We’re thrilled to unveil this year’s Out Loud List, a celebration of vibrant, industry-vetted queer voices telling stories that challenge, provoke, and delight. This year’s list is presented in proud partnership with Gersh, whose support helps us amplify the voices of bold storytellers reshaping the landscape of queer representation, and these honorees span an extraordinary range: from surreal sci-fi futures and haunted small towns, to darkly funny brunch tables and blood-soaked family trees. Whether it’s a zombie apocalypse, a closeted priest’s reinvention, or a grieving estate worker, these scripts reflect the complexity and vitality of queer life across genre and form.
As always, the Out Loud List exists to spotlight bold writers whose work centers LGBTQ+ characters not just as sidekicks or tropes, but as whole, messy, hilarious, grieving, resilient humans at the heart of the narrative. This year's list is as unflinching as it is heartfelt, and alongisde Gersh, we're proud to celebrate these stories and the storytellers behind them.
These writers are not ranked, but instead sorted alphabetically by last name. Please click on each to learn more information about them!
This may come as a shock, but the life of a small-town Public Administrator is very boring. CHLOIE, still coping with the trauma of a horrific accident that killed her parents, likes it that way. Her life is quiet, predictable, and safe. She spends her days settling the estates of people who die alone...but when her latest case leads her to fall in love with the wrong person, Chloie is rattled to her core, with her life upended forever.
Reps: Kate Sharp (Bellevue)
Adam Van Dusen (Paradigm)
A Puerto Rican fifteen-year-old girl comes-of-age in pre-gentrified 1980s Williamsburg, Brooklyn as she fights for justice after her closeted brother's stabbing and his girlfriend's mysterious disappearance.
Rep: Mitchell Bendersky (Expectation Management)
When a witty, gay Hollywood hotshot's career is cut short by a zombie contagion in which the only known cure is to consume a blood relative, his only shot at survival is to locate the birth mother he never knew and eat her before his undead transformation is complete.
Rep: Zack Zucker (Bellevue)
After several disappearances and gruesome murders, a history teacher becomes obsessed with finding the supposed killer but soon faces a far more insidious evil that lurks underneath the surface of a divided coastal town.
Open to representation
After their father's sudden passing, two estranged siblings discover a workshop full of rubber women that holds the key to solving the mystery of his apparent "suicide" — and to uncovering the secret life and desires of the man they thought they knew.
Reps: Alex Lerner (Kaplan/Perrone)
Keya Khayatian, Abby Glusker, Emily Miller (UTA)
A middle-aged Catholic priest with a rich fantasy life and a life spent in the closet suddenly leaves the priesthood and moves to Australia to try and figure out how to be gay and happy, and finds hope and Hugh Jackman (sort of) at a Melbourne piano bar.
Open to representation
ANNIE is just your average NYC It Girl — she loves brunch, her apartment is a mess, and she’s convinced all her friends are hanging out without her (they are). Oh, and she happens to be a psychopath.
Reps: Claire Jennings, Alison Mann (Fourth Wall)
Set in modern day Baltimore, CREW is a serialized crime thriller that follows nineteen-year-old KARA BOONE. When her best friend goes missing, and she descends into the dangerous, anarchist world of The Crew, she discovers that once you're initiated there's only one way out...
Reps: Krista Sipp (Heroes & Villains Entertainment)
Jennifer Good (Paradigm)
A young woman's plan to introduce her new girlfriend to her parents is derailed, and her life upended, when her mother unexpectedly comes out after 35 years of marriage.
Reps: Joseph Cavalier (Heroes & Villains Entertainment)
Tim Patricia, Rob Kim (Buchwald)
In a future where the human mind can be transferred into bionic bodies, a hopeless romantic finds escapism by recreating a past relationship inside a virtual world. But when his digital paradise begins to malfunction, he risks losing not only his memories, but his entire grip on reality...
Open to representation