Madison Natives Bring Uplifting Queer Stories Through Comics

MADISON, WI— When it comes to LGBTQIA+ characters, especially in historical fiction, longtime friends and Madison West High School alumni Zora Gilbert and Cat Parra were tired of seeing them live and die in tragedy.

Parra and Gilbert are the founders of a small press publisher, Margins Publishing, established in 2015, which serves as a platform for queer artists and allows the two comic-lovers to create stories they and other “queer nerds in their 20s” and teens need.

Over the past six years, dozens of queer artists and collaborators have worked and continue to work with Margins in a freelance type system, they described. Many of these collaborators are in the early stages of their careers and found Gilbert and Parra through accessible routes like social media.

Gilbert said that young LGBTQ+ artists and writers, especially people of color, can face institutional bias in the industry, which makes it difficult to get their foot in the door.

The publisher has created a community of networking queer artists. Not only that, but it has given new artists a platform and a helpful line to add to their resumes. Not to “toot our own horn,” Gilbert said, but they said it is a great opportunity for young artists to show they can work with editors and give them some confidence.

“We try really hard to make space for creators to tell their stories, and we also provide a structure,” Gilbert said. “We're not mainstream publishing by any means but being able to point to an experience where they did work with a lot of collaborators, go through an editorial process, and at the end they had a piece printed in a book that you can hold—is a pretty big deal.”

Parra, a part-time artist based in Madison, and Gilbert, who works in production in New York, felt for a long time that media lacked rounded, queer characters who could lead happy and loved lives. Whenever a character was introduced in a show like “The Tudors,” Parra explained as an example, they would barely make it a full episode without catching some old-time disease.

So, Parra and Gilbert sat down to create some ground rules for the project which would come to be known as “Dates”—an anthology of the dynamic and joyful lives of fictional historical characters. This was their first project which Margins Publishing grew out of.

The three rules: the story must be set before 1965, it must center a queer character and no tragic endings allowed.

The timeline was quick between the initial idea in June 2015, searching for collaborators online, raising money on Kickstarter, and by February 2016, Parra and Gilbert were mailing out the physical books. “Dates” sold out in under a year, which Gilbert said is amazing for micropresses.

The anthology includes stories set in time periods like Napoleonic France or during the Joseon Dynasty in Korea with happy queer characters. Stories like these are what Gilbert described as “recasting expectations” of what people expect.

“We want people to have their grounding in history, of course, but we're much more interested in creating uplifting reading experiences, rather than being like a historical document,” Gilbert said.

“Also, you can't say that this didn't happen,” Parra added.

Creating Margins to publish “Dates” under (and eventually “Dates 2” and “Dates 3”) wasn’t just a business move, but it was also a way to create a brand and put more similar content under it.

“This is all queer content, this is all focused around the sort of stuff that we're interested in. It allows it to be connected to ‘Dates,’ but not part of ‘Dates’ and to be its own thing,” Parra said.

With new projects on the way, Parra and Gilbert are looking to branch out into new content but keep making uplifting, inclusive content.

“Queer people have been happy throughout history,” Gilbert said. “Queer euphoria has also been present throughout history--not just queer despair.”