The Importance of Visibility ?

Open Minds Online Group April 2022

Is it important for you to see people that look like you or think/feel the same way as you do? Let us put it a different way – do you remember the first time you saw another LGBTQIA+ person who had the same skin colour or heritage as you and how did this make you feel?

The great news is that there are a lot more ways for us to access LGBTQ+ films and TV with characters who understand what it means to grow up in South Asian cultures. We can see the struggles and successes of our lives in the stories that we watch and there is something very positive about feeling part of a bigger story. The problem is that an increase in visibility doesn’t necessarily mean that people in our homes or families are talking more about LGBTQIA+ issues and this is an idea that we talked about a lot in this group.

We reflected on the fact that some of our friends and family are happy to watch LGBTQIA+ lives on a screen but don’t want to think that these stories might affect people that they know. This is especially true when the stories that they see affect non-Punjabi or South-Asian people who they are happier to think of as having very different lives to us.

We had a think about why this might be, and some of us felt that the cultures that our parents inherited as part of their family migration to the UK might have influenced how open they were about LGBTQIA+ lives. Migration might have caused parts of their cultures to become fixed and to change this would be stressful as it would mean changing parts of their own identity. Migration might also have caused them to confuse parts of their culture with ideas about religion and values that might have originally come from British colonialism.

Like all ideas, it probably doesn’t apply to all situations and although we know people who are much more open about LGBTQIA+ issues in India, some of our group also felt that India is becoming more prejudiced against LGBTQIA+ people. Sadly one of the group members had experienced higher levels of homophobia in public situations in recent times and they feel that public attitudes to LGBTQIA+ people are becoming more ‘conservative’.

Unfortunately, seeing more people who look like us in the media doesn’t yet mean that all the spaces we live/work are safe places for LGBTQIA+ people. But, these stories can start the conversations that we need for these spaces to start this work.

At a personal level, visibility can help us feel seen in the world. When we’re feeling like we’re the only brown LGBTQIA+ person, they’re a reminder that our story is part of a bigger network of stories and this can be one of the most powerful benefits of seeing stories about people who look like us.

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

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Illustration Credit - Kuljit (Project Lead at the Open Minds Project)