Who represents Queerness?

Four views on proving existence, safe spaces for visibility, and archiving chosen histories.

Who is allowed to represent Queerness, and what kinds of queer images are granted legitimacy as they circulate? Queerness is highly marketable, endlessly demonized, and constantly dissected, despite how many queer people, including myself, still move through the world calculating disclosure carefully to minimize risks to their safety. My lesbian-podcast-filled Instagram feed informs me that PornHub launched a sapphic site and that Hannah Einbinder was uncomfortable identifying as bisexual despite playing a bisexual television character. Do we have patience for ambiguity? I am constantly shown reels abandoning intersectionality, challenging bisexual legitimacy, pandering to queer dating hierarchies, and delineating who counts as sufficiently queer to speak about certain experiences. As my sister would say, "This is seriously rage-baiting me right now."

“This is some pretty brutal stuff,” I glance at Jack with raised eyebrows; jokes fly between us wordlessly as we edge our way into a quieter part of the gallery. Clearly, the visitor was not experiencing the same goosebumps lifting across my forearms upon viewing Catherine Opie’s work in person for the first time. Queerness, when presented too directly, too visibly, or too materially, reads as confrontation before it registers as intimacy or social history. I spent the most time with Opie’s journalistic work; in one image, a woman holds a sign that reads, “BUTCHES are my hope for the PLANET.” I kept returning to the confidence of a practice that refuses to negotiate visibility for anyone else’s comfort.

Who is allowed to represent Queerness, and what kinds of queer images are granted legitimacy as they circulate? Queerness is highly marketable, endlessly demonized, and constantly dissected, despite how many queer people, including myself, still move through the world calculating disclosure carefully to minimize risks to their safety. My lesbian-podcast-filled Instagram feed informs me that PornHub launched a sapphic site and that Hannah Einbinder was uncomfortable identifying as bisexual despite playing a bisexual television character. Do we have patience for ambiguity? I am constantly shown reels abandoning intersectionality, challenging bisexual legitimacy, pandering to queer dating hierarchies, and delineating who counts as sufficiently queer to speak about certain experiences. As my sister would say, "This is seriously rage-baiting me right now."

For Pride Month, I interviewed four photographers who are challenging what photography can do: Quetzal Maucci, Niamh Rogers, courtney coles, and Asafe Ghalib, who kindly sat down with me for interviews on their approach to representation.

Asafe Ghalib offered one of the sharpest observations about contemporary queer representation: “A lot of representation still moves between two comfortable extremes: suffering that makes people feel compassionate, or beauty that becomes easy to consume.” Stoic suffering, so often reinforced by the aesthetics of medium-format photography, can quickly harden into expectation. Even anti-establishment queer imagery eventually becomes legible branding. As Jonathan Alexander ponders in his new book, “Damage: Notes on a Queer Aesthetic”(2026), is representing queer damage an act of love?

There is an ongoing accusation, often leveraged against me at dinner parties with straight people, that artists over-rely on identity to access opportunities, institutional support, or cultural relevance. This asinine criticism comes from people uncomfortable with marginalized communities speaking about their lives at all. I can detect a faint undercurrent of jealousy in the conversation. A frustration that identity has become culturally legible in ways their own experiences have not. A wish, perhaps, to be more interesting. What all four photographers reminded me, however, is that queer photography has emerged from necessity rather than opportunistic aims. Ghalib is interested in visibility's limits. Who gets represented? How? And according to whose visual rules?

Family photographs are one genre that reflects ideas about which relationships are considered legitimate and which are excluded. Mainstream image culture determines which families appear ‘natural' and deserve permanence and protection. A testament to the long-term implications of this, I return to the work of Quetzal Maucci and read her writing with tears gathering at the corner of each page. Raised by mothers who migrated from Peru and Argentina to San Francisco, she grew up seeing “...an image of family that society built up, that for many years did not include us.”

