We’re doing it a little early since June is gonna be a wild month. We’ll be chatting with guest Geekinglikeaboss, writer for the queer erotic monster choose your own adventure game, Monster Brothel, about queerness and horror!
You can join the chat and ask questions, and we’ll mostly be focusing on our love for queerness and horror and how that reflects in our fiction work and our LGBTQ+ characters.
(Hi Nay in particular has a majority LGBTQ+ cast of characters from main characters to recurring characters to villains)
We’ll also be playing the brand new installment to the Observation Duty series, I’m On Observation Duty 5 inbetween our chats.
Come join us at 8PM on Saturday, May 28 EST (Toronto time). That’s Sunday morning, 8AM on Sunday, May 29 PHP (Philippine time). We’ll be broadcasting on both Twitch and Youtube.
Stream starts in 30 mins! Come join us on Youtube or on Twitch and ask any questions, chat and enjoy :D
Pride is a reaction from a community told that they were unworthy of love.
Pride is a public spectacle to the voices who said they should stay hidden.
Pride is a ringing response to all who said they should remain silent.
Pride is the answer, in total, to all of those who shouted that they should be embarrassed and that they should be ashamed.
It started as a fierce no and as a mourning dirge.
Pride today learned everything from how a larger society treated those they felt were Other: it screams, it slurs, it hates, it rejects, it extinguishes light, it ignores, it kicks and hits and with a savage, angry, fearful mien it does everything it can to hurt and excise and rip away at what is seen as Different.
Pride learned what it wanted to be by facing down that beast for decades. We learned what we wanted to be: the exact opposite of that.
From that directed hate, an unfathomable empathy was born. When faced with so much anger and hate and rejection, we decided to fight back by loving harder than ever before. We took in strangers, we bandaged each other’s wounds, we held the hands of the dying and we were no longer orphans : all of the rainbow became my brothers and sisters, my siblings and parents, my cousins and my children.
We found wellsprings of compassion inside of ourselves and our global community thrives today because we all poured that bounty out to share with each other and the world entire.
We were so angry at so many things, and rightfully so. We were so tired and so thirsty for acceptance and love, it would have been so easy to hate in return. Somewhere along the way, we decided to dig wells rather than start fires; to build bricks instead of sling the mud. We made a village for ourselves.
You’d think with all of what we went through, over so many generations and so many broken bones and funerals that we would have shuttered ourselves away, but we didn’t. We built big houses and wide roads and left our wells open. We protected each other by our presences and our numbers, not with walls or weapons. When people came to talk, we talked. If they came to shout, we sang over them. If people came to harm, we stood up for each other and refused to be cowed. When others came and needed shelter, we gave it. When they thirsted, we offered our wells. When they hungered, we welcomed them to our tables.
We looked at the world and all of the hate and said, “No.”
They wanted us in the shadows, so we flew rainbows.
They wanted us on our knees, so we stood up.
They wanted us quiet, so we shouted.
They wanted us dead, so we lived.
They wanted us to be hateful, so we loved.
We loved. We loved and loved and still love today, because we are not ashamed and that, my dears, is why it’s called Pride. It is a space and a celebration that has been brought into the world by love, not taking anything from others but by giving and compassion and respect for life, a revolution driven by heartbeats and tears and broken bones and bruised souls that joined arms to hold each other up and kept going. We’re not done, we’re still fighting, we’re still hopeful and we’ve kept love at the forefront all this time.
