What defines us?

What defines you?

Who are we, the LGBTIQ community?

Artist iO Tillett Wright explores the incredibly rich diversity of personalities, profiles, people that we, as a community, are. Because that is what we are: diverse. There are no reasons, scientific or otherwise, for the LGBTIQ community not to be just as diverse as the rest of the population, and that is precisely what Wright shows with her project entitled “Self Evident Truths”.

“WE CHALLENGE YOU TO LOOK INTO THE FACES OF THESE PEOPLE,
AND TELL THEM THAT THEY DESERVE LESS THAN YOU.”

The name of the project comes from the very fact that it is a self evident truth that LGBTIQ people should be respected and allowed the same kinds of freedom than any other person in this world. She explains her project and the reasons that brought her to mount this enterprise in her emotionally loaded and intimate TED talk  “Fifty shades of gay“. The project aims at taking a “simple portrait of anyone who is anything other than 100% straight”. At the time I am writing this lines Wright has already taken 1740 portraits mostly in NYC and also in other bigger cities throughout the United States, their next goal 5000, and who knows why not then 10’000.

“ONE OF THE CORE IDEAS BEHIND SELF EVIDENT TRUTHS, IS THAT PEOPLE DON’T FIT INTO OVER-SIMPLIFIED BOXES. EVERYONE FALLS SOMEWHERE ON A NUANCED SPECTRUM OF HUMAN SEXUALITY.”

“THIS IS THE CIVIL RIGHTS FIGHT OF OUR GENERATION,
AND TOGETHER WE WILL MAKE OUR PRESENCE KNOWN.”