Santa Barbara hosts QTCON: A Comic-Con for Queer & Trans BIPOC fans

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - More than 200 people showed up for Santa Barbara's first QTCON, a Comic-Con for Queer & Trans BIPOC fans. 

For one afternoon, the Paso Nuevo Shopping Center in downtown Santa Barbara transformed into a convention center celebrating fans and their fandoms with a cosplay contest, an artist alley, and a panel on the relationship between fandoms and the queer and trans BIPOC fans that love them.

QTCON organizer, Chief Esparza, says those fans can often relate to these fandoms because the characters in those fandoms are sometimes portrayed as outcasts. 

"If you exist as a queer person of color, you are marginalized, just like those characters in our favorite stories. And if we can see ourselves in these stories, then we can identify with those characters. We can understand our relationships to each other, and we can also envision a better world that we would all want to live in."

Esparza, who has also hosted events in San Francisco and Los Angeles, says it was important that Santa Barbara had an event like this. 

"We felt the community needed some other space to express queerness, to express gender, and to express race and ethnicity."

QTCON was organized by 'Couches and Blueprints,' a virtual LGBTQ+ community center for the 805.