Finding direction as lgbtqia+ people with south Asian heritage?

Open Minds London Group - Apr 23

This month we were excited to try out a new venue (The Common Press at  Glass House) for our London peer support groups. Although we’re grateful to the St Luke’s Centre for hosting so many of our groups, since the pandemic they’ve not been open as late and it’s meant that our groups have had to start earlier. This has made it hard for some people to make it. We hope to continue using the new space as it allows us to start and finish later and there’s the added bonus of it being a specific venue for us LGBTQIA+ folks!

The theme for the group was roughly ‘What do you want to be when you grow up and why’? We wanted to think about how our upbringing might have influenced our choices of study, career or life aims. 

People talked about how their family structure, including which parents they were raised by and what their siblings were like, influenced the choices they made as adults. Some of us have had inspirational and supportive parents, and others found less space for them to explore a path that was different from what their families expected. 

People talked about how these kinds of ‘traditional’ expectations seem to be less of an issue when you’re living in London as there are so many groups of people that you can connect with who don’t judge you for living ‘non-traditional’ lives. Sometimes this means having less of a close connection to your birth family and many of us have a strong network of chosen family who allow us to be ourselves. 

As the conversation progressed we talked about the problem of seeing queer south asian role models in film and TV and some of us felt that our lives would have been different if we had been able to have someone we could look up to growing up. We also thought about how even though LGBTQIA+ representation is improving, south asian people don’t get promoted or celebrated as much and can get lumped in the category of ‘exotic’ queer culture. 

One of the things we asked people to think about was what an ‘authentic’ life looks like for them and whether this is something we should all be looking for. Some of our group members have lived in multiple cities and countries and they talked about how it is almost impossible to find people who are able to relate to all the different parts of their identities. 

As we unpicked this issue, we came to the conclusion that perhaps living authentic LGBTQIA+ lives will always mean that you will be creating new ways of living and being and that this means there will never be someone who can completely understand your point of view. Although this can feel lonely at times, it also can allow us to live much richer and varied lives that keep life fresh and allow us to make lots of different types of connections with lots of different types of people. 

We agreed that there is no ‘perfect’ plan for any of us and we all need to work out our own ways of growing and making the best of what we have and want. Living as LGBTQIA+ people can feel like we’re reinventing things every day but don’t forget that there are so many LGBTQIA+ people who have written or talked about their experiences and sometimes reading about someone else’s struggles can help us work out a way through ours. 

We talked about the work of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, films like ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and the Netflix series Bridgerton as inspirational examples of queer/non-white cultural diversity. 

Overall it was a wonderful group to be part of and the feedback tells us that people enjoy having time to talk to share their life stories. We’ll be taking this topic to our Birmingham group next month and if you can’t make it, will also open up the discussion to our Online group in June.

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

We usually meet on the last Wednesday of each month and if you want to join us at an Open Minds Meeting, please visit the Events page on our website.