Since 2014, Wear Your Voice has been a platform for those who needed a space that honored their voices, centered their narratives, and challenged oppressions in ways mainstream publications so often fail to or refuse to do. When a thing was unpopular to say, Wear Your Voice’s writers often said it and pushed back against the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. 

For us, the staff, Wear Your Voice became the place we wanted to see in media because we prioritized LGBTQIA+ Black, Indigenous, and people of color and their work. We nurtured young writers, many of whose first bylines were at Wear Your Voice. We mentored talented essayists and reporters who have built what they loved into work published across various platforms. We started as colleagues and became friends.

Because of the nature of our work, the publication has always struggled to operate as a for-profit entity. Our readers helped sustain us thanks to their support on Patreon, and we received some small investments, but without critical support systems, we operated month to month without growing beyond what we were. While we all dearly cared about the work, we did it without the essentials of a truly sustainable workspace.

Unfortunately, we are saying goodbye to the platform we helped build. Our staff is being laid off this month, and Wear Your Voice will be ceasing its operations. It is our hope that WYV’s site and social media channels will remain as archives. What we put into Wear Your Voice will be put into other projects and creative endeavors; we will continue to prioritize what matters to us and what aligns most with our revolutionary politic.

We thank our readers, contributing writers, and friends for supporting us all these years. We are endlessly proud of the work we did. 

Signed,

Lara Witt, Sherronda J. Brown, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Elli Hu, and Tea S. Troutman