Concerned about the effect that the marriage equality postal survey and associated commentary was having on the gay community, Bellingen’s Cath Young started a fundraiser selling rainbow pins online.
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They were a runaway success. The first thousand were gone in 48 hours, raising $5000 for Twenty10, an organisation that supports people of diverse sexualities, particularly young people, to be ‘affirmed, secure, healthy and connected’.
As of yesterday (September 20), Cath had sold 1800 of the brightly decorated enamel pins via her online store, and she only had a few hundred left.
If you haven’t got yours already, you may have missed out.
“I’m probably not going to do any more, because the wait time is too long,” Cath said. “I designed them but they get manufactured overseas and I wouldn’t be able to get any more till the end of October.”
The campaign began as a result of a phone conversation Cath had with gay friends after the postal survey on marriage equality was announced.
“I’m very close to a same-sex couple in Sydney who got married in the UK a couple of years ago,” Cath said. “I was worried about them so I gave them a call. And this beautiful, strong, incredibly independent, high-achieving woman that I’ve known for 20 years sounded so devastated by what was happening that I was shocked.
“That someone like her – who’s got an amazing family, heaps of friends and a supportive community – was so devastated by what was going to happen as a result of the postal vote, it just broke my heart.
“I thought, if she’s this upset, imagine how it’s affecting young people. A 13-year-old living somewhere isolated and they’ve got no support, and they’re reading all this horrible stuff in the media about homosexuality being wrong and the next thing is you’ll be able to marry your dog.”
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Cath is a social worker and in a previous job she was involved in supporting LGBTI youth and setting up Be Young and Proud groups in Coffs Harbour.
She’d also previously done an Etsy fundraiser for asylum seekers featuring enamel pins, so when Felicity, her strong but distressed Sydney friend, suggested a similar campaign to support marriage equality, Cath was right on board.
In working out who to donate the money to, they came up with Twenty10 pretty quickly, and the design of the pin was also a collaborative process.
“Initially they just wanted something that said ‘Yes’ but I said it’s more than that, because there’s no guarantee that even if we get the Yes vote that things are going to change. It’s probably just the beginning.”
Cath feels the debate has demonstrated how rampant homophobia still is in Australia, so she wanted the message on the pins to have a longer-term design to say that it doesn’t matter what your sexuality is: love is love.
As well as being a successful awareness-raising and fundraising initiative, she’s found the rainbow pin campaign personally satisfying.
“For me, it’s like two parts of my life have come together – the craft, creative side and also the social justice side,” she said.
The pins may be sold out by the time you read this, but it’s still worth checking @mybeardedpigeon on Instagram or www.mybeardedpigeon.com