Blog: Perspectives

Monochromatic Tees and Apparel for a Colorful Spectrum of Social Causes - We were thrilled to hear about Social Cell Supply Co., a Canadian company which produces apparel and other goods, printed with typographic designs, with the goal of funding and raising awareness about various social issues. At the time of the writing of this feature, these social issues include racial, gender, and sexual equality.

For both Paola Harris and Christoff Visscher, their brands were born out of the sense that there was something missing in the tabletop gaming world.

Harris, a fan of Dungeons & Dragons, started her own online store, Paola’s Pixels, because she was unable to find any Dungeons & Dragons merchandise that was “cute and colorful”; the only things that were available were, in her words, “so dark.”

LGBTI Core Group and OutRight worked with the Free and Equal Campaign and allies to host the United Nations event "Alliances for Equality."

Issues impacting the lesbian community all around the world are often silenced, unaddressed, and sidelined. In this patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic world, lesbians face double discrimination: first for identifying as women and second for their sexual orientation. Lesbians who express themselves as butch, are gender non-conforming, or present themselves outside of society’s accepted gender constructs, can often face even harsher victimization.

At the beginning of April 2017, Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper, broke the news that more than 100 men perceived to be gay or bisexual were rounded up, sent to secret detention centers, and tortured in Chechnya. Reports since then have estimated that more than 20 men were murdered or died while in detention and the number of those detained could be as high as 200.

With the placement of a big rainbow-decorated sticker on the outside of the building, it becomes official: the barangay is now LGBTIQ friendly.

A Brief History: The CSW was founded in 1946 and is a “functional commission” of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). It advises them on issues related to gender and sexuality alongside UN Women (more details here). In 1996, the Commission became the lead monitoring role in assessing progress and gaps in the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (read more on this here).