Being LGBTQ+ In A Warzone (& Other Inequities)

In the days following “The Slap Heard Around The World”, with the topic dominating every corner of the social media world, one repeated comment kept catching my eye. It was always a variation of this sentiment:

“Can we please focus on people suffering from real violence? Or have we forgotten about Ukraine?”

While I believe the complex realities of the Oscar events warrants serious and informed conversation, and while I think we are capable of focusing on more than one issue at a time, I at least understood the impulse. After all, in the ever-competitive, click-bait world of the internet, our attention span seems to be getting increasingly small.

And yet, when I pushed a little deeper on several of these comments, I realized that their call for focusing on “real victims” of “real violence” had its limits. In one conversation, I decided to agree with the person calling for a shift in focus, saying something like:

“We must be careful not to get distracted from this very real and present conflict, where innocent Ukrainians are suffering and dying every day.”