By Graham Cook
Posters stress that “sexual orientation is one part of a person, but it does not define a person”
A non-profit led by SFU students will march in the upcoming Vancouver Pride Parade on August 5 to raise awareness of LGBTQ issues. The non-profit, Our City of Colours, highlights members of the LGBTQ community from a variety of cultural backgrounds through an extensive poster campaign.
Founder and Chair of the organization Darren Ho, who is a third-year linguistics major at SFU, spoke with The Peak about the group’s ongoing work. According to Ho, it all began last year when he and some friends attended a workshop for gay men, which encouraged them to get more involved in the community. Ho, who is from a Chinese-Canadian background, stated that they hope to “increase visibility of LGBTQ people in different cultural and linguistic communities. . . . We want to get communities that do not often talk about gay issues to be more aware and be more vocal about gay topics.” He said that they “noticed a lot of gay exposure happens in the downtown core, so we just want to spread that out to the different suburbs.
“We target different cultural groups because one of the things we found was that unless [media] speaks directly to that group they tend to get left out. . . . Even though we have so many ‘gay-positive’ campaigns and media out there, a lot of times people who [are ESL] do not see these images,” said Ho of the poster campaign. He added that this campaign also targets those who feel that gay people do not exist within their community, with the intent of showing that these issues are relevant across all backgrounds. Ho said that so far they had received many positive responses to their poster campaign.
“The negative feedback that we’ve gotten has not been so much ‘to our faces,’ ” said Ho, pointing to reader comments made on a Georgia Straight online blog piece. “Any time we get written about online the comments section will have typical homophobic responses, along the lines of ‘I don’t want these posters in my neighborhood.’ ”
Simon Lam, an SFU student since 2008 and outreach and logistics chair for Our City of Colours, was also drawn to this project after attending the workshop with Ho last March. He echoed the importance of distributing gay-positive materials in languages other than English. Lam added that the posters “also fight the stereotype that LGBTQ people just like fashion and go out shopping all the time. . . . They do have different interests and they are like everyone else . . . the one thing that’s different is their sexual orientation, and that is only one part of their personality.” He stressed the importance of these communities understanding that “sexual orientation is one part of a person, but it does not define a person . . . people are a whole lot more than who they like.”
This sentiment is reflected in the posters, which each feature one or two people accompanying phrases such as “Plays Volleyball,” “Watches hockey,” “Has a pet pit-bull,” “Business student,” and other personal interests before concluding on the note that they are a member of the LGBTQ community. Our City of Colours is currently planning to release a second series of posters in even more languages in time for the parade.
Correction: The original article mistakenly stated that Simon Lam was the outreach and logistics chair for Out on Campus, when in fact he is the outreach and logistics chair for Our City of Colours. The Peak apologizes for the mistake.
