The inspiration for this Sim has as many facets as the big green plumbob. Please read on after the images for the rest of my story. Lea is available in my gallery ID Minraed

The very first twitch stream I ever watched was Lea Morgana. I was invited by BrennachanSims one day.
I adore Lea; they have a fun and chill stream of Sims (and other games), often times while getting dolled up in Drag. The community of followers (that sounds a bit culty, but you know what I mean) are wonderful, and many of them run in the same circles as I do so I am enjoying getting to know them. I enjoy a stream community based on respect, kindness and overall just being supportive. So… Lea became my muse for my #Sims4Pride feature project. She will also show up in Simmed Up Magazine in my Simatography article in the July 2021 Issue.

Thank you so much to LeaMorganna (EA ID) for letting me use your likeness for this and for helping to guide me.

So why is a middle-aged, straight married female so fixated on this particular Pride project?

I spent my young adult years in the heart of Toronto’s restaurant business. Many of us were misfits of some sort or another and in our restaurant we came together as a family that included one transgender female, one transitioning to female, one performing drag queen, another who enjoyed the amateur circuit. More than half the staff were LGBTQ and because of that I learned a lot about “people”; just the fact that we are all different and our way of loving and seeing ourselves in the world has so many wonderful variations, but we hurt the same, love the same. I am very grateful for that experience. I believe it made me a better person.

On a darker side I’ve seen my LGBTQ friends bullied, attacked, harmed, laughed at and more. I’ve lost friends who struggled to embrace or reconcile with their identity, others who took their own lives, and two who died of the complications of AIDS.

Perhaps the depth of the connections I have to the memories from this intensely impactful time of my life’s journey is why whenever Pride comes around I have such big feels. This is amplified here in my Sims community circles because so many who I have connected with identify as LGBTQ+ and once again I am learning to understand and empathize with the humanity and uniqueness and beauty and struggles of people who are not automatically given the right to be and to love and to exist without fighting for it. It touches my soul deeply.

I also would like to mention something that my friend Matthew said to me back then that stuck with me all of these decades later. Matthew was a stern intellectual type. He had a life partner and he enjoyed participating in the drag circuit and other events around the “Gaybourhood” as we called it. Yet, when it came to Pride Parade time, he wanted nothing to do with it. While I and many of us in our misfit family enjoyed the celebration and flamboyance of it all, Matthew explained to me why he and others like him did not. I won’t get his words right after all of this time, but it was along the lines of “We just need to be ordinary people and an accepted part of society without our sexual preferences being paraded around.” That is something I believe it deeply too. Ultimately I think this is what all or most of the LGBTQ community wants, is just to be seen as people. But for now, despite all of the amazing progress since my years back in the Toronto restaurant scene, there is still a need to shout it from the rooftops (literally) and the streets, and the tops of parade floats.

Happy Pride and a deeply felt message of love, joy, life and peace to all of you my friends. You deserve to be and to love as you were meant to.