Intersectionality. A letter from Bekah Hesse: "When you think of the rainbow what colours spring to mind?"
Bekah and Kirsty the day we met.
Along with having conversations about racial diversity in the wedding industry, we wanted to move forward with conversations about the intersectionality with this and the LGBTQIA+ community. So, looking further into and asking how being from this community intersects with being black and, on a much fluffier but also important level, for Most Curious, how both those parts intersect with planning a wedding and telling people’s love stories.
So we are completely honoured to feature a beautiful, hard hitting think piece we commissioned on the reality of real life, living inside this intersectionality. Big, powerful, uncomfortable questions once again but questions we need to sit with, work through, listen and respond to. Bekah is West African British and is the singer in and lyric writer in band @blankfictionuk and lives in London with fiance Kirsty and their 3 cats, Jiggy, Cherry and Mango and dog Bertie.
Thank you so much to both of you. Thank you as well to Ava at @lgbtqequalityweddings in guiding me on being sensitive in commissioning this.
When you think of the rainbow what colours spring to mind?
What flavours, what feelings do you feel? Is it God’s small gift of beauty after destroying all the heathens, only giving mercy to Noah and his flock?
The chosen ones, the righteous, the worthy, the deserving, the pure.
Is it Pride? White gay men marching through Trafalgar square, arms linked with the Metropolitan police and their rainbow lanyards, behind a float sponsored by that bank that let you get a £3,000 overdraft at 18. You paid that off yet?
Is it messy rainbows in your neighbour’s windows that you spot on your one allocated outdoor activity, “rainbows for our heroes” and you think about who gets to be a hero and why we celebrate preventable sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of those whose skin colour falls on that part of the rainbow we don’t like to talk about. Your Auntie, the one who works nights at Newham General, did she consider herself a hero when she submitted her application to nursing school? Is she working from home? What about your Uncle, the London Underground worker with the respiratory condition, is he safe? Do you care?
We could talk about Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera and that messy evening outside the Stonewall Inn. We could discuss how no one knows what really went down that night, but we know it started a rebellion that inspired the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Pride parade of 1970. A parade that celebrated sexual and gender nonconformity despite the violence that they – we – faced, violence that was allowed and ignored by cisgender heteronormative society, and is still ignored today in 2020. I could tell you about Roy Hackett, Owen Henry, Audley Evans, Prince Brown and the Bristol Bus Boycotts of ’63. Boycotts that led to the passing of the Race Relations Act of 1965. I could lay it all out for you plain and simple but I’m not going to. If you cared you would know those names already, I am not your history teacher and this not a lesson.
This is a message about right now, today, here. This is about your neighbours, and this is on your doorstep.
I could tell you black is beautiful, and black lives matter and people should be allowed self-identify and use whatever gendered public spaces they feel safest in. I could tell you that being a Lesbian is special and how much I love my fiancée and that being a Non-binary femme has loosened the patriarchal grip of womanhood and the standards that come with it. I’m living in the margins, not following the norms, making music for you do dance to, coining slang for you to use ironically at work drinks and I’ll perform for you whatever you need and then you’ll go home, disengage, and revisit it whenever it is convenient for you. That’s the difference between you and I, life in the intersection. It never stops as long as you’re breathing, nowhere is safe.
Those tough conversations you’ve been having in the last few weeks, we’ve been having them our whole lives or at least since we found out we’d never be the chosen ones, we’d never have the mercy as no one had learnt to give it, our rainbow was man-made, there are cops at pride, my siblings are in cages and my aunties are being sacrificed in the pandemic, I cried. I also cried when that same Auntie told me that queerness was a “white thing” and I took that all the way home. There is nothing to be done but to try to stay alive and fight for those that look like me knowing they wouldn’t fight for my right to self-identify, but how can I argue with a caged bird?
What are YOU doing? Those of you not living in the intersection, do you elevate us, are you in our corner? Why are you not living for the people? How do you wake up every day and not breathe for the people, how do you put [RH6] on your factory-made clothing, and get the train to work without a thought of the people. How do you plan your “boho-chic” wedding party without a thought for those of us who weren’t allowed to marry until March 14th 2013, those of us whose parents won’t be at our wedding because to be queer is to be “un-African” but we scream black lives matter at every march regardless..
When did you stop hearing us screaming for our dignity, when did your ignorance become blissful, how does it feel to dance without all these chains around your neck?
Bekah would also like to highlight the following organisations, charities and Go Fund Me’s to donate to:
Colours Youth - One of the few LGBTQ organisations that is black-led
Blank Fiction
Bekah and Kirsty
Bekah with her Grandma and some of her family in Accra, Ghana.
Note from Becky at Most Curious
If you look at our feed and brand, you can see we have not really broached this topic AT ALL, which we acknowledge. This is not our lane, although we would like to be inclusive and representative of and in full support and understanding of these issues within our work. SO we wanted to talk to and lift up a person’s voice who’s experience this is, to begin learning, listening and sharing with our audience and taking on board this very nuanced, layered, raw place and experience. We were beyond lucky to almost quite literally stumble upon @planetbekah and Kirsty a week ago. They had come back from protesting on Black Trans Lives Matter and I saw them with their placards, carrying on their stance locally. The rest is history and hopefully the start of a long term conversation, especially as Bekah explained they are engaged too.