Pure circumstance steered a night of photoshoot planning and go-go dancing toward meeting two very special queer womyn from Australia. It was their first visit to America, so  Hawa & I showed them a time worthy of our own border-breaking qpoc Mary-Kate & Ashley ‘Our Lips are Sealed’ knockoff.

Always browntourage-minded, we asked them to school us on their own experiences in the Melbourne queer scene. Here’s what they had to say:

Lesson 1 – “ETHNIC MUNCHER”

—n. A white-identifying individual that seeks out and consumes PoCs based on their enticing otherness usually and mostly to indulge their pseudo-progressive liberal ideologies. Allured by the PoC’s ethnicity rather than specific qualities, they come to only view them as interchangeable homogeneous entities that have no purpose but to satiate their appetite for exoticness.

Eg. “We are the snacks for your ethnic munchies.”

note: PoCs can also experience a similar hunger but that’s a story for another time.

THE MELBOURNE MUNCHIES

The scene here likes to think of itself as “multi-cultural” and accepting of all races and gender identities but we’ve personally found it to be anything but that (super backward race politics most of the time). Organisers and patrons alike are incessantly culturally appropriating and indulging in their privilege and just doing things that are not OK.

We know of many QPoC’s who have sacrificed nights out mostly because they’re not interested in a) feeling invisible b) feeling exoticised and/or c) having some white person being really unaware of their privilege in their personal space. This has been incredibly frustrating for us (and other QPoC’s we know) because most of us are minorities within minorities within minorities and so the need for a ‘safe’ space that acknowledges the intersectionality of oppression whilst, ya know, letting us get our dance on is kind of important.

The belief that we live in a post-racial society and that being queer makes you radical and able to transcend gender and race seems to make some people in this place think it’s cool to indulge excessively in our otherness or engage in blatantly racist behavior. This isn’t transgressive and it’s not going unnoticed.

So, when we’re in this so-called safe space and a person is bouncing off ethnics exclusively within a close radius, it’s usually clear to us that the homie has got ethnic munchies and operating on those racist ideologies. Understand that we’re going to need you to start inspecting those desires, because we’re not fooled, flattered or here to wet taste buds.