Maucci's work is stirring for the care with which she questions the relationship between photographer, subject, and archive. Alongside documenting her own family through photographs and writing, she is building the Queer Family Archive, a community-sourced collection of photographs, oral histories, and personal reflections. Rather than positioning herself as the sole author of these histories, she increasingly works as a facilitator, making space for multiple voices, memories, and forms of authorship to exist alongside one another. There is a rare emotional intelligence to the work, one that feels increasingly valuable as a counterweight to visual culture dominated by ego.

Which raises another question: how do queer artists navigate autobiography and self-portraiture without disappearing into self-mythology? In some ways, I am navel-gazing by including Niamh Rogers in this essay. Her project feels uncannily close to my own, a kind of spiritual twin flame. One of the most radical acts of solidarity is resisting the pressure to compete with one another. Her series, “This Body Is Not Made For The Altar,” explores Catholicism and queerness, “challenging the idea that queerness and religion must always exist in opposition to one another.” Raised within a Roman Catholic household, Rogers examines the process of unlearning shame while navigating the emotional residue religion leaves behind.

Mirroring the aim of many young photographers, she explains, “I’m interested in creating work that can become part of visibility for somebody else.” Many queer people first encounter themselves through someone else's queerness. I’ll reference the words of courtney coles, an artist we will examine shortly: “I remember being immediately drawn to my professors and all the queer artists they taught and finding it so comforting when they'd announce that they were gay.” Rogers’ work avoids easy conclusions and, rather than providing answers, it sits with contradiction. Her images bear the visceral marks that ideology leaves on the psyche through internalized homophobia by representing them on the physical body. Rogers is drawn to experiences that remain unspoken because “if that conversation isn't happening, sometimes it's important to be the person who brings it to the table.”

Asafe Ghalib approaches this question from a slightly different angle. While Rogers is interested in visibility as recognition, Ghalib is interested in visibility's limits. Who gets represented? How? And according to whose visual rules? His project "Under the Same Sun" documents LGBTQIA+ communities across Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico while examining movement between hometowns and urban centers. His work is also currently the poster image for our Pride Month open call. Compellingly, Ghalib refuses to reduce queer life to familiar narratives. “I am not interested in queerness as a fixed aesthetic,” Ghalib explains. Rather than treating queer people as symbols, they remain attentive to individuals who are, as he puts it, "sometimes guarded, sometimes theatrical, sometimes tired, sometimes completely in control of how they want to be seen." Photography, he argues, can make people harder to erase, and returning the gaze to nuance feels quite radical in a culture obsessed with legibility.

courtney coles pushes this conversation closer to the idea of the photographic as therapeutic. As a Black-American Leatherdyke, she describes everything she makes as a love letter. The people in her photographs are not anonymous subjects but friends, former lovers, and chosen family. Photography becomes less a tool of representation than what she calls a "sacred energy exchange." When I asked about photography's role today, her answer was refreshingly unsentimental: "Everything about photography is a lie. There is always more to be seen outside of the frame, and we as photographers are the most beautiful liars."

Yet coles remains invested in photography's ability to preserve what might otherwise disappear from view. Reflecting on the AIDS crisis, she notes that an entire generation of queer elders was lost through negligence and homophobia. "In the event something like that were to ever happen again," she writes, "I wish for our full lives to be represented in the books, museums, galleries and schools." Her response is deceptively simple: photograph more. "Queer love, loss, accomplishments, history needs to be memorialized." Long before institutions acknowledged queer archives, queer people were already documenting one another. At protests, in bedrooms, at parties, and at family dinners. Photograph yourself and each other. Participate in our desperate, hopeful act!

Earlier this year, one of my photographs was selected for a project sending images into outer space. While writing my application, I realized how much comfort I found in the idea that being seen somewhere beyond Earth felt safer than being seen fully here. My father, whom I am still closeted to, photographs galaxies and the moon through his telescope. Photography is one of the only languages we reliably share. There is something meaningful about imagining my image existing somewhere within the same sky he spends so much time looking toward. Perhaps that is part of what queer photography has always done. Leaving evidence behind for one another. Creating images that insist we were here too.