Queer Radiance
This interview and portrait project brings light to stories and images of queer strength and joy. We're learning and sharing the superpowers that are forged through the challenges of living as an LGBTQIA+ person, and the positive impact they have on the world.
A sense of who we are, and who we love, is the bedrock of humanity. But many of us spent years feeling compelled to suppress our burgeoning desires, and denying our sense of self. Navigating back to our truth requires us to summon a mountain of courage, hope, and creativity. Inherent in queerness, then, is a capacity to reimagine. To look beyond what is to what could be, if we invent it for ourselves.
This forced, secret self-reckoning, and learning how to swim against the tide, galvanizes unique strengths that we can use to nourish our community, support others on similar journeys, and dazzle and inspire the world.
Sarah Fitzharding
Stephen Fry
When I was 14, I fell in love with a boy at school. It was a thunderbolt, it changed me forever. I was devastated and made miserable by the enormity of it but at the same time I felt that I’d been granted a remarkable privilege. I kept myself apart. I used to go up to the roofs of the building - I found these little secret ladders and stone steps and doorways and I would go up and stand on the roof and look down over the school. I’d see all the other boys milling around and the schoolmasters in their gowns flitting around like black crows. It was like an instinct to be separate, to be apart. That’s what being gay made you – it made you an outlier, and part of that is pride in your outlying, pride in the fact that you belong to a separate group.
But laughter, comedy – this was the way I survived. I was the class clown, I wrote little comic sketches and plays for us to perform in the dormitory, and I would tell comic stories at night – it’s what stopped me from being unpopular. At the time, I thought laughter was the only cure for what ailed the world, and what ailed me – it was important to laugh at myself, at my welter of misery in being in unrequited love – I knew that must be laughed into health.
–
It’s almost impossible to overstate the effect of being gay on the course my life has taken. It is the primary energy that was behind my reading, and therefore the development of a love of literature and a love of novels and poems. Reading The Trials of Oscar Wilde, I realized that the crimes he had committed, the sins for which he was being sacrificed on the altar of public opinion - this crime was something I could feel in myself. And through this I discovered gay writers and artists, and that led to the opening of an intellectual life – it all sprang from that moment.
The two most valuable attributes that I have developed as a transgender woman are strength and acceptance. As an asylum seeker from the Middle East, I had to leave due to rights conflicts, and it took a lot of strength and perseverance to build my life back up again and shape it into the one I was meant to have. Acceptance means the ability to make peace with the circumstances that arise from being a minority in a very tough, harsh world. That stems from self acceptance up to acceptance of the world around you, and perseverance through the challenges that society puts upon us trans individuals, such as the recent rulings about biological sex. The fact of the matter is that we will never be erased and we will always continue to exist in this world and make ourselves seen.
Farrah
Farrah
Fiona Harvey & Spark
In T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he says, Do I dare to speak? He is unable to make up his mind, unable to take the steps that he wants to take. This was how I felt for a long time about being gay – about it being something inexpressible, and having an internal monologue where you’re torturing yourself about who you are. It felt like being at war with myself.
Once I eventually acknowledged to myself that I was gay, it became a source of strength. It gave me much greater insights into other people, and their fears and hopes and feelings, because I put myself in their shoes. Being gay, you have to think, why does that person react so negatively to it? It gives you empathy. It also gave me a great deal of confidence, it gave me courage in all kinds of ways. There was no internet dating – if you wanted to meet other gay people you had to go to a gay bar. So once you screwed up your courage to do that, you could do anything! The single most important thing is not caring about what other people think, refusing to be beholden to their judgment. This has enabled me to go up to people for my job and talk to them, getting interviews with people by just approaching them. It’s also given me a sense of proportion – being able to be ruthless about what is important and what is not.
You have to have faith in yourself and your own courage. Being a lesbian is not something to be scared of - being a lesbian will be a source of joy in your life. Don’t give up - try to find a way to make things better. Don’t just accept what you are given. I am proud that I’ve managed to carry on through difficult things, and still be optimistic - full of joy and still looking forward.
Fiona Harvey
When I came out, it was a time of confusion and fear, feeling pushed down, left out and not supported by my parents. They didn’t care, they wanted me to change, and they sent me to conversion therapy. I went from sadness to anger, because I didn’t have the tools or the vocabulary to talk about it. With queer identity, no one is figuring this out with you, no one is helping you. I felt restless, unsoothed, like I was carrying something heavy inside.
Now, because of growing up queer, I’m more centered, more respectful and mindful. I feel I can read other people’s feelings better; I can put myself in their shoes. I can see that I have a parallel with what’s happening with that person, and that perhaps I have some tools that might help them.
I started going back into those individual moments – questioning how feminine I was, or how masculine, or how vulnerable or how faggy I would look – and putting them into my work, so that maybe they can touch someone else. I wasn’t surrounded or supported, so now I am the one that’s trying to be supportive and helpful.
I want to thank that younger self for making me see how deep emotions can get. I want to thank him for his curiosity, and that excitement and sparkle, and tell him: You are crazy and fun and happy – you’re genuinely good, even though you think that you’re not!
What I really want now is to be able to continue making art, to be surrounded by people I love, and always to have a life that’s filled with color. My goal is to get a big plot of land and have a bunch of friends move in, and whenever your life is not going ok, just come! And if you don’t have money, you can help us plant something in the back. I would just love to be helpful, forever, for whoever needs it.
