Pride Month Cosplay: Steven Universe Retrospective Gallery
It’s tough to think of any nerd entertainment more Pride positive than the animated series Steven Universe. In interviews, series creator Rebecca Sugar has said that the LGBTQA+ themes common in the show come from her own identity as a bisexual woman, and that the Gems were created specifically as non-binary women, a status she identifies with (according to her Twitter profile, Sugar’s pronouns can be she or they).
The series started in 2013, but I didn’t take my first photo of a Steven Universe cosplayer until the summer of 2015, at ConnectiCon. This is in part due to the fact that the series had not yet broken out as a hit known to the general cosplay community, but much more so because I knew nothing about it, and therefore didn’t know the names of any characters to call out to for a photo. Until some cosplayers I knew well enough to have them come to me to get their pictures taken started cosplaying from Steven Universe, I had no idea what those characters were.
Over the next five years (2020 being essentially a lost year for cosplay photos) I took more than 125 photos of Steven Universe cosplayers, most of whom chose to cosplay the characters because they loved the themes and messages of the show as much as they loved the costumes, if not more.
Among the cosplayers in this gallery are Serenity Lockhart, Tito Midnight, AkaneSaotome, mandi_joan_cosplay_and_art, Mink the Satyr Cosplay, hail_rosequartz, West Street Studios, MicroKitty, Flukeoffate Cosplay, maydaycosplay, Punky Bruiser, maidofmalice, and many more.
We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
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