CARRIE LYELL CONSIDERS THE IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS ON THE LGBTQI COMMUNITY

What a year the last month has been. Try as I might, I’ve struggled to write this piece; to make sense of the world we find ourselves living in. Not least because it’s really difficult to report for a monthly magazine on a situation that changes hour by hour. Each draft looks completely different from the one before it; my heart breaking all over again as I read notes I made just a few weeks ago, still a faint optimism there that this storm might have passed by now.

It feels as though there’s a tidal wave coming, and we’re standing on the shore, powerless and paralysed. It’s too surreal for words, watching as it swells and swells, our deepest fears come to life yet somehow worse than we could ever have imagined. The size and scale of the wave is overwhelming, the devastation it will wreak too much to bear. What will be left when it hits? What will it leave it its wake? I want to do something to help, but I’m not a doctor or a nurse or a key worker. I’m just a writer, and what use are words when the wave comes? I can’t build a boat, or teach people to swim. Instead, I wake in the night, drowning in my own anxiety, all the while knowing the wave hasn’t reached land yet. I think of my loved ones, scattered across the world, no idea when I might see them again. Certainly not for some time. I wish I’d held them longer, closer, tighter when I could.

COLLECTIVE VULNERABILITY

Everything has changed – very little is certain anymore. But there are two things I can say with confidence: I’m not alone in my anxiety, and there is not a single person reading this whose life has not been impacted considerably by Covid-19. In an article for Forbes, Jamie Wareham writes: “The LGBT+ community are always disproportionately affected in institutions, structures and crisis because they require a different set of needs. New research from multiple studies in both the UK and US has found evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic will be no different.”