You lie to yourself all the time. You rationalize your decisions constantly. At a deep

7 min readDec 5, 2020

While it’s always been easy for me to find opportunities to bring my design skills to the queer community, it’s been harder to find queer community in design. I found myself wondering what does it mean to be a queer designer? What legacy have other queer designers left in design? Where do I fit in in the field?Today, the Slack we started has over 1300 members, and the online directory has over 600 people across all disciplines — inspired by sibling directories like Blacks Who Design, Women Who Design, and Latinxs Who Design.And that bias falls along familiar fault lines. Cis folks experience less bias than trans folks, white people are better represented than people of color. Men generally reported better experiences than… everyone else.

Deep down you know exactly what to do. But you won’t do it until you’re honest with yourself and really audit where your life is currently at. Often, the hardest part is admitting you screwed up and letting go of those sunk costs.

Be honest with yourself about what you want. People pretend to not want the things they don’t think they can get — wealth, health, love, meaning, so it goes. If you want these things, just admit that you just don’t feel capable of getting them, right now. Also, understand that you can get those things in the future.

“Handling an emotional crisis leads to greater wisdom and results in lifetime benefits. Fear of life is really the fear of emotions. It is not the facts that we fear but our feelings about them. Once we have mastery over our feelings, our fear of life diminishes.” — Dr. David Hawkins

Over time, you’ll develop a deeper awareness of these physiological responses and learn to manipulate them. Often, manipulating your physiology first can help the emotions follow suit.

We knew from AIGA’s design census that a disproportionate number of designers identify as LGBTQ+. We also saw that LGBTQ+ respondents earned less and didn’t stay in the field as long as their cisgender, heterosexual peers. But we didn’t have any real data on what the queer experience in design really was.

Your monkey mind tells you what you want to hear, but your intuition is screaming what you need to know. They sound almost exactly the same and you constantly confuse them, but they’re different.

If you’re angry, be fully angry. Truly mourn. Let that anxiety rise to the surface and see what it feels like for real. If you practice this, you’ll notice that the feeling eventually passes if you fully embrace it.Try smiling right now. You feel happier. Weird, right? Stand up razor straight. You feel confident and powerful. I forgot where I read it, but there’s this thing called the “doorway technique” where you straighten your posture anytime you walk into a new room. Boom. You enter with confidence.The more you’re able to be brutally honest with yourself, the better you’ll be able to navigate life. This is all about removing the extra emotional context from your decisions. Often, the most useful decision is the most emotionally difficult.

Do the thing you know you need to do deep down in your bones. This is a corollary of being honest with yourself. Bering honest with yourself helps you understand what to do. Fully trusting your intuition helps you carry the decision through.

Read the book Letting Go by Dr. David Hawkins for an in-depth look at how to do this. In the book, he talks about the fact that people never get over their emotional hurdles because they repress their emotions.

I’d been trying to connect with other queer people in design, to learn more about queer design history, and not getting very far. And so I had a Field of Dreams moment. I decided I was going to build something out in the world and bring the queer people to me.

It turns out that it’s true that in a lot of ways design earns its reputation of being queer-friendlier than other fields, but it still has a long way to go. Although queer designers are half as likely as the American workforce as a whole to overhear anti-LGBTQ+ comments on the job, almost 90% of our respondents had experienced some kind of bias.

When you feel embarrassed, you’re not experiencing a thought. You’re feeling something in your body. That heart sinking into your stomach feeling, fast heartbeat, blood rushing to your extremities to prepare to you run or fight.

I, for example, am a fairly basic factory model cis white guy. For me, “queer” is more of a political affiliation than a form of self-identification. The way some folks identify as culturally Jewish.

“Listening to the “unspoken voice” of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by “tracking” my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the “survival emotions” of rage and terror without becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally.” — Peter A. Levine

I’ve stayed close to the community since then — working with queer clients whenever I can, keeping what I learned in those early days present with me in my current job, and selling designs to raise money for queer causes.
This is something you’ll have to practice over and over and over and over again. Like I said at the beginning of the post, all of these practices are things you’ll repeatedly do but won’t ever get close to mastering.
I think that’s one of the most important take-aways from the count. When we talk about queer community, we’re not talking about a monolith, and we can’t talk about queer identity in a vacuum.

I grabbed a Twitter handle and tweeted my intention. The next day, I had a DM from a designer in Buenos Aires named Rebecca Brooker who would become my cofounder. She had been developing a similar idea, so we decided to make this thing together. It was almost a year before we met in person.

You lie to yourself all the time. You rationalize your decisions constantly. At a deep

Written by David Partho