Ghost Talks!
GhostWriters is a team of 6 friends and colleagues from Greece who want to give a voice to groups that are underrepresented in the media. Our target groups are minorities, like People of Colour (POC) and people from the LGBTQ+ community.
As a team we have high hopes and believe in equal rights for everyone! To achieve this, we created a social platform- a newsroom if you will- which connects us with creators and people from the queer and/or POC community. For instance, one way of reaching out is our podcast and vidcast series called «Ghost Talks», in which we will interview said creators, as well as recommend shows, books and music that set a good example of representation in media.
Additionally, to achieve everything, we need to break some stereotypes. We need to give the opportunity to minorities to amplify their voice. We need to educate everyone on the matter of equality!
Not only our first interviews were huge successes, but they also made us realise that we want to keep doing it, and more importantly, we want to understand and help each individual feel like they are not alone.
We started by speaking to 4 different people. Our first guest was Stefanos Mwange, a Greek actor of Ugandan descent, who wants to break stereotypes through his acting and inspire young people of colour in Greece. He told us that “racism still exists very deeply in the Greek community, no matter how many things have been done and no matter to which field they refer to”, which made us realise that we need to start from our birth country and continue our way up. Next person to be interviewed was Brandon Wu, a Chinese podcast creator who we had met during an Erasmus exchange program. He thoroughly explained how conservative China is in the film industry, and how Greek people treated him as a person of colour. To be more specific, he did hear some comments about ‘eating dogs’ and ‘how every Asian is infected by COVID-19’.
We then reached Joanna Paschali, or biarctos on tiktok, a bisexual content creator whose main issue is LGBTQ+ discrimination in Greece. In particular, she highlighted that “It is hard to express yourself if you are a part of the community in Greece, which is a narrow-minded society, in general. People do not talk about their experiences openly because they are afraid of discrimination. Ignorance and older generation’s opinions are taught to kids from a young age.” Furthermore, our last guest (so far) was Steve Stivaktis, a queer transgender illustrator who gave us helpful advice regarding our work and spoke to us about his experience as a transgender man in Greece.
Aside from personal experiences and questions, we decided to talk about other issues that seem to affect the queer community. For example, queerbaiting and cliché tv tropes seem to harm the community’s image by misusing LGBTQ+ people to grow their audience and their profit. Clearly though, we can all understand that using one’s identity as bait is completely wrong, just like trying to depict a gay character as the villain. Tropes subconsciously make the audience hate queer people and think they are the bad guys. However, on the contrary, we could not leave shows that have a good representation of LGBTQ+ characters behind. The Umbrella Academy alongside Kipo And the Age of Wonderbeasts are some excellent examples. If there was representation in the media, like these shows do, it would be easier for everyone to be accepted, welcomed, and adjusted to the community with no fears or embarrassment. Plus, aiming at younger generations is of vital importance. Children should be able to grow up with such role models, ideas, and opinions. It is as important, if not more important, as aiming at older people.
To sum up, through this process not only did we enjoy ourselves, but also, we got to understand and learn about the people in front of us. We came across different cultures and we corrected linguistic mistakes that we kept making because of the exposure to the wrong media representation. We hope that we can keep learning along the way and that we will be able to reach our goals!
Until next time!
Marianina Deligianni Alexandra S Sophia A. evadinou John Reizis
You can find us on:
