Happy Pride Month! 🏳️🌈
June 2025 marked the first Pride Month since Galaxy Garden was officially launched in October 2024, so I would like to take this opportunity to celebrate my queerness in the context of personal blogging.
When I blogged for the first time in the later half of the 2000s as a teenager and secondary school student, I did not know I was queer, and I never even considered the possibility that I was queer. I live in a country where LGBTQ+ rights remain non-existent; I was not aware of any queer person among the people I knew before adulthood; there was a severe lack of positive representation of LGBTQ+ people in the media I grew up with; one of my teachers during secondary school was one of those "love the sinner, hate the sin" type of Christians regarding LGBTQ+ people and identities who openly expressed the sentiment during one of the classes.
Without positivity for LGBTQ+ identities and people around me growing up, it was virtually impossible for my child and teenage self to figure out that I was queer, despite the signs being present in retrospect. I had always disliked traditional gender roles, and I was told more than once that I was "unladylike". Even though I did experience attraction to women celebrities during secondary school, I dismissed it as a teenage phase and nothing more. While I did realiase even in secondary school that I had no romantic interest in boys, and in fact, I was utterly repulsed by any attempt made by classmates to suggest I was romantically interested in any boy, even as a joke, it never crossed my mind even once that it was because I was a lesbian.
That started to change after I graduated from secondary school and started attending university since 2010.
The seed for planting my journey of figuring out that I am queer was BioWare games. BioWare games were notable among Western video games, including Western role-playing games, for their romance side quests, including same-gender romance options. The very first BioWare game I played, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, also the first Western RPG I played, introduced Juhani — a lesbian character and the very first confirmed gay character in a BioWare game and even the Star Wars franchise, including the old Expended Universe known as Star Wars Legends after Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise. Star Wars: KotOR ended up driving my interest to explore other BioWare games, including the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, BioWare's most well-known original franchises that include multiple same-gender romance options as well.
My interest in BioWare games led me to seek out fan works and their fandom, and interacting with other fans of BioWare games on Tumblr, which became the blogging and social media platform I was most active on from 2011 to 2024. The queer representation in BioWare games attracted a lot of queer gamers, so the majority of the BioWare fans I interacted with on Tumblr were queer themselves as well. What those LGBTQ+ fans had in common was not only interest in the video games that were developed by the same company, but also openly and proudly being queer. Despite not knowing myself being queer at the time, I found myself at home with the queer fans. As a result, I started to ponder that maybe I was not cisgender and heterosexual either.
Compared to my teenage blogging days, my blogging activities on Tumblr focused much more on fandom-related stuff than my personal life, in no small part due to the dominance of fan culture on Tumblr. However, after interacting with other LGBTQ+ people and discovering LGBTQ+ resources through Tumblr for years, I finally figured out yes, I am indeed queer — I first discovered myself being non-binary and on the asexual and aromantic spectrum, then realised that I was a lesbian in my early 20s.
Figuring out my queer identity was one of the biggest turning points of my life, as it made me rediscover myself and changed my perspective on social issues drastically. It helped that around the same time I figured out I was not cishet, I also realised that I was autistic, which was another major factor in contributing to increasing my awareness to social issues, and shifting my politics further to the left. LGBTQ+ and autism are both marginalised identities bigots try to erase, but are both equally integral to who I am and how I interact with the world. In hindsight, despite not knowing I was queer and autistic before adulthood, both of those identities explain why I often felt and was made to feel like an outsider compared to my peers.
However, despite the challenges queer and autistic people face in society, meeting queer and autistic people online who are loud and proud of who they are inspired me to not be ashamed of my own queerness and autism either. In the face of a society that would prefer us to not exist, taking pride in our identities, living our best lives possible, and standing together in solidarity with each other as a community are acts of defiance and rebellion. The word "queer", originally meaning "strange" or "peculiar", has been used as a slur against LGBT+ people in English-speaking countries, but by reclaiming it, we use the word to signify pride and resistance. Yes, we are different, so what? We are proud to be different. We are here, we are queer, get used to it.
I have loved blogging since when I was a teenager. Despite having abandoned my teenage blog because of both the rise of social media and major life changes caused by attending university, my blogging spirit continued on Tumblr, which helped me discover my queer identity, and eventually in the early 2020s, through a post about Neocities and making personal websites, rediscover the web outside social media and Big Tech platforms.
In September 2024, I joined omg.lol, an independent web service platform, including its community, which quickly became one of my favourite online communities, with it being openly LGBTQ-inclusive being one of the many reasons. The omg.lol community includes a fair amount of bloggers, who ended up inspiring me to return to my blogging roots, and thus launching Galaxy Garden, this very blog.
Galaxy Garden marked a new beginning of my blogging journey, where I have grown to be an adult with a much better idea about who I am, what I want in my life, and much more self-assured compared to my teenage self, struggling with low self-esteem for years due to the bullying I suffered at school, and struggling with understanding myself, having no clue about myself being queer and autistic.
I love blogging because I love to express myself through writing, and it allows anyone to share their thoughts, feelings, stories and words with other people without having to jump through the hoops of traditional publishing channels. Censorship of LGBTQ+ issues still happens in many parts of the world, so us queer people cannot always depend on mainstream media to represent ourselves. In that regard, personal blogging is great for providing me an opportunity to talk about my queerness outside mainstream publishing, even if LGBTQ+ issues are not the only topic I talk about on my blog.
May fellow LGBTQ+ bloggers and citizens of the indie web have a happy Pride Month! May we all be liberated from oppression.
Reply by Email