As OUTsiders in the art world, queer and trans artists embracing and expressing through monstrosity has been a way to denounce the dominant systems and refuse being disciplined into normalcy. This refusal of the “normal” entails a decoding and a re-imagining of popular culture’s proclivity to equate the monstrous and the freakish with sexual deviancy and hysteria through vampires, werewolves, witches, and other such figurations. This continuous casting of queer and trans people as freaks, monsters, abnormal, not fully human, and a series of other characterizations in the dominant cultural sphere and by mainstream politics needs to be continually challenged. 

But we at OUTsider love and admire monsters (Latin, monstrum)--divine messengers, hybrid creatures, embodiments of duality–and artists that push against mainstream’s understanding of and attacks on us through radical, smart, and joyful embodied performances, and visual and sonic artistry. Our desire for OUTsider 2025 is to lift up creative responses to what is deemed filthy, offensive, and less than human in mainstream culture. This enables us to further expand the geographical limits of our island of misfits where we refuse to be in the scene of propriety as we further undermine the dominant strictures’ notion of what is obscene. Through collective and interactive flights of the imagination we build a better present and can imagine a future of boundless freedom.