Roy and Kelly Loves Tony

With the world becoming increasingly digitalized, it makes sense that there would be other pathways through with marginalized groups can find a space and voice.  In particular, Roy talks about the Internet being a powerful, yet flawed medium through with South Asian LGBT+ folks can communicate and support each other.  On one hand, on the Internet, you can often decide who your peers are by tailoring what content you post to attract people with specific interests in line with yours and blocking those who you don’t want intruding on your space.  Essentially, the Internet is an easy way to create a relatively safe space.  This, however, cannot take the place of a real-life safe space, since not everyone has access to the Internet, and thus cannot partake in the resources and meetups that are publicized on there.  I think that though the Internet is a convenient, it’s mostly convenient for those who belong in the middle class and above.  Furthermore, besides there being a digital divide amongst LGBT+ folks who have access to the web and those who don’t, there is also a disparity in the effort it takes to organize different demonstrations and events on the Internet and in real life.  On the web, it takes little time to make an event page on Facebook and invite as many relevant people as you can.  There’s a certain kind of connection with others that you can only get face to face, and while the experience of going through a collective struggle such as LGBT rights is something that can cross distances, a community effort caters to the issues that specifically apply to its substituents rather than the all-encompassing Internet.

ON KELLY LOVES TONY:

This was a really interesting documentary because I grew up hearing that once you have children, your life is basically done.  Nothing you do is for yourself anymore, and so seeing Kelly try to pursue a higher education while resigning herself to her culture’s emphasis of family above everything else was intriguing.  It was frustrating to hear how Tony doesn’t understand how much trouble Kelly has adjusting to living with his family, and how much of an impact having a second baby so soon has on her.  Though he cited Mien values to justify why Kelly should be happy with her lot in life, I could relate to why Kelly was so exasperated with him at one point because he always refused to see the struggles of having to balance two cultures with different values at once.  Furthermore, I noticed that Tony was always making assumptions about what Kelly wanted, and that those assumptions always placed the blame away from himself, which infuriated me even more.