Lonely in two communities at once
Yes — we know. This is a particular kind of alone, and it has a name in the research.
Studies of LGBTQ+ newcomers keep finding the same thing: when services don't exist for people who are both queer and new here, you end up isolated from the LGBTQ+ community and from your own community at the same time.
You may have left somewhere you couldn't be yourself, arrived somewhere you finally can — and found that knowing you're allowed to isn't the same as having anyone to be yourself with.
Why it happens, and why it isn't a failure on your part
- The queer spaces here assume a shared history. The references, the jokes, the bars, the shorthand — built over decades you weren't here for. Walking in doesn't make you part of it.
- Your own community may be the one place you still can't say it. The people who share your language and your food may be the last people you can be out to, and sometimes they're connected to family back home.
- Everything at once. Credentials that don't transfer, a winter nobody warned you about, work below what you trained for, family asking when you'll marry. Any one of those is exhausting. Friendship is what gets dropped.
- English, or French, and the version of you that speaks it. Plenty of people find they're funny in one language and merely polite in another. Being funny is most of how friendships start.
Organisations that do this work properly
These people know the system, and several of them run actual social events rather than services.
- Rainbow Refugee (Vancouver) — supports people seeking protection in Canada on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or HIV status.
- Egale Canada — LGBTQI Refugee Support — national.
- Access Alliance (Toronto) — programmes and a maintained resource list for 2SLGBTQI+ newcomers.
- JIAS Toronto — Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, welcoming and settling LGBTQ+ newcomers. You do not have to be Jewish.
- SPECTRUM (Waterloo Region) — Rainbow Newcomers Connect, a social on the second Sunday of every month. Not a service — a social.
- ROAR — Reaching Out Assisting Refugees (Nanaimo, Vancouver Island).
- Reaching Out Winnipeg — resettlement for queer refugees.
- AGIR (Montréal) — Action LGBTQ+ avec les immigrantEs et réfugiéEs.
- Sher Vancouver (Delta, BC) — for South Asian LGBTQ+ people, their friends and families.
- Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (Toronto).
- Fondation Massimadi (Montréal) — Afro-LGBTQ+ arts and culture.
- Ubuntu — Black Trans, Non-Binary and 2Spirit Collective (Toronto).
- African Centre for Refugees in Ontario Canada (Toronto).
More organisations, by province →
If it's still not safe for you to be out
Plainly: you decide who knows, and when. If there are people here or at home for whom this would be dangerous, use a display name that isn't yours. Nothing here requires you to be out to anyone, and nobody will ask you to be.
And one room that's open right now
Lüvable is an online space where you drop into a room and talk to people. No algorithm, no matching, no swiping, nothing to download. You choose the name you go by.
The rooms are always open — Wednesdays and Sundays, 7–9:30pm EST is when the most people are around.
You won't have to explain the whole of your life before you can say something. The lights are on, and there's someone to talk to.