Queer

"How does being queer inform your work?

I approach queer topics specifically from my non-binary gender, guided by the earliest experiences I have with this. This is reflected in my work, I explore the unexplored area of ​​queer identity development in childhood and depict it as a means of discussion and visibility."

This fragment above  is a part of the interview lines on the webpage at The Queer Design Club  about my link with queerness in both my life and work. If we take the term "queer" literally, it means "strange." And "strange" can be defined as deviating from the mainstream majority. In this context queer points at differences in both sexuality, gender and identity, which I felt ever since I was a young child.  Queer identity in childhood is  usually a taboo, but is especially complex when I was kept in forced social isolation in the Dutch foster care system. The 'upbringing; based upon far right principles of extreme violence, humiliation, exclusion and  isolation  I received over more than a decade,  suppressed every expression of gender, identity or origin. 

At the age of eighteen,  I realized  I would never identify as a man or woman or a girl. But what was this?  It only happened that four decades later there was a name for it: non- binary.  It brought me many problems both in society and with the Dutch authorities that violated all human rights to show their hatred in the eighties and nineties. 

But this wasn't the only resistance- even within the LGBTQ communities  there was contempt and even dead threats and exclusion. With 2023 the year in which I was suddenly welcome in the LGBTQ community I realized I didn't feel at home in a community that despised me for decades - there is very little room for queer people that are not according to the standard norms of the LGBTQ communities. 

So there came a moment from 2020, in my work the concepts of gender became more obvious and were used as a combination of processing as if they were entangled with  modern day perspectives on transgender and queerness- but it was not. Being violently raised against your gender of birth means nobody will understand the complex challenges you face in your life with respect to a gender that never really formed. That is the message in my work. It's however  not really  celebrating queerness, not even in childhood. When you look at the faces of the queer boy portraits ( the 40 portraits in pastel, created between 2021 and 2024) you'll always observe something that isn't gay: there is a hidden sadness in the story- a story unknown to others. How is it for a boy to  be forced to wear the clothes of a girl? To be threatened to be a girl as a body - aka forced transgender in childhood - and in the isolated position, disconnected from all boys around you? To be punished for every expression, gesture, idea that reveals your real gender of birth? But the time caught up with events: raising a boy as a girl suddenly became  almost normal and my experiences were suddenly invalid - would David Reimer's  story not count anymore either, I wondered?

Still, I realize I'm an outsider, in the queer communities, in all communities. I don't belong, and that doesn't matter, it also has a power in itself, undefined, not exactly in a box, in between, living in the twilight of  different genders, sexualities and identities.

In my work, boys play an important role,  they are mostly but not always portrayed as a metaphor, as a parallel, thus   showing my limited and disconnected world,  which I realize  is the aftermath of a complete disturbed  childhood that should never be. But will I ever be able to portray women, men and girls,  as I hardly am able to do? 

Still, I hope my work resonates with the lives and ideas of others, being oppressed only for there sexual identity, their unique gender or body expression or even for a deviant lifestyle that doesn't fit in the 'normal ideas'.    I always stated that you'll never be able to catch true diversity in humanity  in colors of a rainbow, in the letters of an alphabet or symbols on a computer. True diversity respects every person, no- one excluded.  I hope my work will show how queerness is a normal part of life for many 'common citizens', emphasizing my favorite  quote: "Love over fear". 

My link page at Queer Design Club