READ HERE - Article by David Rozental-Devis
“There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now okay to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it’s simply the way things are.”
~ US Senator Tammy Baldwin, 2000
This statement of encouraging people to live openly in public, whilst something that has certainly pushed the rights and needs of our community forward, is impossible for many people in the LGBTQ+ community to act upon. Be it for their close family members, or the culture around which they have grown up, living openly is not always a safe option. In fact, according to the UK Government’s LGBT National Survey 2017 (1), 24% of LGBTQ+ people are not open at all with their family, and 29% have experienced an incident with someone they lived with, including but not limited to: verbal harassment, controlling or coercive behaviour, and being outed (having their sexual orientation or gender identity revealed by someone else without consent). This isn’t even to mention the experiences of those in less accepting countries.