ABSTRACT
In this chapter participants’ experiences of unbelonging, disconnection, and exclusion from both mainstream LGBT communities and wider British society are explored. I reflect on how participants navigate the disorientating British ‘commitment to racelessness’ alongside ‘silent racialisations’ and the invisibility and centrality of white heteronormativity. I explore assimilationist and homonationalist impulses that constrain possibilities for making space for understanding the intersectional complexities of being a queer and trans person of colour in the UK. The secularity of the Western LGBT project and the coding of queerness and transness as ‘white’ are considered, and how they work to separate and ‘save’ QTPOC, white-washing their experiences. I draw on Eng and Han’s concept of ‘racial melancholia’ and following Munoz suggest that this could be a ‘productive space’ to collectively address the possibilities of the intersectional richness of being a queer and/or trans person of colour.
