The theme of Pride Month 2020 is #StillWe which has been designed to celebrate the achievements of the LGBTQIA+ community and acknowledge the adversities that many members of the community are confronted with every day. We’re living in a crazy, but historic, period, celebrating Pride Month, coping with Coronavirus and getting behind the Black Lives Matter movement. This past month, I’ve challenged myself to learn more about other communities in my own backyard, commend their victories and understand their struggles.
This week I was lucky enough to attend an online seminar hosted by academic Andrew Farrell entitled Developing and Delivering Indigenous Queer Studies. It was an awesome event featuring an often-neglected area of study. Andrew explained that Indigenous members of the LGBTQIA+ community often experience a great deal of discrimination, both in Indigenous and non-Indigenous spaces. Members of this specific community are regularly excluded from health programmes, especially in terms of HIV/AIDS education, sexual abuse, mental health and suicide prevention. There is a huge gap in services available for this specific community so that’s why people like Andrew are determined to educate people and create spaces in the community where LGBTQIA+ Indigenous persons can not only feel welcome but have a real sense of belonging in the community. From a white Australian gaze, Indigenous communities are often seen as heterosexual, cisgendered and patriarchal, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Indigenous LGBTQIA+ persons may not fit into western standards of queerness, but long before colonisation, these communities existed and thrived.
However, the cultural exclusions for the group bring up huge complications, particularly in the Indigenous transgender community. Especially in remote communities, practices such as gendered song and dance present identity issues for transgender Indigenous people. Luckily, in recent years the formation of the Brotherboys and Sistergirls have created a space for trans persons to express their identity while at the same time keeping in touch with their cultural heritage. Click here for a great video by Brotherboys Kai and Dean which talks about their experiences with cultural, sexual and gender identity.
There is little content about Indigenous LGBTQIA+ communities at the moment, so it’s our responsibility as Australians to read, learn and understand more about. If you’d like to learn more about the Indigenous LGBTQIA+ community, I’d highly recommend Andrew’s blog, Archiving the Aboriginal Rainbow: https://indigblackgold.wordpress.com/
