Opinion Society

If you walk into the Stonewall Inn on a given night you will find a mix of every walk of LGBTI life drinking, dancing, and sharing. Some of them enter with the awareness that they are, in fact, entering a place of history. The majority, however, do not. Unfortunately, they have no idea of what the brave men and women did in order to help give them equality. They don’t know about that fateful hot summer night in June 1969, when their ancestors decided to exchange their freedom for that of...

Like a lot of queer kids, there was always this feeling of just being different. Like while the other kids would be outside playing football, I’d be inside choreographing routines to Madonna songs. At first it didn’t bother me much but as I got toward teenage years, I felt more and more alienated and unwelcome. My solution was to get away. So I focused on reaching that magical age of 18, when I’d be able to leave home, find my people, and be me. That new home was going to...

In July last year, a lawmaker from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Mio Sugita, said LGBTI people were ‘unproductive’. It caused a big problem. Around 5,000 people protested outside the party headquarters in Tokyo. The protests by mainly young LGBTI Japanese were widely covered by national media. I was proud to see the community publicly denounce homophobia. They were unafraid to show their faces and give their names. Some called this Japan’s Stonewall Riot. The 50th anniversary of New York’s Stonewall Riots gives a chance to reflect on the...