“Love Is Love” Is The New Inspirational Track From Sydney’s Huntington
By Sam Eacott
Love Is Love. I’ve heard it a million times, and it’s a great slogan, but I forget sometimes that I didn’t always know this.
When I was a teenager, I had a very narrow selection of role models; the fabulous, zhuzhed up fellas on Queer Eye for The Straight Guy (all a bit too intense for a shy kid from Sydney) or the guys on “Queer as Folk”: exhilarating to watch, but at 14, I couldn’t really relate to all the stuff about dark rooms and open relationships. The potential role models were there (Ian Thorpe, Ricky Martin), but out and proud celebrities were few and far between.
This is slowly changing. The internet has given a lot of communities a home (for better and for worse) but teenagers these days don’t have to feel so alone. Safety in numbers. It has also meant that actors, news anchors, politicians, even sportspeople are comfortable living openly. This is a trend that, obviously, many of us want to see continue.
It scared me the first time I saw the words “NO IS OK” scrawled multiple times on the pavement near my house. Not for me personally, but for the 14 year old queer kid that has to walk past those words on the way to school every day, or the kid with a gay parent, or aunt, or brother. I was also scared for the other kids, the ones that haven’t practiced empathy a bunch yet, the ones that just don’t see our nebulous, large acronym as a collection of real people.
It’s that practice of empathy that I’ve tried to simulate in this video. As a straight white couple, if you get disdainfully stared at by a man in the street for holding hands, what would you think? That the guy is a bit mad, maybe woefully prudish? Replace the white woman in the relationship with an Asian woman and the stare picks up some nasty racial connotations. Replace the woman with a man, and you get what is unfortunately commonplace in Australia. I have been glared at, spat on, yelled at for holding hands in the street in the past. If this survey goes our way, it will be nothing but a sign, a signal to the queer community that we are supported. Safety in numbers.
If you feel like you might know someone on the fence about this, show them the clip. Give them an exercise in empathy. Also, I think the song is quite fun (I mean, I wrote it, so yeah). – Words from HUNTINGTON