hello!! I'm nonbinary and demisexual. I dabble in a lot of artistic endeavors, but lately I've really gotten into 3D animation and modding through Blender. You'll commonly see Vira and Burakh here, under the tag #lionhearts ! Here's some recent art I've made of them:
I haven't written in a while, but the lionhearts do have an FFXIVWrite series from 2024!
It would mean a lot to me this year's Pride, to see acknowledgement and celebration for queers of color of every stripe. Often it feels like BIPOC are an afterthought in Pride celebrations, not only left unacknowledged, but further marginalized by the intersection of their identities. And yet the weight of queer history roars with the resistance of people like Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera who did not stop fighting for liberation until they passed. The uprising at Stonewall itself is a culmination of years of queer activism.
When it comes to conversations about queer suppression, especially as shown by the attitude inspiring this post, we often see takes that certain people inherently don't "understand" gay coding or any number of nods to queer identity, simply due to the circumstances of our birth. I'd like to bring attention to the fact that many people in the world are still unable to openly call themselves queer of any kind of identity, without being severely punished by their own governments. At the same time, BIPOC in the USA especially Black and Indigenous people, regardless of their queer status, are policed and killed every day for the most frivolous reasons; and queerness amplifies the danger they face on the daily, especially if they are perceived as being gender-nonconforming. I'd like us all to remember what we think of as 'normal' now, like posting about queerness and being queer online, is an incredible, incredible privilege that people lived, fought, and died for. Our elders died dreaming that we, the future generations, have a chance to breathe and love together.
Stereotyping a whole kind of people, or blanketing a nation's attitude onto the people who live there, feels extremely antithetical to the history of the term 'queer' as a community and as a movement of liberation. Personally speaking, I was practically raised by a butch while we were both navigating the complexities and danger of being queer, in a country whose textbooks promote civilians to punish homosexuality by stoning gays or putting lesbians into house arrest, whose laws criminalize private citizens' sex lives. I saw firsthand the discrimination she could not shake for the entirety of her work, how she had to bring her own friends as advocates for her because her coworkers and administration disliked her, the way our organization suffered due to the perception of her as a corrupting influence on the band kids she trained. She shepherded us through the most successful years of marching band our school had ever seen, and her reward was to be kicked out of the school the moment my class graduated. Luckily, no worse outcome happened that I know of, but we all saw it happen. She had no partner that I knew of, and she never spoke of her orientation publicly, but that she was so gender-nonconforming as a butch was enough to mark her for life.
Instead of performing that violence of erasure, let's uplift and truly see each other, and continue the hard work of our forebears where we can. We must, we must strive to give the next generation (and our peers right now) a better life.
