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I know that the particular timing of Pride weekend varies from town to town, but our homebase of Vancouver, Canada just celebrated its Pride this past weekend and that makes a good opportunity to make this post! We don’t have a lot of rainbows in our back catalogue, but this excerpt from a massive July 1996 colly does the job nicely.

Its artist, Etana, has worn a number of hats over the years – from SysOp of DODEL (Dreams of Dark, Enchanted Lizards – for a time, acting WHQ of Mistigris), to founder of our successor artgroup Hallucigenia, to administrator of Keyframe: The Animation Resource… all endeavours which rate a blog post, but I’m here to mention her most recent undertaking today: Tilted Windmills – a social justice initiative that celebrates wellness, creativity and collaboration, with a focus on gender, disability and minority rights. But she puts it best, so please let me stand back while she sets the scene:

When I first conceived of the name of Tilted Windmills—some years before I met Stefan—it was from a place of solitary frustration. As both an artist and a woman with a disability, I felt very much like I was railing at the establishment from the outside edge and that my ambitions were viewed as a little “crazy”.

What? As someone with a disability, I somehow thought I should be able to live independently above the poverty line? Contribute to society at large rather than be seen as simply a burden upon it? Live, love and create passionately and with purpose? Clearly, I had some kind of Don Quixote-complex, so I thought why not simply go with the metaphor.

And then one day I sat down to coffee with a transgender man and started what continues to be a fascinating conversation about what it means to live a life outside the mainstream. Our worlds and our life experiences have been very different, but Stefan and I have discovered a startling amount of common ground in areas such as mental health challenges in the face of adversity, trying to make sense of the barriers and attitudes flung upon us by mainstream society, as well as just trying to understand our own place in the greater picture.

I have come to believe that as human beings we are far, far more diverse and spectacular than we have ever realized. Whether you are ablebodied or disabled, cisgender or living outside the gender binary, you are part of that diverse fabric. In founding and re-envisioning Tilted Windmills with my partner, we hope to clear a space for that extraordinary diversity to be supported, nourished and celebrated, to take this unique conversation that we’ve been having between ourselves and invite you to the table.

Historically, anyone who chose to spend their spare time online was probably kind of an outsider, cyberspace a new territory in which escapist flights of fancy could be role-played – or where imposing power systems could be reproduced as elaborate power fantasies, the downtrodden now the down-treading. Due to its history of criminality, the digital underground wasn’t an especially welcoming or accessible place. As explored in our International Women’s Day piece, we did what we could in Mistigris, but an utopian sub-subculture can only achieve so much when both the wider society and even subculture are continually bearing down with negativity, oppression and regressive values. (Did anyone ever sign on to IRC using the Bastard-X client?) If you want to find a more just society, don’t head for the teenaged boys, is all I’m saying.

It’s 20 years on now and the online world is more and more congruent with its parent, the world… and whether you see it as having become a more or less just place depends on, well, a number of factors. Life is a complicated thing and the world is a complicated place, and so probably the answer is “both more and less”. But any way you slice it, it’s clear that there’s still much work to be done here before an online utopia is achieved – not just for the fair-skinned sons of privilege, but for everyone – and fortunately cyberspace is also able to provide a home for the conversation at Tilted Windmills (both at its website and its Facebook group)… perhaps containing the seeds of what tomorrow’s more just and respectful cyberspace might look like.