Proud of This Ship

by Julia Rios

Happy Pride!

We’re delighted to bring you a whole issue celebrating queer creators. Everyone on the Mermaids Monthly staff for 2021 is queer, so celebrating queer work, examining queer struggles, and creating space for queer stories that end happily  are all things that matter a lot to us. We’re also a staff of people with complex identities. We are neurodiverse, mixed race, and we have various issues with chronic pain and illness. All of these things exist simultaneously with our queerness. We wanted to present a sampling of work by creators, who, like us, come from a lot of different backgrounds. In this issue, you’ll find trans and non-binary creators alongside cis ones, and works that explore experiences from lots of different parts of the LGBTQ+ spectrum. The issue includes work by disabled, neurodiverse, BIPOC, and non-US creators because queerness does not depend on geography, or existing in a vacuum. There are all kinds of ways to be queer, and if you are uncertain that your particular identity is valid, we want you to know that all kinds of swimmers are welcome in our waters. 

We’re also releasing this issue to everyone at the same time rather than our usual practice of sending it to our subscribers first. We chose to do this so that everyone would have the chance to read the issue during Pride month. However! We did send a special early bonus to our subscribers. It’s a story by Jordan Kurella, and it goes really well as a companion piece with their essay. If you are reading this in June of 2021 and are not already a subscriber, you can get that story right away by signing up for our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/mermaidsmonthly — and, of course, if you don’t have the cash to sign up now, you can wait and read that story in July! 

Come, let’s dive in and find some treasure!

–Julia Rios

© Copyright Julia Rios

Julia Rios (they/them) is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Lightspeed, and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Their editing work has won multiple awards including the Hugo Award. Julia is a co-host of This is Why We’re Like This, a podcast about the movies we watch in childhood that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They’ve narrated stories for Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. They’re @omgjulia on Twitter.

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