If you feel unseen, this is just a beginning.

Stepping into We Are LGBTQIA+ ESEA

I went alone on a quiet Sunday to Queer Britain in Granary Square to see We Are LGBTQIA+ ESEA. A community‑built exhibition about East & Southeast Asian LGBTQIA+ lives, developed with Queer China UK. I’m a new LSE student, and I carried a simple hope: that somewhere in that room I would recognise a piece of my own life, a flyer, a lyric in two languages, a photo that felt like the nights that shaped me.

What I felt instead was softer and stranger: not absence, but misrecognition. I could see “us” on the walls, but not quite on our terms. I was named, yet not held. If you’ve just arrived in London and felt out of place in a room meant for you, you’re not alone; that feeling is real, and it can be the start of a direction.

   

Opening Night: Named, Not Held

I’ll describe what happened, plainly.

Performance. At the opening of We Are LGBTQIA+ ESEA, a performer invoked the Rabbit God (Tu’er Shen) and raised a red balloon. The image was meant to bless the space and gesture toward ESEA queer futurity. I understood the reference, but the moment felt detached from lived experience. It read as an icon for the room, not a feeling in the body. The symbol landed; recognition didn’t.

Music. Two Chinese queer women, both international students, DJed after. Their set blended mainstream Mandopop and soft ballads. It sounded polished and safe. What I missed were the textures I associate with ESEA queer nightlife: grit, risk, the subcultural frequencies that carry memory and defiance (house/techno/ballroom/DIY edits). The curation made us audible, but not fully legible to ourselves.

Life drawings. A series of pencil life drawings depicted a British‑born Asian drag artist (Mild Peril). Technically excellent, yes. But the display reduced drag to outline. Without the caption I wouldn’t have read it as drag, no sweat, no blur, no camp threat or joke. A moving practice was fixed into a quiet picture. The label included; the framing contained.

What this adds up to. This wasn’t absence so much as over‑framing: making ESEA queerness neat and legible for a general museum audience, at the cost of the unruly, embodied elements that make our scenes breathe. The result was visibility without being held.

     

To the International Student Who Feels Far Away

There are distances the Tube map doesn’t show: the lag between time zones when you call home; the way your accent rearranges itself mid-sentence; the seminar pause while you translate a thought you don’t yet have words for; the dorm kitchen where five languages share a single microwave; the small panic of choosing a seat the first time you enter a society meeting.

If that is you this week, hear me: you are not behind, you are early. You brought ways of sensing the room that the room hasn’t learned yet. Your softness isn’t a liability; it’s your instrument.

I went back to the exhibition and read slower. After the wall text, I started reading the corners: a tiny shrine to chosen family, trembling with notes; a handmade amulet quietly etched with diaspora; a fortune stick that refused to be polite: Queerness is political. There will be no queer liberation without liberation for all. None of these “fixed” anything. They did something better: they opened a seam where air got in. I stopped hunting for mirrors and started listening for what can’t be captioned, the askew, the smudged, the untranslatable you have to feel to understand.

Learning to Belong (Slowly)

In this city I am learning that study is not a slogan but a set of small movements. A seminar becomes a room where someone says “take your time” and the thought arrives intact. In the library, a desk lamp opens a harbor over a page and my pencil writes, almost by itself: keep the blur, keep the laughter. Our methods classes begin to look like rehearsal: not proving, but trying; not extracting, but listening; not collecting lives, but accompanying them. Perhaps that is what we came to LSE for — to practice futures until they no longer feel hypothetical.

After the museum I walked the canal and sent a voice note to a friend; in the morning I underlined a line that steadied me; by afternoon I found myself in a queue that felt less like a line and more like a bridge; that evening, in a kitchen steaming with rice and rain, someone said “welcome home” without making a ceremony of it. None of this fixed the city. It changed the temperature of the week.

Belonging, I am learning, isn’t a door that swings open. It is a drift, a return, a map that brightens where we have stood long enough to warm the ground. If a room names you but cannot hold you yet, keep your name and keep moving. The holding will come, from classmates and shopkeepers, from footnotes and dance floors, until one day you realise the future you are studying has begun to study you back.

What I’m Carrying Forward

I didn’t leave triumphant. I left oriented. The city didn’t know me yet, but it had given me instructions: notice what doesn’t fit; turn toward those who do; keep building the rooms you needed. If an exhibition names you but can’t hold you, take the name and keep walking. We will make the holding together, across seminars and dance floors, bookshops and kitchens, until the map begins to glow where we have been.