Student Highlights
Ivan Leonce, 3rd year BSW student
Ivan (he/him) is a Black queer artist, healer and educator, and is a 3rd year BSW student at the ßÉßɱ¬ÁÏ. He was born and raised in one of his ancestral homelands, Iere, land of the hummingbirds, Kalinago territory and moved to the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory in 2012 seeking a change from colonially imposed anti-queer laws in the Caribbean. His ancestors are the Afro-Caribbean, Tamil and Kalinago people. Ivan is completing his studies part-time through the distance education program at the School of Social Work, and works full-time as the Executive Director of YouthCO, a non-profit providing support and health education services to youth living with and impacted by HIV.
Here are some of Ivan’s reflections on pride:
Growing up as a young person criminalized in my own homeland for my queerness has informed so much of my relationship to pride – the word, the movement, the history, and the present moment. I did not have the language for it back then, but choosing to step into my identity – to welcome myself in its fullness – was to reject the laws of a people who were not my own, of a British nation who though no longer occupied our land, occupied so much of our ideas of what is good, just, and moral. In choosing this, I step into the history of pride – into a history of queer and trans people of our colour creating safety for ourselves outside a colonial justice system never built with us in mind. I try to honour this history every day in my work to decriminalize HIV non-disclosure here in Canada, a law that to this day still sees queer and trans people as those who are dangerous, rather than those who need protecting.
Pride to me is a remembering. An honoring of the revolutionaries within our own communities to whom we owe the freedom we have, and a commitment to them to keep fighting for the freedom still to come. It is an invitation to reclaim ourselves in our fullness.
Posted: June 18, 2021