Video Release : A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Up Queer and Invisible

The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Up Queer and Invisible is an animated comic series that attempts to delve into the experience of a young queer girl growing up in a predominantly heterosexual world in which any alternate sexual or romantic preference is neither found in the society nor represented in the media available to her. I have used the form of an animated comic because straight privilege plays out in the most regular aspects of our lives, one of them being the media, we are surrounded by and I have tried to bring out the difficulties of growing up queer by unpacking the differences in everyday or commonplace situations for someone who is queer versus someone who is not. The media shapes our understanding of the world and most often reflects the hetero-normativity of society. And when it does so, it creates an invisibility of sexual and romantic minorities. This animation seeks to understand how this reality affects a queer child’s understanding of the world and herself.

Credits :
Concept & Animation by : Debasmita Das
Background Score by : Dog and Pony Show by Silent Partner

About Debasmita Das :
She is an aspiring animator and illustrator from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. A socially awkward extraordinaire, she likes exploring gender and sexuality in her work and plots how to befriend cats the rest of the time.