On this day in queerstory: Queer Comix

On this October 23, queer communities across cities are leaning into stories. Not just the big legislative shifts or headline protests, but the smaller, intimate moments: the zines, panels, comics, and conversations that carry memory, nuance, and new voices forward.

In Chicago, the Gerber/Hart Library & Archives is hosting a special evening titled “Queer Comix: Off the Page” on October 23. The event invites queer cartoonists, illustrators, and fans into conversation about the power of comics to reflect identity, resilience, humor, and resistance. The archive is pairing that with a display of historic queer comic strips and zines—some dating back to the 1970s and 1980s—inviting attendees to see how visual storytelling has long held space for queer lives in margins.

By making comics a site of queer remembrance, organizers hope to draw attention to how small-press and underground publications preserved queer life when mainstream media often refused to. The evening also includes a live “drawing jam” where attendees are encouraged to sketch, annotate, or remix archive panels into their own reflections of queer identity today.

Meanwhile, at USC in Los Angeles, the LGBTQ+ Student Center is putting on a panel on October 23 titled “Queer, Trans and Two-Spirit Narratives.” The panel will feature students, local Indigenous and Two-Spirit voices, and scholars discussing how identity, memory, and spiritual traditions intersect in queer lives. The event is part of the university’s month-long slate of LGBTQ+ History Month programming.

The moderators have emphasized that the goal isn’t just to show “success stories,” but to surface the tensions, the losses, the spiritual traditions long erased, and the ways that communities now re-weave those threads. They hope to encourage attendees—especially younger queer students—to see themselves in narratives that go beyond assimilation or stereotype.

October 23 may not carry with it a single towering milestone in queer law or protest, but that’s why events like these matter: they remind us that history is composed of many small arcs. The comic event in Chicago, for example, isn’t just nostalgia — it’s an act of cultural reclamation. In a city archive that has accumulated donations and acquisitions for decades, curators note that for every zine or strip saved, hundreds more were lost, copies destroyed or discarded for fear or shame. The evening is a chance to say: we won’t lose this again.

In Los Angeles, the campus panel isn’t just a talk — it’s a place where students can bring in their own stories, challenge assumptions, and push back on erasure. One planned segment invites audience members to write “a lost queer memory” on a card and anonymously pin it to a “memory wall,” to be later digitized into the campus archive.

These events reflect a wider shift in queer activist culture: moving away from spectacle and toward conversation, from banner parades to dialogue circles, from brand visibility to embedded memory. Queer history is not just what’s on the books; it’s the whispers between pages, the subversive panels in a zine, the generational gap in storytelling.

In queer life, not every date is about a march, a court case, or a law passed. Some are about preserving voices before they disappear, giving space to new storytellers, and listening. October 23 reminds us that the texture of our movement is made from art, memory, community, and the quiet labor of archiving and storytelling.