The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Carlos Motta, a queer Colombian-American multi-disciplinary artist making his home in New York City, has launched and ambitious new web-based project called We Who Feel Differently. The project exists largely as an online database of documentary style video interviews with LGBTIQ activists/artists/academics sharing their critical perspectives on the battle over LGBTIQ rights from their own geo-political contexts (Colombia, South Korea, Norway, and the United States).

In addition to the video database, Carlos and co-editor Christina Motta have assembled a narrative text pulling on six major themes from the interviews including discussion on the limits of tolerance/liberalism, trans and intersex identities, AIDS activism, and much more.

Rounding out the web-based project is a sporadically published online journal with its inaugural issue, Queerly Yours: Thoughts and Afterthoughts on Marriage Equality, focused on opening up space for more complicated conversations about LGBTIQ investments in this thing we call marriage. Yasmin Nair and I were asked by Carlos to put together a piece for the journal about our perspectives on gay marriage through our participation with Against Equality. I was also interviewed as part of the video database of American LGBTIQ participants.

In Carlos' own words:

I am pretty enthusiastic about the scope and content of the project and hope it will serve as a good resource and document of different ways of thinking about queer politics. The project was conceived as a kind of "make document" project, and as such I hope it will be used by anyone that is interested in understanding the myriad of ways in which LGBTQ politics and activism have been implemented in different contexts. Hopefully, I will be able to lecture and travel to present the work and use the [web]site and book as a platform to begin a conversation in different settings about the themes in the work. It is primarily a resource so I hope it will be used as such.

As to what direction future editions of this new journal may go, Carlos has hinted at the lack of interesting and comprehensive work about intersex politics and believes the topic deserves more attention and consideration. But before we jump to the next issue, we've got hundreds of hours of video footage and journal articles to take in with this first iteration.