Tash T @ Breaking the Distance: Her Day Job, her Gay Job, the Most Curious Coalition and her LGBTQ-incredible Mexican honeymoon with wife, Marthe
At the heart of Tash’s work is a love story.
“Wow, I do lots of different things,” she says in response to my question. “What hat shall I wear?”
Tash works across various fields, harnessing various skills, but at the core of her work is love: love for her community, love for her family, love for performing, love for educating, love for travel and love for her wife, Marthe, co-founder of their blog, Breaking the Distance. Now, Tash is bringing all of that love to our Most Curious Coalition. What’s the Most Curious Coalition? It’s a group of diverse consultants hired by A Most Curious Wedding Fair organizer, Becky Hoh-Hale to aid in cultivating a more purposefully inclusive wedding fair. Tash led the inaugural meeting, which took place January 11th; we met up a few days later to discuss.
The first thing I learn is that Tash has a “day job” as well as a “gay job.” As we laugh together, she explains that during the day she works as a freelance Diversity and Inclusion facilitator and consultant. “That’s my passion; that’s become my mission.” Since early in 2020 Tash has been educating even the most stubborn of corporate workers in all things inclusion and communication. It’s not her first day job—Tash has previously worked as a personal trainer and dance instructor. In every one of her classes to date there’s always been two types of people: those who know what they’re doing and those with two left feet. A true educator, Tash’s preference isn’t necessarily for the clients who can hit the ground running (or dancing); often it’s the clients who need her partnership that speak to her the most. “I would always love the client who just didn’t get it. One client—I still train her and you’d be shocked to see the progress! The first time she completed a dance from start to finish, she cried,” and Tash cried with her—happy tears of resilience and perseverance. Those are the same people she’s trying to reach now as she enters into sometimes hostile, or otherwise indifferent professional settings in order to facilitate conversations around diversity and inclusion.
“I love the client who doesn’t get it. Even the ones who give a bit of push back—give me a challenge! That’s a whole new learning experience. It’s also about receiving an awareness—have you thought about how this person might think?” Even her own clients can educate her at times, showing her not just their stance on a certain point, but where they’re standing. “I find myself thinking: I never thought about that—I have to meet you half way.” Is it a rewarding day job? Yes, according to Tash, who relishes in the little moments of authentic connection. “I know [they] won’t remember and implement every detail,” Tash tells me, acknowledging that much of her work hedges on implementing life-long habits—more work than can be done in a single course—however, “if one little thing helps [them] reconsider how to communicate with a colleague, then we’ve reached some form of understanding.”
So about that gay job...“I have a really nice balance in that my day job of consulting is from home because I really got into it fully in the pandemic; my other job is in-person when it happens. Monday to Friday facilitating, weekends performing to real humans.” With a musical theatre degree guiding her steps, and an entertainment education bred from seasons aboard cruise ships—where you’re on whenever you’re outside your personal cabin—Tash has all the skills she needs to do “the work of empathy” as she calls it.
“Performance has 100% been a superpower!”
“It’s given me the tools—especially on Zoom—the stamina and personality to facilitate and stay on.” When she’s not using Zoom to balance education and performance, she’s on stages hosting Queer cultural events, such as the most recent Essex Pride. She tells me about meeting Priyanka and Cheryl Hole, famous drag queens who’ve both seen wide commercial success since their tenures on RuPaul’s Drag Race (Canada and UK, respectively). Loneliness and isolation have so long been integral to the Queer community; it’s wonderful to hear how everyone was able to join together to feel the love and commemorate the on-going fight for visibility, safety and human rights last summer.
“I struggle when I see people who are challenged trying to live their lives authentically; I find it really hard when I hear stories of unacceptance,” Tash says. But through their blog, Tash and Marthe have done their part to create a haven of authenticity, awareness and education through travel. Well detailed via Breaking the Distance, Tash and Marthe were, like so many Queer couples, an LDR! They met in Bali. Breaking the Distance was founded for the pair to remain connected during their first year dating long distance, but has become a prolific and beloved LGBTQ+ travel visibility blog. Originally from Holland, Marthe now resides with Tash in London where they both continue to serve their myriad communities, but Holland also feels like home to them both.
Were they pandemic brides? “Yes and no, we had one date and one date only and we did it on that date,” Tash tells me of their good fortune, while also sharing a bit of how the pandemic intersected with their wedding plans. After getting engaged on March 1st, 2020 in Bali on the spot where they first laid eyes on one another, they weathered the first lockdown together, booking their venue over Zoom. “We didn’t physically see it until April 2021, but it was the perfect venue for us.” Then their three-day event was nearly reduced by half! Eight weeks before the wedding travel bans were still in place in the UK that would have prevented Marthe’s family from attending. I’m nervous to ask, but…”EVERYONE MADE IT!” Tash assures me and I let out a breath. And a honeymoon?
