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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my third toronto

when you move often enough 

your body adapts to sinking in anew anywhere

your body is your first home

music steeps colour into places of all shades

music colours place

music plays you places you used to know

when you don’t belong in a city anymore

a forest will always accommodate you

your time is never wasted with trees

be kind to your seasonal selves

seasons of kindness

space for flashbacks

your capacity to sit with nostalgia equals your capacity to believe in the future

does the sand remember the heat of a long gone summer?

slow-cooking yourself

defaulting is a verb

you are on your way to the cliff

an ongoing, slight irritation in what the meaning of the word “now”

it doesn’t stop even though you’ll be in one place at a time

home is not a colour

home is the specific shape of a mug

home is the right water pressure and people’s first hug after a while apart

noise underlines flight

in silence, some find home

quietly marking some of the places you’ve scattered pieces of your heart prematurely ?

home is being able to count for the next day to come

feeling the warmth of a band-aid

wrapped around a forever-crinkled heart

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About the Author

Dr. Friederike [Fred] Landau-Donnelly (*1989, she/they) is an intersectional political theorist, urban sociologist and cultural geographer. She is currently a Visiting Professor for Social and Cultural Geography at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Friederike is interested in challenging the norms of what counts as academically valorized knowledge, understanding queering as a political practice of body and mind to write differently. With (t)he(i)r emerging practice as #PoeticAcademic, Friederike meshes academic and artistic methods and insights into poems, performances, sketches and zines.

Website: https://friederikelandau.com/poeticacademic/.

Instagram: @dr_fred_fld

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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: La Pompadur

Instagram: @la.pompadur