Queerly Stated - Conversations Within The Queer Caribbean Community

During the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, when we still had ‘no movement’ days and orders to stay at home, more people turned to the internet for information, entertainment, and whatever level of human connection can be had from virtual interactions. People were having virtual games nights, DJs were hosting Instagram Live spin sessions and straight tweeters were harping on about dating on social media. These dating conversations never included or made mention of queer people, or the fact that most of us have tended to meet our partners, friends and side-pieces on social media even before the lockdowns, because this was oftentimes the only place we were able to express our full identities.

It was this exclusion that led me to create the first iteration of Queerly Stated. The hashtag #RubbinCratchiz was meant to be a one off Twitter Spaces conversation to center the experiences of queer women dating in The Caribbean. That first session became a two-part conversation and it quickly grew into a regular occurrence. There was a wide range of topics including travel across the region, facing discrimination in the workplace as a masc-presenting woman, as well as non-binary and genderfluid identities. The talks even spurred a virtual speed-dating session for Valentine’s Day. The Spaces hosted over 100 listeners from all over the Caribbean and in the diaspora, tuning in with the desire to feel connected across land and sea. 

It became clear that the thing that brought out the audience was the need to connect with their community and that, through these conversations we were having, we could create a more inclusive, understanding and caring queer community for ourselves. Listening to people share their experiences of love, friendship and gender euphoria was proving to community members that it could be possible to live and thrive where we are. The importance of this to people of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics within formerly colonized, economically exploited and less developed (in areas of human rights) Caribbean countries can’t be overstated. 

These conversations don’t just do the bare minimum of telling us that we have a right to exist, but that we have a duty to intentionally and caringly nurture one another. In a world where queerness is stuck in only being portrayed as theory or death or sex, all of which has to be American/European, or some other Global North country aspiring, do you know how much life we get from one another? As we are?

Today, Queerly Stated is a forum for queer Caribbean (or “Queeribbean”) conversations that center, revolve around and is built upon the lived experiences of queer Caribbean people. Its main aim is to help build a more connected and caring community that allows people to see their experiences reflected back to them and, most importantly, to foster respect and understanding for the things that make us different. As powerfully stated by Audre Lorde, the ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, ‘Without community, there is no liberation... but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”