“Being Queer Is Very Powerful”: Michael Oliver Love On His Vibrant And Defiant Photography Practice

He is also the founder of Pansy Magazine, a men’s fashion magazine challenging the normative understanding of what it means to be a man; the magazine’s output clouds the separation of masculine and feminine energy and creates a space for free expression. “Pansy Magazine was the “Being queer is very powerful because you inherently challenge the norm”culmination of my university degree of media, writing, and gender studies, plus my love of fashion magazines and imagery,” Love explains. “I was seeing imagery floating around the internet and elsewhere of men in pearl earrings and feather boas and I wanted to see more of it.”

The iconic name subverts a term that has historically been used as a slur against queer men, in a similar way that the LGBTQIA+ community has reclaimed the word queer—which was also once an offensive and derogatory noun and still can be, depending on the context and who uses it. The etymology of the latter, for example, has roots in the German word quer, meaning oblique, diagonal, and transverse, or in other words, not straight. At some point this came to mean perverse; and among the synonyms that the Oxford English Dictionary lists for queer today include, strange, odd, dubious, criminal, and “not in a normal condition.”