Names

I got this button pin in Oslo Pride, it is written "Jeg er i hvert fall ikke hetero". I was really curious of the meaning of this, so I asked a Norwegian girl in that counter. She told me it means "I am anything but not straight", then she further explained to me that, because the pride includes everyone who is not straight, therefore they made this button pin.

After reading Simone de Beauvoir and also Chou Wah-Shan, I started to further think about the naming of LGBT community. Of course now there are only few people would like to use the clinical term "homosexual", but in Hong Kong, the use of the word "queer" is not popular, instead, people use "tongzhi".

Chou Wah-Shan mentioned in his book the origin and the meaning "tongzhi" carries. It sounds really political correct. However, I remember one of my gay friends once said, he doesn't want to use "tongzhi", simply because he doesn't feel like having same will or same ambition with other gay people.

I keep on thinking about these "naming" and "label" issues for this project, hopefully I can draw some conclusions on my observation.

Why gay parade?

I suggested the topic "presentation and representation of gay parade", simply because of my experience in Oslo. Since I arrived in Norway as an exchange student, I have been looking forward to at least go to one gay pride parade.

However, it is rather difficult to search for one in winter time, therefore before I left Europe in the end of June, I could only go to Oslo Pride, which is a relatively small one. Anyway, it was still a nice experience. Not only because of the nice crowd, also because of the interesting use of symbols, colours, and of course, language. Therefore I think it would be an interesting project to explore the use of language in gay parade.

From now on, I will write more on the experience in Oslo, and the information of Pride London and Hong Kong Pride, which I gathered for this project.