The Poster Project
At the beginning of June 2021 in a month allocated to celebrating the LGBTQ+ community worldwide, a string of homophobic incidents occurred in Waterford city. On Monday the 7th of June, in the early hours of the morning, a Pride flag that was erected to celebrate ‘Pride of the Déise’ outside Menapia Building in Waterford city, was torn to the ground and burned.
The following week, in another act of aggression towards the LGBTQ+ community, posters were stuck around the city advocating for ‘Straight Pride’. The posters, which showed a newlywed heterosexual couple embracing, read ‘it’s natural, it’s worked for thousands of years, and you can make babies’. As an openly gay man living in Waterford, I knew this type of bigotry was not representative of the otherwise exceptionally welcoming county I have grown to love and call home. In response to these acts of homophobia, I put out an open-call for artists and designers to submit a poster in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
The response was nothing short of breathtaking, and within a couple of days I received over 40 poster designs that where printed and pasted around the city in an act of queer joy and solidarity, and so began ‘The Poster Project’.
The response was nothing short of breathtaking, and within a couple of days I received over 40 poster designs that where printed and pasted around the city in an act of queer joy and solidarity, and so began ‘The Poster Project’.
