Bi+ Awareness Week 2020: Features
Propel are proud to be a community home to many talented young people all across the sexuality continuum, and this #BiWeek we are excited to be featuring some bi-loved local young artists and Propel family across our socials to share their messages for Bi+ Awareness Week 2020!
We will be adding more features during this week, so keep an eye out.
Patrick Gunasekera
I’ve always been attracted to people of all genders and always struggled to articulate this through labels. For me, a lot of English words that I’ve used to describe my sexuality over time now carry baggage around having to reject my ethno-religious heritage when I first came out at 14.
It was actually Kylie Bracknell’s work with Hecate that motivated me to stop speaking and thinking about my sexuality and gender in English, which sent me down this amazing journey around pre-colonial Sinhala-Buddhist frameworks of sex, gender and sexuality, which position these things to be community roles that you “do” based on how you can serve the community best, rather than as identities that you “are” which you define yourself.
It saddens me that all the people I know who find pride and strength in both their sexuality and gender and also in their culture and faith are all young adults or older, and that this is hardly ever an option for younger people anymore because of colonisation.
But it also encourages me to be a possibility model for people of all ages by not being ashamed to find strength in ways of being in the world that are incongruent with western concepts of queerness, like expressing my gender non-conformity and sexuality through modest fashion as I’ve recently started doing.
I’m still learning how to say no to things I feel peer pressure to do because it’s what other people do, but listening to myself and not being afraid of who I am and where I’ve come from and subsequently what I carry with me has really helped.
Visibility for me looks like being visible to myself: by listening to my roots, learning my language(s), and trusting my ancestry.
George Burton
Kaya! My name is George Burton, I’m a queer, gender fluid sixteen-year-old, who loves to wear a long skirt and flowy clothing. I’m a long-time supporter of the work at Propel Youth Arts WA, and I’m also a local musician who performs under the name ‘Blue Cat Reserve’.
Representing youth in WA in one of my strongest passions as I don’t think we have our beautiful voices heard as much as they should be. Young people need to speak out, and they need to know that there are safe spaces out there for everyone who needs them. So never be afraid to be yourself and never be afraid to wear a beautiful skirt!! x
Jamie McGleave
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever understood my own sexuality. I’ve been attracted to people of all genders for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, I was often frustrated by the implied expectation to choose either a homosexual or heterosexual identity. Neither label fit me at all and contributed towards a general sense of "not fitting in" with my peers, which continued throughout high school.
I don't strongly identify with the label of bisexual, at least not with how the label seems to be used within mainstream circles. A lot of people mistake sexual fluidity for confusion. This might be the case for some people but it definitely was not a phase for me. It's how I felt back then and it's also how I feel now.
Right now, I am 35 years old, happily married and a father of two. I am a gender conforming cis man in a monogamous heteronormative relationship... in other words, I appear to be part of the mainstream binary. The trouble with binaries is that they only represent a sliver of a spectrum.
Human beings are more complex than a simple "yes / no" question or "on / off" switch.
Anonymous
My sexuality has always been such a huge thing for me because culturally, as well as with my sexual orientation, I’ve been in and out of a lot of spaces. I am half this, half that, kinda migrant, kinda Australian, but never quite enough of both, or of either. And so I guess bisexuality was just another thing that I was not quite straight, not quite gay enough for either party. So, I’m not out because my straight family wouldn’t accept that, but also I guess I am still a bit afraid of the queer community not necessarily accepting me as I want to be accepted for being whole, because I feel like I don’t want to intrude with my passing “straightness” and I feel like I am scared of imposing myself on spaces where people of colour are because I pass for white as well. So, for me bisexuality is still a really complicated thing and I wish I was able to feel the pride for it outwardly that I do inwardly, because inwardly, I am whole, I am in a liminal space but I am whole, and I am wholly bisexual.