QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO (QINAM) is an organization committed to create structural power, agency and influence by and for queer people — especially those who are most marginalized (including TQBIPOC, sex workers, newcomers, people experiencing homelessness and others). QINAM writes, initiates and produces (cultural) events, provides education to governmental bodies, and fosters visibility and awareness around the concept of queerness — particularly the decolonization of queer identity. The launch of QUEER IS NOT A MANIFESTO took place at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. QINAM frequently collaborates with queer artists and uses art and performance as tools to make space for new ways of being and as a means of achieving equity.
HI SAILOR - CHECK OUT A SELECTION OF OUR PROJECTS BELOW
Building collective strength, fair labour and financial sustainability for queer professionals
THE QUEER UNION
The Queer Union brings together queer influencers, artists, lecturers, photographers and independent entrepreneurs who seek professional growth within a community of peers. While the queer community has gained visibility across cultural and commercial sectors, structural issues persist: underpayment, tokenisation, racism, homophobia and transphobia remain common in collaborations with institutions and brands. The Queer Union responds by fostering a network grounded in cooperation rather than competition, enabling members to share resources, knowledge and opportunities.
Together we work toward defining our own standards — from fair rates and contracts to safe working conditions — and toward building collective financial stability. By strengthening our professional position, we strengthen our cultural and political impact as well. The Queer Union is organized in collaboration with Encourager.
THE QUEER SUPERDIVERSITY PODCAST SHOW
A podcast about the multiple identities that are present within ourselves
The Queer Superdiversity Podcast Show explores the many — often overlapping — identities we carry within ourselves. How do these different parts of us relate, influence one another, clash or harmonize? Rather than treating identity as a set of isolated labels, the podcast looks at how lived experience, culture, embodiment, desire, neurodiversity, gender and community interact in complex and sometimes unexpected ways.
Through long-form conversations and storytelling, the show examines identity not as something static but as something dynamic — formed through context, history, intimacy and imagination. Each episode invites listeners to think beyond singular narratives of “who we are” and instead approach identity as layered, relational and in motion. The Queer Superdiversity Podcast Show aims to create space for the contradictions, complexities and dirty secrets within ourselves.
Featuring Simon(e) van Saarloos, Asia Hussain, Nora Nord, Simomo Bouj, Asifa Lahore, Ghaith Kween Qoutainy and more esteemed guests.
AVAILABLE ON ALL YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APPS SOON
A publication that refuses to cool down until sex workers get their rights
HOT LABOUR: SEX WORK IN AMSTERDAM
ORDER HERE!
HOT LABOUR — Sex Work in Amsterdam is a zine dedicated entirely to the voices, knowledge and lived experience of sex workers in the city. Co- initiated and designed by Levi Jacobs, the publication brings together personal reflections on mental health, visual work by sex workers, and a practical guide for aspiring sex workers. At its core lies the Sex Workers’ Manifesto for Amsterdam, endorsed by eight sex worker advocacy organizations.
The manifesto calls for a fundamental shift in municipal policy — away from control and restriction, and toward rights, safety and autonomy. Proposals include increasing licensed workspaces and legalising home-based work, reducing dependence on exploitative third parties and strengthening workers’ negotiating power and trust in authorities. HOT LABOR offers twelve concrete strategies for a safer, more just future for sex work in Amsterdam.
credit: xdonnavalentina
A booklet with the perspectives taken from five LHBTQI+ safety conferences (NL only)
CENTERING LHBTQ+ SAFETY
This booklet brings together the reports of five conferences held in late 2024 on
LHBTQI+ safety in Amsterdam, each with its own focus:
• Sexual violence within the queer community
• Islamophobia & queerness
• Strengthening LHBTQI+ safety in Amsterdam South-East
• Nightlife, travel and public space
• Strengthening your safety – Queer peer and bystander workshop
Across all conferences, one message came through clearly: safety is not a given. It requires continuous care, awareness and collective responsibility. Participants shared lived experiences, professional expertise and community-based strategies — exposing urgent structural gaps while also highlighting what does work, from strong reporting systems to allyship and accessible support.
The conferences are produced in collaboration with the alliance Queer 365.
An event bending genre, gender, rhythm and reason.
FUCK YOU SQUARE, I'M A CIRCLE
FUCK YOU SQUARE, I’M A CIRCLE featured artists who refuse to be contained — aesthetically, politically or bodily. Drag king Silly Dick opened the night, using theatrical lip sync and alien-starship fantasy to joyfully dismantle the gender binary. Sharan Bala followed with a talk introducing her installation of 160 printed pages from her medical file, exposing the violence of the medical gaze on intersex bodies. Performance artist Mavi Veloso and percussion ensemble Baque Flamingo then took the space, connecting Afro-Brazilian Maracatu rhythms to queerness, resistance and collective memory — first in conversation, then in music. The evening closed with Lucia Vives, whose musical performance, a poem disguised as a concert, explored “never arriving” and the beauty of endless becoming.
WHORES OUT LOUD
An event on autonomy, labour and collective power in sex work
Whores Out Loud centred the labour, autonomy, and expertise of sex workers and strippers. The evening opened with a panel discussion addressing structural barriers to agency: from restrictive legislation to the lack of financial control within workplaces. Speakers outlined pathways toward safer and self-determined working conditions, and called for a queer politics that stands in solidarity without moralising or rescuing.
Striptopia followed — a technology-driven pop-up strip club in which dancers receive direct digital payments via an app, reshaping customer dynamics and enabling safer, more transparent labour. A powerful ensemble of strippers, sex workers, drag performers and artists transformed the space into a site of pleasure, resistance and collective empowerment.
Organized in collaboration with Queer.Red and Striptopia.
GENTLE THEM CONFERENCE
Centering queer artists and their relation to underpayment, tokenism and commissions.
The Gentle Them Conference was a three-day performative intervention centering queer artists and their entanglement with financial precarity, tokenism, and the frictions of institutional diversity frameworks. Through 10 performances, 20 installations, and 2 panel talks, the program examined how underpayment, symbolic inclusion and short-term commitments continue to reproduce dominant power structures — white, cis, heteronormative and patriarchal.
Framed through the fiction of Gentle Them Agency, an imagined international booking agency foregrounding queer and fluid identities of colour, QINAM created a temporary world in which alternative modes of commissioning, valuing and collaborating could be tested.
Bringing together performers, activists and makers, Gentle Them acted as both critique and proposition: a space to rethink how institutions engage with queer cultural labour, and an invitation to build infrastructures grounded in care, equity and long-term commitment.
QINAM x STEDELIJK MUSEUM
The launch of Queer is not a Manifesto at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Queer is Not a Manifesto was launched as part of the Stedelijk Statement series. The evening introduced the project not as a fixed declaration but as a proposition: if queer is that which fundamentally resists categorisation, then any attempt to define it — aesthetically, socially or politically — is bound to fail. Rather than offering a single position, the launch brought together thinkers, artists and performers whose practices deliberately unsettle dominant taxonomies of gender, sexuality and the body.
By creating such a platform, Queer is Not a Manifesto seeks not only to problematise prevailing and reductive descriptions of identity (male/female, gay/straight), but to invent new, more nuanced and inclusive ways of being and becoming. Queer is not a Manifesto aims to create a space of radical imagination where a multitude of undefined positions can exist alongside one another.
