- Youth Out Here Sri Lanka to voice out adversities faced by local LBGTQ+ community
In light of the upcoming International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) observed on 17 May, Youth Out Here Sri Lanka (YoHSL), a social service organisation, is preparing a campaign that speaks out about homophobia, transphobia, and biphobia in Sri Lanka, which will feature members of the LGBTQ+ community voicing out the challenges they face everyday and how they are adversely affected by the hatred towards their community.
Brunch spoke to YoHSL Secretary General Isuru Parakrama to learn more about the organisation and its plans for the upcoming IDAHOBIT.
Established in 2012, Youth Out Here was created to provide sexual reproduction education to young members of the LGBTQ+ community, and also catered towards people at risk of developing HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) as well as HIV-positive citizens.
When they registered the organisation in 2018, their values and mission remained the same, and carried on until 2019 when they began working with the Ministry of Health on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (shortly known as GFATM), providing HIV-related health services to MSM (gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men) communities, which continued until the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Parakrama told us that their organisation is best known for their online advocacy work.
“We have an excellent capacity for creating audio visual content,” he noted, informing us that on their YouTube channel (Youth Out Here Sri Lanka), there will be detailed videos of their advocacy work since 2015. Unfortunately, he told us, since the target audience for most of their videos are those among the LGBTQ+ community, these videos don’t reach the general public, so they remain unaware of basic education and awareness regarding the community.
Going back to their upcoming project, in conversation about what the aim of their upcoming campaign is, Parakrama explained that they hope to raise awareness of rights violations against LGBTQ+ persons and stimulate interest in LGBTQ+ rights work worldwide.
“We have collaborated with a platform by the name Cheer Sri Lanka to combat the issue of our video content not reaching the general public,” he stated, adding that their upcoming project will reach a larger audience than their previous ones. Since the pandemic, YoHSL was unable to carry out any of their campaigns over the last two years, so to make up for that hiatus, Parakrama said this campaign will be bigger and better than their previous ones, and they hope to make a significant impact with it.
These video clips to be featured on their campaign for IDAHOBIT will be created by members of the LGBTQ+ community that are of diverse backgrounds and social circles. Although this year’s theme for IDAHOBIT is “Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Rights”, YoHSL chose to keep aside the theme and give their members the chance to speak from a personal place, sharing whatever they feel is burdening them as members of the queer community.
“We will collect their opinions on what should be addressed, what the general public needs to be educated on in terms of not spreading hate, and recognising members of the community as their peers and colleagues,” he told us.
This approach will allow them to access many forms of advocacy, like claiming rights to live as their sexualities and to express their gender(s) freely, but also demanding to be from physical violence, from so-called “conversion therapies” to forced sterilisation of trans and intersex people.
Despite not sticking to a theme, the aim of YoHSL and the global aim of IDAHOBIT remains the same – to honour a day that reminds us that many of us across the world experience LGBTQI+ phobias in their very flesh every day, and that their bodies are being abused, thus ruining their lives. Their bodies are their lives and they have a right to live free and in dignity.