(QPOC) Melbourne: My thoughts so far

Hello folks,
First of all, thank you for inviting me to inaugurate the blog! I'm absolutely flattered by your welcome and honored to be a part of an ongoing dialogue with the Melbourne QPOC (and wider) community.

Before I talk about Melbourne, here's just a synopsis of what I'm doing for 14 months so that you have a bit of context on why I'm here (but feel free to skip over it to get to my thoughts on QPOC Melbourne):

My name is Miyuki Baker and I was born and raised in the US and recently graduated from uni right outside of Philadelphia at Swarthmore College where I studied a myriad of things but technically majored in studio arts (mixed media and performance), Asian studies and Chinese.  While at uni, I started the website Asian, Gay and Proud to interview queer API (Asian Pacific-Islander) folks around the world and post coming out stories by API folks.  It was really important for me to increase queer API visibility and provide as many resources to folks who were questioning or struggling to find community and empowerment.  I certainly could have used it when I was trying to come out to my parents.  After that, I became really involved with the local queer API womyn and transfolk group in Philadelphia, hotpot! and through that to a more national level as we went as a group to the annual national LGBTQ conference, Creating Change where we attended workshops and day long institutes. In particular, I attended the NQAPIA (National Queer Asian Pacific-Islander Alliance) institute and met a number of queer API activists from all over the US, learning about some excellent activism strategies and events being organized at the local level.

Here are a couple of highlights that come to mind:
The Visibility Project 
The Asian Pride Project

In any case, after a couple of years of being in these QPOC activist circles in the US and China, I was presented with the opportunity to apply for a year long travel grant with a project which leads me to my story today.  My project is called "Visibly Queer: Exploring the Intersections of Art and Activism" and I'm particularly interested in how the culture, history, politics and language of each country/city affects the medium choice of a particular queer artist/activist.  But what it comes down to is that I'm meeting as many queer artists and activists that I can, and then making a zine for each country. I've made zines for Ecuador and Argentina so far.  As the previous blog post said, you can follow my travel/project blog at heymiyuki.wordpress.com.

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Okay! So now we're here in Melbourne. This is my third city in Australia (1. Newcastle for 3.5 weeks 2. Sydney for 6 days) and I must say that this is the city I had heard the most about before arriving and was anticipating the most.  Burlesque, drag king and street art culture plus lots of vegans, queers, cyclists, thus a high potential of likeminded folks to meet and collaborate with!

What can I say? It's only been 4 days but already Melbourne has shown me its beauty and great energy.  On my second day here I attended the QPOC leadership and social change initiation meeting and was wowed by the caliber of people at the table with me and our discussions that followed.  A memorable moment for me during our conversation as it moved to the topic of holding "multiple identities" was when Mo said we need to figure out how to put all of the levels up on the soundboard and still make beautiful music (with our multiple identities that is).  Perfect. Another great point was brought up by Lia that there is an OBSESSION with race and color but folks don't want to call it that, and refer to it as "culture" here in Australia.  I'd say that in the US, folks don't even have a name for it. A lot of other brilliant comments were made during and after the meeting (including many about queerness and religion) but I simply can't emphasize enough how empowering it was to be surrounded by such a passionate and diverse group of thinkers.

Yesterday, I went on a bike trip with the local Queer Asian womyns group, the Yellow Kitties, and felt like I was back in Philly with hotpot!.  It was extremely nourishing to be in community.  This afternoon, I had coffee with writer Tom Cho and talked about the QPOC scene here.

Sounds a bit like a run-on list of what I've done so far but I promise to be more reflective in future posts!

That's it for now!

xx
miyuki