Voices of Pride creates space for queer voices that refuse restriction, dilution, or apology. Through writing, art, and lived experience, LGBTIA* creators reclaim visibility, challenge inherited norms, and speak to the realities of identity, resistance, intimacy, and belonging.

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Disappearing Act

In late fall 1983, I walked across campus with my mentor. I wore shorts and an old torn football jersey, the only things I could afford from the charity shop. She turned to me and said,

“You know Paul, you should start wearing crisply pressed white shirts. And a necktie. Maybe change your glasses too.”

I laughed nervously.

“You think so?”

“Yes. You’re dressed like a homosexual.”

I froze.

My face went red. I could not breathe.

I quickened my pace, maybe to prove something, maybe to disappear.

They taught us to disappear back then.
Blend in.
Act normal.

Disappear like my friends who were dying from the disease they called the “gay cancer.”

For years, I practiced becoming smaller.

Silent.
Invisible.
Straight acting.

I listened to their jokes. Their vulgar comments. I disappeared deeper into the shame of myself.

Even my work disappeared.

I erased gestures. Softness. Desire. Anything that might reveal me.

But erasure leaves traces.

Now I understand: nothing about me was ever meant to vanish.

I do not need to resemble them to deserve visibility.

They may still look away.

But I refuse to become their disappearing act.

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About the Author

Paul Beaudoin is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, writer, and educator whose work moves between sound, text, video, installation, and performance. Based in Tallinn, Estonia, his practice explores fragmentation, memory, perception, queer identity, erasure, and unstable systems of meaning. Through repetition, layering, interruption, and slow temporal structures, his work examines how identities and histories are constructed, concealed, and transformed.

His visual and multimedia works have been exhibited and projected internationally, including presentations in Brussels, Berlin, London, Tallinn, Wrocław, and elsewhere across Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States. His work has appeared in festivals, museums, galleries, and public projection contexts, often emphasizing durational experience and perceptual instability.

His writings have appeared in Qafila (India), Queer Voice Project (New York), Anarkiss Magazine, Means Magazine, and numerous other publications exploring experimental art, queer experience, culture, and contemporary thought. Across media, his work resists fixed narratives, creating spaces where vulnerability, disappearance, desire, and resistance remain visible in unstable, evolving forms.

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Photography

The Voices of Pride campaign features work by Elizaveta Bogachavo, drawn from the project Ephemeral Reveries through the Alchemy of Queerness. You can read more about Elizaveta and the project here.

Instagram: @lisa.bogachova

Website: www.elizavetabogachova.me

Model: Mojo, the x y of z

Instagram: @riseofmojo