Hope Tala’s Love Letter to the LGBTQ Community

This Pride Month, Billboard asked artists to write a series of love letters to their LGBTQ fans, highlighting what the community means to them, as people and as artists. Below, Hope Tala rejoices in the queer community’s ability “to be endlessly varied, containing every kind of multitude,” even in a world “that increasingly feels like a dystopia.”

The first time I can remember hearing the word ‘gay,’ I was eight or nine years old, playing in the sunshine the morning after a sleepover. I asked one of my friends what it meant and received a child’s definition — ‘when a boy kisses another boy’, whispered in my ear like it was something bad.

I was shocked; this concept was so far outside my understanding of how the world worked that it had never even occurred to me that it could happen in a way that wasn’t familial or platonic. I had never encountered anything that resisted the idea that a woman should be with a man so I didn’t consider that ‘gay’ could have anything to do with me until I was fourteen and began spending copious amounts of time trying desperately to locate that newly discovered part of myself externally.

Eleven years later, through the world’s progress (however insufficient it has been) and the intentional reconstruction of my own world, I’m now able to see and feel queerness everywhere. It was always there, of course, just not in my line of sight. The wonder of it still feels astonishing, the comfort immense.

In a world that increasingly feels like a dystopia where the political right is bent on destroying it, the queer community continues to be endlessly varied; powerful and vulnerable all at once, containing every kind of multitude. I am grateful to know queer people closely and from far away; to be inspired by them, to be able to live through the knowledge that they are thriving, laughing, crying, hurting, resisting, making food and mistakes and love and art absolutely everywhere. Now this thing that often felt like a source of fear and ostracization, separating me from the world I had always known, has brought me closer to the community I was always supposed to be a part of and the person I really want to be.

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