First, they had to recover from Covid, which hit them and 50% of their wedding guests. “Covid came at the perfect time, if that’s even possible. We’d booked our flights, but nothing else for five days after the wedding.” They found it relatively easy to move their flights and while Tash doesn’t remember much of the first week of marriage—it’s all a blur of “—Covid, Squid Games and not [being] able to taste anything, laying in [my] childhood bedroom with the dog in the bed,” they did manage to pull together a loose itinerary that would see them fly into Mexico and enjoy two and a half weeks of newlywed bliss.
“Mexico was LGBTQ-INCREDIBLE!” Tash exclaims, making my Queer heart very happy!
Tash tells me a story that makes me believe that global efforts towards inclusion and acceptance for the LGBTQIA+ community are taking root. “We were in a restaurant, and we were all loved up and honeymoonin’, right? Like we were all snuggling with each other,” Tash— recalling these warmer days—shimmies deeper into her fluffy gray robe on this cold January day in London.
Tash and Marthe were in Burrito Amor in Tulum, “They’re really well-known for being THE burrito hotspot and there’s a real mixture of people in there. We were sitting at a table and we’re a little bit higher and we can look down on a table of a family—quite a young family—mum, dad, two children—a baby and maybe like a six year old. They’re not English; they’re speaking Spanish. At some point we’re kissing and the daughter sees us. She says something to her mum and her mum sort of looks and—and like in that moment, you know, Queer-fear kicks in and you’re like oh god, have we overstepped the boundary?”
I murmur my understanding: it’s a common fear, but Tash has assured me this story has a happy ending.
“Anyway, next thing you know we turn and mum and daughter are standing next to us! [Mum] said, ‘Hi, I’m really sorry to interrupt, my daughter wants to ask you something.’”
Nervous for what the child will want to ask them, Tash and Marthe awaited a translation from a suddenly timid six year old. The mother ends up asking for her daughter in English.
“She just saw you kiss, and she wants to know: are you in love?”
Learning that Tash and Marthe are indeed in love—and on their honeymoon—the little girl looked up into their astonished, joyful faces and raised her cupped hands to form a heart.
“Thank you, Mexico,” Tash says, her voice full of gratitude for her validating experience. She also tells me of a local man who was selling excursions at their hotel. When he asked what had brought them to Mexico, a honeymoon was first on his list.
“It was the perfect honeymoon—it did us proud it really did,” Tash says of the whole experience. We speak for a moment about how difficult it can be as a Queer couple to authentically and safely enjoy a honeymoon—a holiday where its difficult to fly under-the-radar. “Right? We asked ourselves, where can we go from a pandemic perspective and out of those countries where are we safe to live our 100% authentic lives?”
Because of this, Tash and Marthe had to let go of their hope to return to Bali, where Queer nightclubs have been raided in the last year and arrests have been made of its own citizens as well as Queer tourists and non-residents. “I was very fortunate to have a wedding that was 100% inclusive in terms of the preparation—I never felt othered, [or] felt I needed to justify or educate based on my identity. We are who we are, a couple in love. I would just love for everybody to have the experience we had or that there’s a space for that.”
Though Tash has no stories to share of homophobia or prejudice around her wedding—thank the Queer gods!—she and Marthe are no strangers to such impositions in their daily lives. This is what makes Tash such a strong moderator for the Coalition; speaking from the intersectional experience of being black and Queer, Tash is a valuable member of the Coalition for the ways in which her upbeat charm keeps the Coalition from becoming bogged down by necessary, difficult conversations and by providing input her personal experiences as a bride of colour, marrying her wife.
“The wedding industry is built on a lot of assumptions. And I 100% understand that our wedding was built on a lot of traditions because we’ve been fed that from Disney and fairytales—you want that too as an individual—but as an industry that cannot be the assumption. Everyone is different—you can’t make an assumption on the people walking into your space. [Be] willing to play, experiment, trial, try.”
“I would just love it when you opened a wedding magazine it wasn’t just Ken and Barbie—I see them enough.”
Tash was confident when going to the bridal boutique where she first saw her dress because the online models weren’t all white—she could literally see herself in her dress, even before she put it on. Tash didn’t want to feel like a stranger in the midst of her own wedding experience and encourages more vendors to do the work to make diversity visible.
”It’s about time to see that difference—every body wants to see themselves in aspirational things…we all have a vision of what that wedding looks like. And we all have a right to that.”
I ask if she has any more advice—for the weddings world, its suppliers, its couples, or even those she reaches out to in her day job. “If you’re thinking of going against tradition—you’re already going against it,” she says, succinctly getting to the heart of the work she’s impassioned to do: challenging our biases and celebrating our diversity.