a little bit
about this project

I thought about this idea a lot. And if you know me personally then you probably heard me ask many variations of it over the years. Why was I so captivated by this idea?

As someone well into their 50’s, I came up and into my queerness in a time without social media and no real (positive) representation of lgbtqai2s+ people in mainstream media at all. Everything I learned about being queer was taught to me directly from other queer people. In this way, I was pulled into a kind of oral history lineage of becoming (noun: [process] the act of growing, developing, or changing from one state into another) which required both vulnerability and shared intimacy, because it happened in bars and backyards, meetings and marches, backrooms and across the kitchen table. People told you their stories, shared information, and showed you that it was ok to be you.

We now live in a time where queerness is much more visible in the mainstream, so much so that our identities are often reduced to sound-bytes and commodified aesthetics, marketable products for financial and social profit. I can’t help but wonder if this ‘gain’ in visibility has led to the loss of that oral history lineage, and with it, opportunities to share our authentic and vulnerable selves through sharing our stories.

So I wondered, could we make a thing/a place to call back vulnerability, intimacy, and authentic connection outside of commodified identities- a place to reconnect to the oral storytelling of our queer ancestors… like a collective diary, or love letters to each other.

Let’s find out together.