000s."

Under Ikonomou, a trans man, OutWrite has had a strong year. With its editorial content bouncing back after the pandemic, Ikonomou says the publication is now publishing the most of any UCLA student magazine, with around three online articles a week in addition to quarterly print editions. It has also launched a weekly podcast.

Newsroom spoke with Ikonomou, who will graduate this month with degrees in communication and disability studies, about how the magazine has evolved over its 44 years and its recent resurgence.

What are the most important things about OutWrite's origins?

It was originally just for a gay and lesbian audience. And then it became gay, lesbian and bisexual — I think in the ’90s. They didn't explicitly include trans people until the 2000s.

Although it is very historic, it wasn't always serving the entire community. It's funny to think what the original editor-in-chief would say about me, a trans person, the head of the magazine that they created when they initially didn't include trans people! It's interesting to see a radical magazine evolve into a more radical magazine that includes more types of people and intersections.

OutWrite was originally called TenPercent. What did that name signify and why did it change?

TenPercent was chosen from Alfred Kinsey's 1948 study, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," which stated that 10% of men identified as homosexual. In 2005, the newsmagazine's staff petitioned to change the name to OutWrite to decenter the white, cis, gay male identity and use a name which better represents the queer community's vast spectrum of identities.

When did you join OutWrite Newsmagazine and how has your role evolved?

I joined in fall of 2019, my freshman year. I was an itty bitty 18-year-old! I joined as an illustrator, because I wanted to find a bit of community.

As editor-in-chief, I haven't been able to do as many illustrations. The last one I did was a frog wearing a mushroom hat that said "This is what nonbinary looks like," because it was for an article about putting nonbinary people into a third binary box instead of it being an expansive identity. But I’ve also been the layout director of all of the magazines since fall of 2021, so I’m in charge of the visual look of all of the print magazines.

How did you get the idea to launch the new podcast, Speak Out, which has been airing since November?

OutWrite had a radio show or podcast years ago. We haven't been able to track much of it down, but we thought that it would be cool to start it up again. We have up to six people on mic, and it's like having a genuine conversation with your queer friends for an hour every week. We did a tiered list of pride flags for our last episode, which was essentially us looking at flags and deciding whether we like how they look or not, which is like, so stupid — but it was really fun!

My co-host, Judah C, is super literate in queer history and discourse, so they always bring this amazing perspective to whatever we’re talking about — even if it is something silly, like pride flags. It's a mix of humor and getting OutWrite's general opinions on queer topics out there from the voices of queer people with different opinions.

If students are interested in joining the staff, what should they do?

We open applications a few weeks before the start of fall and winter quarters and close on Monday of week two. Keep an eye on our Instagram! This is a very welcoming community that's getting more intersectional as more nonconventional voices join the team.

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A February episode of Speak Out, the newsmagazine's weekly podcast, discussed the romantic orientation "aromantic."