“Safe space” for the LGBTQ+ community

Mayo is a member of B.G.U and is mainly responsible for editing, translating, and planning events. This year, they also started organizing a bunch of events called TQC (Tokyo Queer Collective), which holds a space for queer people in Tokyo to build a community.

They wanted to make space for events that happen during the daytime and not focus on a space for drinking because most of the queer events that happen in Tokyo happen in a place like Nichome, which is known as Tokyo’s gay district (Rickert, 2017), and happen at night such as clubbing or party events. It's an over-stimulating environment and hard to meet new people and talk to anyone who they don’t know yet if they are not used to going to these sorts of events. Through the events, they realized a huge lack of events or projects that are more center drawn to other media such as books or arts showing that they are able to provide a safe space for queer people. They mentioned the importance of creating a space and community for LGBTQ+ people in Japan.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b39d55_921f211c0b87438888be70230e8a01d3/360p/mp4/file.mp4

Now they are having different sorts of monthly events for queer people by queer people such as book exchanges, art fairs, movie nights, or seminars. In addition, anyone who would like to organize queer events can hold events in TQC. Consequently, building a community and creating a safe space for queer people is effective to support each other and work collaboratively to achieve equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community.