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. The last part dealt with how society provides Keya, a queer child with a manual for life that only teaches her heterosexuality, and how apart from people in her immediate surroundings, the media is also responsible for that.
In this part we now explore the differences that exist because of this invisibility and how the media makes being straight a far smoother experience than being queer. This part predominantly explores the lack of queer representation in popular media available to a child since society seems to deem anything that is queer to be inappropriate for children. The little representation available is also problematic for various reasons such as rampant stereotyping. In this environment of invisibility where a queer child has no clue about same sex attraction or is only exposed to negative or trivial connotations of it, how does a queer child even begin to realize her sexuality?
Credits :
Concept & Animation by : Debasmita Das
Background Score by : “Ponies and Balloons” by The Green Orbs
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.
