5 Things Queer Relationships and Communities Can Teach Everyone
Let's all learn from each other this Pride Month
Hello again! It’s Pride Month once again and at a time where LGBTQIA+ rights are increasingly under threat globally, it’s never been more important. As such, I thought now would be a great time to explore all the wonderful things the queer community has taught me about love, relationships and community.
There are so many things everyone can learn from the resilience, kindness and joy of this community around the globe and it’s something I sincerely hope to never stop celebrating. So let’s take a look – and happy Pride Month all!
1. You Don’t Have to Ride the Relationship Escalator
Most hetero relationships inevitably follow what’s known as a “relationship escalator.” Time spent together eventually transitions into exclusive dating, which leads to moving in together, which leads to engagement, which leads to marriage, which leads to children.
Queer relationships don’t necessarily follow the same trajectory. This may be because there is a much higher overlap of both non-normative relationship structures (including polyamory and relationship anarchy etc) within the LGBTQIA+ community, or because, like Asexual or Aromantic folks, the inevitable intimacy ascent might not be something they actually want in a long-term partner.
It may also be because, until relatively recently in the West, marriage and children weren’t possible for a lot of these folks – and in much of the world, they still aren’t.
What this all adds up to is the understanding that there are many ways to be in a relationship and many ways to love other people – and in my book, more opportunity for love is a pretty wonderful thing!
2. Which Means You Don’t Have to Have Children if You Don’t Want to
I love kids. Always have. I think they’re hilarious and cute and fun and I love spending time with them. So much so that I worked with kids during the whole of my undergrad degree, both as a daycare worker for ages six to eighteen months and as a Disney Princess for little kid’s birthday parties (which remains, to this day, the best job I’ve ever had).
That said, I’ve never really wanted my own kids. Yet, only seeing hetero relationships reflected back at me in the media, it never really occurred to me that it was actually something I could just choose to opt out of entirely. This caused, as you might imagine, a fair amount of anxiety, the idea always looming over me and as I grew up and hit my twenties. A future with kids made me (I emphasise, me personally) feel like I was on a conveyer belt hurtling towards an incinerator. It wasn’t until I started spending a lot more time in queer spaces that I realised I really could just… Not do that?
Seeing queer and alternate relationships taught me that I should have kids if there’s nothing I want to do more. For my friends with kids, that’s often the case – and I can see how happy it makes them and that is so, incredibly wonderful. But I also knew it would never be the case for me.
It also taught me that there many ways to build a family. Two people can be a family. A group of forty friends can be a family. There are so many more ways to have a family than we see represented to us in mainstream media – and the nuclear option is just one.
3. Great Community Spaces Are Inclusive
When I was an early twenty-something, like most early twenty-somethings, I loved going out to clubs and bars. Mostly because I loved dancing with my friends (I still do). But it was only after I stopped going out to nightclubs and bars that I realised how homogenous these spaces were. Everyone was around the same age. Same socioeconomic bracket mostly. Same general way of dressing etc. It never struck me as odd. Until… I started going to queer/queer-friendly parties!
My absolute favourite thing about attending queer/alt/queer-friendly events is how wildly varied everyone in attendance is. You’ll see people of all ages (and I do mean all ages) out on the dance floor, chatting, laughing and having an amazing time. You’ll see people from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and a much broader range of appearances.
It quickly became apparent to me that this wasn’t an accident. The reason these spaces attract a wider range of people because they’re both more intentionally accessible. More intentional in that these are often privately-run events with accessibility specifically in mind when they’re created. Many of these events stress consent and boundaries in their event descriptions and ensure they create a space where a much wider range of people will feel safe, comfortable and welcome.
This could (and often does) include making sure the venue is accessible for disabled people, gender-neutral and neurodivergent-friendly and geared towards folks who think that making more people feel more comfortable is a great thing.
I personally love spending time in places where I can have a chat and a boogie with people of all ages and I think it makes for better, kinder, more interesting communities. It’s something I’d love to see more of in mainstream society but something that, as our third spaces continue to erode, seems to be diminishing rather than increasing. And that’s a damned shame.
4. The Way You Dress is Designed to Make YOU Happy. Thassit.
I think a lot of people my age would agree with me when I say that we grew up with some pretty fucking gross messages reflected to us by the media, especially in regards to the way we look. Even though I grew up with amazing feminist parents who instilled in me that being smart and educated was a lot more interesting than what I looked like, it still affected me a lot. It still does. The idea that as a woman, there is a certain amount of beauty that you owe the world as some kind of tax for existing is ingrained DEEP.
