Media Diversified
Foregrounding voices of colour
Writings by LGBTQ contributors discussing their experiences at the intersection of being LGBTQ and a person of colour
by Shane Thomas Content note: this review contains spoilers It’s often said that a key facet of healthy relationships is open, honest, and clear communication. Perhaps less emphasised is that this applies to familial relationships as well as romantic ones. Eight years after his debut feature film, Medicine for Melancholy, Barry Jenkins has made a movie… Read More
by Karen Williams The last man executed for sodomy in Australia in 1863 was an indigenous black South African soldier. He was one of hundreds of mainly African and Asian indigenous and enslaved people transported from Africa’s south and its surrounding islands to the new settlement in New South Wales and Tasmania. Also in Australia… Read More
by Keguro Macharia Republished here with the author’s permission At first, once a week, and then twice a week, and, eventually, four times a week, I’d head for the gay club in downtown Pittsburgh. It was small, located below street level, dark, leaning toward seedy, and, had I bothered to think about it, a death… Read More
by Khaleb Brooks I sat quietly in a large room at Chicago’s Gerber/Hart Library. Some sat nervous like me, wide-eyed and curious, fidgeting with their clothes, bags, nails and expressions. Others seemed like old friends, gallantly laughing, bending wrists, and gliding across the room in an array of both extravagant and dapperly conservative fashions. This… Read More
from Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul by Ryka Aoki 1. Consider that for every rational number, there exists an infinite array of values that do not resolve. The dead or frightened housecat. The slipshod dance of sun and moon. A Shanghai butterfly splits the baryons of a faraway nucleus… And you wonder… Read More
Or: Clear and Present Transgender by Suzy Wrong Visibility for many trans people is a conundrum. Unlike our genderqueer compatriots, we often work for ideas of gender that seem to be about, above all, conformity and normality, which in turn implies a certain ordinariness and social invisibility. In early stages of our individual transitions, we… Read More
PACE’s Closure: The Loss of a Lifeline by Anonymous And just like that it was gone. After providing mental health support services to LGBT+ people for more than three decades, the charity PACE closed its doors on 29 January 2016 due to lack of funding. I heard the news a day after I’d sent an… Read More
by Claire L. Heuchan I have read a lot of lesbian fiction in my time. For the most part my life, both as a reader and a lesbian woman, has been all the richer for it. However, the vast majority of these books have focussed specifically on love, sex, and relationships between white women –… Read More
by Phelan Chatterjee Recently I watched the first episode of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None with a friend. The first thing he pointed out was the seemingly in your face diversity; “Oh look, a Jew, a Pakistani and a black lesbian! They seem to be ticking all the boxes…” This seems to be a fairly… Read More
by Karen Williams With the prevalence of Islam-related news headlines, it is tempting to forget that the everyday still takes place in Muslim-majority areas: the going to school, the heartbreak, food and dance, and through the centuries, the constant production of art. This is the context shaping the work of groundbreaking South African photographers Husain… Read More
