LEdoian's Blog

A thought on pride and visibility

CW: minority issues and mentions of stereotyping

(The tags and categories for this post are very random, sorry. I really need to make a reform of topics, since now it is hard to tell where this belongs. I am also probably going to rework this in few days, I just needed to put my ideas down today; !RemindMe 10 days.)

I have been to a premiere of a short documentary about the situation of queer people in Georgia (Somewhere in the Caucasus, I think I can only link the event in Prague Pride calendar at this point). And I backfilled the information about the current drama about payment processors effectively censoring NSFW games (most of my knowledge is from Soatok's blogpost).

Nasty shit. And now I have thoughts I want to share and be able to return to later. Therefore this post.

There were about three ideas that were mentioned on the premiere in the discussion:

  • The importance of sharing the word
  • Not being a separable group
  • Not giving up

Obviously, those points were raised and live in my head within a context of being queer. However, I think they apply to other issues as well, so I'm going to elaborate on them a bit in this post.

Sharing the word

This is a rather classic one: information is vital to help issues in the world and to be resistant to disinformation, misconceptions and/or prejudices. It is important to learn the stories of how the evil came. The more people understand the underlying issues and their causes, the more people can help fix/treat them.

Political situation in Georgia has its causes. The payment processor issue is an issue in the system. People in jail have stories that lead them there. Heck, homelessness has causes that might be possible to fix. But first, we need people to be aware of them.

So share information. Learn new information (and ideally verify them). Ask people their stories (if they are willing to share).

Group forming and breaking

This was originally a very minor idea, but it reasonated with me: It tends to be simple to dismiss some group's issues as not being relevant to people outside. LGBTQI+ people being one of the prime examples. People playing 18+ games may be another. It's quite easy to dismiss those as “the perverts” (or what stereotype one can think of).

But we are people too. And the aim should be to have a single society that everyone would be welcome in.

And if we are able to show that e.g. queer people support worker's issues, it helps break the barrier between “them” and “the majority”, helping all groups.

This happened in the UK. Also, this idea is known for more than 79 years.

Now, I am not saying “let's create a queer pride out of everything”, that would be going overboard. And I don't have the answer for what would be acceptable. But letting people protesting other causes know that (some) queer people (for example) support them helps promote queer people as having similar values. (The alternatives are silly enough to be unlikely: rejecting people from protests for my values based on being queer or rejecting the validity of a protest based on queer people being present.)