Queerspace: A Digital Safe Place for LGBTQ+ People In Burlington
As queer education continues to be the topic of heated debates across the country, the app Queerspace exists as an easily-accessible medium for LGBTQ+ folks and allies to access queer resources, education, and outreach.
Background and Inspiration
It can be really hard to figure out who you are when you don’t know where to start.
The lived experience of every queer person is different. For some people, they always knew that there was something within themselves that didn’t fit into the heteronormative, cisnormative world we live in. Others might not realize until they are well past their teens, maybe not even by the time they are middle-aged. For some people, there are hundreds of little clues peppered throughout their lives that they can only recognize looking back that were, in fact, very gay.
The lived experience of every queer person is different. For me, I settled on calling myself bisexual around the beginning of high school. Girls were great, guys were great, everyone was great, so that meant I was bi, right? Years pass and I’m in my twenties and have been on three dates in my life while some of my friends have been in long-term relationships for years. I’ve never felt the need to date or had the desire to date. I laid in bed at night wondering what might wrong with me, why I’m not going out and meeting people like everyone else in my life. I want to have someone in my life one day, but every time I’ve tried, nothing happened.
One day, I come across the term greyromantic and everything changed. Greyromantic is defined as “[referring] to an individual who experiences romantic attraction very rarely”, which means a person who is greyromantic might only feel romantic love one- two- three times throughout their life.
Finding that term? It was mindblowing. Euphoric. For the first time in a very long time, I felt understood. There wasn’t something wrong with me or broken in me after all. There was a name for what I was and it was exhilarating to know that there were other people like me, that I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I feel. By learning that, I felt lighter than I had in ages.
After experiencing this life shift, I thought long and hard about my experience. I stressed about my identity for years with emotional turmoil, and even then I only found the term by chance. It wasn’t easy and for a long time, I felt incredibly lonely, not knowing where I fit in the world. At that moment, I was struck with the urge to create something that could help other people figure themselves out in an easier, more accessible way. I wanted people to know about resources that I wasn’t aware of when I was struggling with my identity. I wanted to give others the opportunity to know where other queer people are in their area so they feel less alone than I did when learning this new truth about themselves. I wanted queer people’s lives to be easier, and I hope that the development of this app can do some good for folks in the LGBTQ+ community.
App Structure
Queerspace starts off on a screen with five buttons: education, physical resources, other queer media, online resources, and helplines and hotlines.
The education button brings you to a page that provides an A-Z list of terms related to the queer community. There are a lot of terms the app covers, so the page also features a dropdown category list to narrow down the results, sorting the terms into groups such as acronyms, dynamics and relationships, POC-specific, and sexual and romantic orientations. There is also a search function if you are trying to find something specific.
For most of the other screens, each specific resource that you select will bring you to a screen that summarizes the said organization or website. It will have a button linking to its homepage and, when applicable, there will also be another linked screen that gives a more thorough depiction of the resources the site has to offer.
The physical resources section provides information about locations in and around Burlington focused on serving the community, featuring resources both queer-specific and more generalized ones. Physical queer resources include organizations like the Pride Center of Vermont and Outright VT, while the more universal physical resources are organizations like Planned Parenthood and Pathways Vermont.
Other queer media features a few different things. Queering the Map is one of the websites featured in this section. Queering the Map is a platform that allows users all over the world to digitally archive their queer experiences by documenting them on a world map. There are thousands of stories told on this website, even a few of my own.
The online resources section provides information on many different websites and organizations that can be beneficial to queer folks. Whether it be medical information targeted at the LGBTQ+ community on the CDC website to the resources offered by The Trevor Project, there are an array of helpful sites conveniently and easily accessible through Queerspace.
The hotlines and helplines section offers ways to contact crisis and emergency services as well as talklines for when people need someone to talk to. Within this list, there are options to talk over the phone, communicate through texting, and through chatting online. The hotlines cover subjects including homelessness, domestic abuse, self-harm, and more and can be sorted accordingly for easy access. There are also some that are catered specifically towards youth, whereas others are for individuals of all ages.
Queerspace Now
Queerspace can currently be accessed as a fully-functional preview that can be downloaded onto your home screen. It can be accessed through the QR code below or through this link.
***As a note, I want to make it known that Queerspace isn’t just for LGBTQ+ folks. They are the audience the app caters to, but allies are absolutely welcome to download. Whether it be to better educate themselves on LGBTQ+ terminology or to access resources to help their queer friends, they are more than welcome to use it.
