what’s queer about grief?

Written by Hosts of TNN’s Queer Good Grief peer support meetings

When we grieve, we grieve as our whole selves.

We grieve as who we are, where we are.

When grieving for our LGBTQ2S+ friends, lovers, partners, and community members, we might be grieving in silence or half-truths, not able to name the relationship for what it was.

Homophobia and transphobia might mean that we grieve in isolation, without a community of family, friends, and loved ones to hold us up.

We grieve our collective losses: generations of LGBTQ2S+ people lost to stigma, violence, and sickness.

Many of us grieve without legal protections that recognize our relationships and families as legitimate and our lives as worth living.

The resources that exist to support grievers might not see us as our whole selves, assuming that everybody in the space is straight and cis.

As well as grieving the people we have lost, many of us grieve the relationships that we had with those people and the relationships that we might have had with them, had homophobia and transphobia not gotten in the way.