A group of artists is bringing its project to explore gender, sexuality, and identity to the streets around Capitol Hill Block Party this weekend and posing some of the stickier questions in life to the crowds of attendees and passersby.
CHS watched Friday afternoon as #SelfID posted their work at the corner of Pike and Belmont and stopped people on the street to talk about how they identify their gender and sexuality.
“The goal of this project is to allow people to inquire about their own identity and in doing so appreciate the struggle and challenges LGBTQ folks face,” Yonnas Getahun, organizer of #SelfID, said. “Many of us take for granted the prescribed identity we tend to fall in to. It is not often when someone asks you ‘when did you come out as straight or how did you know you are male?'”
Getahun also helped organize the #caphillpsa campaign.
Getahun said the goal for #SelfID is “to continue the conversation about the complicated issue of self identification through gender and sexuality by showing the breadth of diversity in how people approach and describe their own identities.”
#SelfID includes 38 interviews with Seattleites answering questions about their sexuality and gender identity.
You can learn more at selfid.me.
One thing that I find so great in this video is that everyone seems so comfortable with their feelings and how they are so often wibbly-wobbly. They seem good with the ambiguity. A fear I have for the younger set is how intellectualized they try to make the subject. You know when you know and it is about your feelings and not trying to fit a label or several labels. I know some of the kids right now identify as like five things and it seems obvious that they are confused because of the lack of life experience and feel pressured into finding a label and feeling legitimate within it. Teenagers are often too young to answer these questions and need to be encouraged to feel ok about not knowing and maybe even, not caring to find out until they are ready. Gender, sexual identity, all of it, is not found through reading and intellectual pursuit. You know when you do.
OMG. Give the kids a break and let them have a weekend NOT thinking about their precious “identity.”
you act like thinking about such things can’t possibly be any fun.
It certainly is for the many navel gazers around here.