#belgiam

Alright so I live in Belgium, which has historically been a very accepting country for gay and bi people because there’s a strong culture of not giving a fuck about people’s personal lives. In fact, we recently had a very openly gay prime minister.

But sometimes I feel like we legalized gay marriage and just said: “Yep, that’s enough acceptance. No need to ever discuss this topic again!”

There’s almost a taboo around discussing LGBT+ people, largely because of the ignorance surrounding the community. I doubt a single person in my class knows what the terms transgender or asexual really mean.

This also really hinders me coming out as ace, because nobody has a clue what it means and because there’s also a culture of “doe normaal” - act normally. That means anyone who says they’re something that isn’t well known is immediately labeled an attention seeker or whatever.

n. A style of Belgian beer with a distinctive sour cherry flavour, traditionally made by slowly fermenting lambic beer with morello cherries.

Belgian transgender ballet film wins #Cannes Queer Palme

“Girl”, a film about a transgender teenage girl’s quest to become a professional ballerina, won the Queer Palme award on Friday, selected as the best from a bumper field of movies with an LGBT theme playing at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Belgian movie was warmly received, with Variety saluting “a stunning debut for both director Lukas Dhont and star Victor Polster”.

Polster, a cisgender boy and…

#ValentinesDay brings sparkle to Belgian #diamond hub

Sparkling new diamond rings will grace many fingers around the world on Valentine’s Day — and most of those gems will have passed through a drab district in the Belgian port city of Antwerp. A diamond hub for nearly 600 years, Antwerp is holding its own as the global trade capital for the precious stones despite new rivals in the Middle East and Asia, traders there say. Not that it looks anything…