By Emily Hashimoto — 2020
A queer author of color on the limits of language and the maximums of love.
Read on www.out.com
CLEAR ALL
Though pop culture often portrays queer people successfully coming out young, a generation of our closeted LGBTQ elders might disagree.
Greater levels of support and acceptance is associated with dramatically lower rates of attempting suicide.
When many LGBTQ people look back on their childhood, we remember a mixture of confusingly feeling different; being harassed for our sexual identities; and realizing how important our parents, teachers and other authority figures were in either helping us through those years—or making our lives worse.
The sound of drums, singing and prayers marked the opening of a powwow in Phoenix on a Saturday afternoon this month. . . . It was Arizona’s first Two-Spirit Powwow, one of a handful of powwows that have sprung up across North America to celebrate LGBT Native Americans.
“If LGBTQ people get assaulted or beaten up in a hate crime on tribal land, it’s often not prosecuted,” one advocate said.
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Ideas of visibility and the closet have largely been shaped by white America and the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Refusing to subscribe to this narrative gives us space to connect with our gender, our culture and our sexuality on our own terms.
In the late ’90s, television was my greatest source of comfort—the place were I went to to find versions of myself reflected back at me. The only queer woman I ever saw on screen, however, was Ellen Degeneres.
The term “Two Spirit” in Native American culture often describes a person possessing both male and female spirits. And they’ve been around well before the Santa Maria or the Mayflower dropped anchor.
These black women and gender-nonconforming individuals have created a space for other young girls and nonbinary persons to feel seen and heard.
The ever-viral artist discusses his meteoric rise and the pressures of being a Black gay musician on a global stage.