The Passion Behind Pride: Interview with QPOCTTT Ciara Havishya
I continually encountered criticism for being a capitalist for wanting to build permanent spaces for queer and especially POC tattooers from my white queer peers who had a lot more resources and privilege to stay more ideologically true to radical ideals. They simply didn’t have as much to gain from the legitimacy and safety of a tattoo shop as I and other POC did. That experience has been recurring in various incarnations, but ultimately I realized that white queer tattooers have a racism problem that manifests in incredibly dangerous ways for POC queer tattooers who have drastically different experiences of financial stability, respectability and family trauma
Ciara Havishya interview with tattoodo.com 2020. @la__tigresse__
Find them in Calgary at Bushido Tattoo or follow their insta for guest spots in Vancouver
Sex Symbols: Tattoos, Science, and Queer Visual Culture around 1900
“Tattoos were not merely signposts for criminologists and anthropologists; they were also critically important to the pictorial communication networks of homosexual men themselves, serving as discrete signifiers of subjectivity that allowed them to actively partake in queer communities. More often than not, it was men from traditionally ‘hypermasculine’ backgrounds who participated in tattoo culture: soldiers, seamen, workers, and tradesmen, some of whom had sex with other men only occasionally or circumstantially. Tattoos functioned to create community amongst men who were typically excluded from participating in more ‘respectable’ queer circles due to their socio-economic status, evidencing a form of queer visual culture that circulated in military barracks, shipping ports, and disreputable tattoo studios rather than in museums, universities, and theaters.
Ty Vanover, Genderblog, UC Berkeley, 2021
Read the original blog for more on the histories of scientific homophobia as they have intersected with the politics of queer visibility amongst queer men in 20th century europe
Life on their own terms: tattoos and gay culture
The type of groups that allow people to feel comfortable coming out as gay are typically the same that allow people to feel comfortable coming out as tattooed.
Out Front Magazine, Josiah Hesse, February 2012
- Dan Brouwer (1998) The precarious visibility politics of self‐stigmatization: The case of HIV/AIDS tattoos, Text and Performance Quarterly, Dan Brouwer (1998) 18:2, 114-136, DOI: 10.1080/10462939809366216
- Pitts, Victoria. “Visibly Queer: Body Technologies and Sexual Politics.” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, [Midwest Sociological Society, Wiley], 2000, pp. 443–63, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121386.
Andy Pollard 