It was fucking everywhere. Endless magazine articles telling you what men found attractive and then subtly insinuating you should change yourself to suit that, countless songs, music videos, films, television shows that distilled women down to a series of parts available for consumption and suggested sartorial ways to decorate them to suit and sell that understanding. I swallowed it for a lot longer than I’d like to admit. I still find myself doing it, though now at least I’m self-aware enough to understand it.
But queer fashion? It’s about signalling to the world what YOU want and what makes you feel like your most authentic self. And you would be amazed how varied that can be when the straight male gaze isn’t the defined default. The options are endless and highly individualised instead of binary and prescriptive and I adore seeing its slow bleed into the mainstream.
5. Friends are Family
A big part of what my upcoming research at the University of Sydney will focus on is why everyone is so goddamn lonely these days. It’s serious – the WHO declared loneliness a pressing global health concerns in 2023 and thought it may sound kind of ephemeral, it has very real health consequences and touches every part of human wellbeing.
Mentally, obviously, loneliness causes anxiety and depression, cognitive decline and increased risk of dementia and heightened stress levels. And of course, poor mental health inevitably leads to poor behavioural health and decreased self-care, including addictive behaviour, lack of physical activity and a lower tendency to visit healthcare professionals. Physically, loneliness can impact your immune system, cause cardiovascular issues and chronic inflammation and lead to sleep disorders.
So, yeah. It’s terrible for individuals and communities. And it’s a growing problem with a comprehensive study of 113 countries finding that loneliness rates are high and steadily increasing across ages, cultures and socioeconomic levels. And we know that strong communities are needed to alleviate them. But mainstream society has been steadily dismantling community structures for decades now. When the nuclear family started being held up as the be-all-and-end-all of social connection, and the epitome of all anyone could ever need for comprehensive health and happiness, individuals started suffering. And now? There’s no more village for parents to lean on, adult men AND women have fewer friends to lean on, and third spaces to make social connections are rapidly disappearing.
And it’s happening fast. In the 1990s, in America, 33% of adults said they had ten or more close friends. In 2021? Just 13%. Additionally, the percentage of people reporting no close friends at all increased from 3% to 12% over the same period.
Studies also suggest that LGBTQ+ individuals may have higher levels of social capital within their communities compared to non-queer individuals. They are more likely to have stronger community support organisations (and be more active in those communities) and also more likely to have stronger networks of friends and thus, higher social capital. You’ve heard the term “chosen family”? It’s a real thing and it’s real important. Straight culture lost something when it decided that friends were not REAL relationships and that your spouse, your children and your colleagues had to fill every emotional need you have. It’s impossible. We need friends just as much as we need family. So much so that any hierarchy between them, from a social capital point of view, really shouldn’t exist. And for queer people, they often don’t.
If more people could start viewing friendships as every bit as important as any other meaningful emotional relationship, everyone would be better off – mentally and physically. So take a page from the gays and start building yours.
Bits & Bobs
This week’s obsessions dedicated to everyone who tells themselves they’ll just get gas in the morning before work. It’s fine.
Watching: David and I watched Civil War and mannn, I loved it. I understand that apparently some people were upset that it didn’t push a political agenda further (I think it was about as blatant as it could be without hitting you over the head with it, personally). But I enjoyed it as a war journalism story where the setting, as incendiary and shocking as it was, is actually fairly secondary. A24 continues to impress.
Reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I loved The Martian and its film adaptation AND the fact that Andy Weir is just a huge nerd who loves space so much that he wrote The Martian and published it for free on his website and then, when someone told him he should try to get it published, started selling it for 99 cents before it was optioned for a film. What a legend. Project Hail Mary is a lot of fun so far and I hear filming has just started on the film adaptation with Ryan Gosling, which I’m sure will be just as good.
Listening to: A wonderful friend of mine introduced me to The Gray Area with Sean Illing podcast and I’m really enjoying it. Favourite recent episodes have included Johann Hari talking about Ozempic and the havoc it may or may not be wreaking on our brain’s reward centres and Sebastian Junger’s account of his recent near-death experience. Which goes along with a super-interesting book I recently read on the subject by a veteran hospice doctor.
Enjoying: My mum and I share a strange fascination with documentaries about extreme things we will never do, including (but not limited to) mountain climbing, cave diving, extreme survival skills and, most recently for me, frontierism. This has manifested in me binge-watching a show about the hundred or so people who live in an extremely isolated Alaskan village that is only accessible by boat (and then only part of the year) and who essentially have to hunt, fish and forage for food. Do I want to live this way? No. Do I understand why I like it? No. Can I stop watching it while I am falling asleep? Also, no. There are nine seasons. Please help me.
That’s all for this week folks! Have a beautiful week and happy pride for those of us who celebrate.