The Victorian Commissioner for LGBTIQ+ Communities, Todd Fernando has said he doesn’t want LGBTQIA+ people to feel “disconnected from community” when living in Swan Hill.
Mr Fernando, a Wiradjuri man appointed commissioner nearly a year ago, considers it a priority to connect with regional and rural areas.
By creating more connections between people in the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies, Mr Fernando hopes to dismantle the cultural idea of a “hidden journey that in order to be comfortable about being a queer person or a gender diverse person you have to go into the city to find and connect with your community”.
“The reality at the heart of what that says is in a country town, you can’t be LGBTQ+ and we know that that’s not the case. We know that many LGBTQ+ people live in these areas. Part of the challenge for us is to figure out how do we keep them there and make them feel safe and connected and part of the community without suggesting that you have to come into the city.”
Mr Fernando, who moved away from his hometown, speaks of this journey from his own experience.
“I grew up in a country town, and I made that decision thinking that was the path. For me to have to go from my country town to the city in order to find my chosen family. And we see that play out in pop culture, in movies and books and narratives about queer and gender diverse people,” he said.
Mr Fernando said to make staying an option we need to understand what services are missing for LGBTQIA+ people in regional towns and where the difficulties in being gender or sexually diverse lie.
Mr Fernando said the “progress … we’ve made as a society in an urban environment just hasn’t translated to that of folks in the country” and to retain LGBTQIA+ people in places like Swan Hill, we need to reassess our actions.
“Part of the challenge … is the kind of the personality of what it means to live in a rural town. We just crack on, we just get on with it. It’s the ‘we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps’ type of mentality. And that’s great when the systems are there to support you in being able to lift yourself up and being able to just crack on with it,” he said. “But when you don’t have those systems in place to support you, often what we find is communities feel out of touch with other parts of community.”
He said part of making communities feel safe is altering services to be more appropriate through actions like the normalisation of “LGBT+ training” and more iconography “like a pride flag or pronoun badges on a person who’s working”.
Mr Fernando will be in Swan Hill on Tuesday, August 16, holding a workshop at 9am on the Rainbow Ready Roadmap in meeting room 2 at the Swan Hill Town Hall. RSVP at daniel@niche.org.au with any dietary or accessibility requirements.
