A man describes growing up without language for his identity, hearing only slurs like "homos" and "tomboy." He argues that representation matters: seeing yourself reflected in media and community spaces is how you learn who you are.
Chapters
I really feel I've understood this world, or this— how we technically call it— this domain. I think only in the last decade when I truly accepted that, yeah, this is who I am. Because, you know, Utkarsh, representation matters, exposure matters, and sometimes it's, you know, we use all these big fancy words, but can I see people like me growing up? Am I hearing people like me? Radio, TV, friend circle, chilling on Marine Drive. Am I feeling people like me? Like, are there conversations So this whole cycle of feel, see, think, hear, like what we discuss as consultants in change management. So even for change to happen, I need to— the child or the human needs to have these certain, like, you know, touch points. And you kind of didn't have that growing up. You either had one nomenclature that homos, that was the nomenclature I grew up with, or tomboy. Like, we didn't even have the nomenclature of lesbian or, you know, gay came in much later. Bisexual. LGBT, like much, much later.