5 interesting ways to create awareness through your queer personality!
There is no particular protocol or a defined formula to enhance awareness about queer people and the queer community to let people understand various queer perspectives to make the world a better place where everyone accepts each other's existence. The effect remains powerful if a group of people hoist rainbow flags, dress up like colourful unicorns and march by shouting out slogans to mark their presence in society. But that's not the only way one can create awareness. You don't always need a bunch of people to urge people to understand the queer culture, sometimes all you need is you and your queer personality to represent the whole queer community!
Speak up and share your knowledge to enlighten the world around you whenever you find an opportunity to cultivate the people who are unaware of the queer terms and terminologies. Never hold yourself back and think twice before you describe to people what runs in your mind when someone passes a homophobic joke, someone demeans queer people, or someone throws random statements that don't make any sense. You should extend your support through your communication skills to stop entertaining queerphobic people and start creating awareness. It should start within you so that it reflects on the people around you.
Falling under the queer stereotypes is another interesting way to generate awareness. Yes, if you are someone who typically gets noticed as a queer person because of your queer lifestyle patterns, then you don't have to feel odd about it because it is super fine to remain the way you are and be stereotypical sometimes, especially when you aren't the one who created such stereotypes in society. So do you see any scope of feeling awkward for being typically gay or visibly lesbian or aptly transgender? Instead of feeling different, try to feel normal because, without any knowledge, you are broadening awareness through your queer personality. People talk about you no matter what but they also talk about your queer existence, which indeed means they start identifying queer people around them and finally they get habituated by accepting you the way you are.
Your dressing choices, fashion statements and signature queer style foster awareness in people, even though they cause you a little uncomfortable by staring at you. But C’mon you must be proud to worth a stare, dammit. If your dressing patterns constantly induce people to eat each other's ears, gossip and talk behind you, then you don't need to react aggressively towards them. Preferably, you must feel thrilled to be that person who initiates queer topics by barely uttering a statement. All you need to do is to deck up the way you love and spill your fashionista vibes around.
Using social media to express your emotions and feelings regarding your queer personality, the highs and lows of the queer community, the pros and cons of queer culture, everything that makes people get the reality check without granting them to perceive that queer community is only about sexual preferences, pride parades, rainbows and unicorns. Take surveys, conduct live sessions, speak to other queer people publicly in group conversations, make videos and publish posts with engaging captions that portray the powerful queer vibe to your followers. Flaunt your queer personality online because, in this modern scenario, people fritter away more time on phones than looking at others. So it's inevitably a clever idea to appear on their screens to heighten awareness through words, images and videos as practically it works better than anything else.
But not everyone lives in the virtual scenario because most people who are unaware of the queer community are the people who live outside this virtual scenario and still prefer person-to-person conversations, especially in villages. Rigorously, now you can't go to every village in your country wearing flashy clothes or explaining to them all the fancy queer terms, sexual orientations and identities which they can never understand just like that. The above methods apply to metropolitan mindsets but country mindsets are stubborn enough to accept any kind of change, indeed they feel queer culture is abnormal and unnatural. So, instead of applying the same aspects, to create awareness, you need to tone your queer personality a bit down because they need to learn from scratch and the aim is to make them understand.
As mentioned earlier, you don't have to go around looking for village people. Start from your home with your parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents and relatives who have never even heard of the term queer. It seems challenging to approach them with queer concepts in your mind. But you can make it easy if you can involve some relatable references that they can easily get along with. Be it spiritual contexts, historical stories, periodical influences and ideologies, cultural changes, political icons, personal lives of popular queer people in pop culture, glamorous industry, corporate circles, and even ancient civilisation stories where queer people got appreciated and celebrated for their existence and how colonisation has affected their lives and how the modern scenario recognises them and celebrate their queer personalities by allowing and accepting them the way they are, etc. The more you sound, related according to a person's mindset, the more that person perceives your effort of creating awareness. You may fail initially but if you continue contributing your energy, you end up making your surroundings more accepting! Isn't it what you need as a queer person at the end of the day? Don't you think you can pull this off alone all by yourself?
