She Turned Her Life into a Game: Iris Van Der Meule is Playing to Win

Well, first of all, I'm a lesbian myself and I've been out since I was 17.

I'm 30 now.

I came from a quite rural area from the Netherlands.

Now I live in Amsterdam.

But yeah, I experienced quite a lot of homophobia and discrimination living in these more rural areas and also the city where I went to art school.

And it happened so often and so much that it's Yeah, well, it started to feel a little bit fucked up to me that this was part of my daily routine.

And at some point I spoke to my family about this, about the things that I experienced on the street.

So this was mostly me just holding my girlfriend's hand on the street and we would get very... sexist comments but also comments that we are disgusting so I told my family about this and they were like oh we don't know this still happens in the Netherlands because Netherlands used to be a quite progressive country like we were the first country to introduce gay marriage so yeah my family had the idea that it was safe here and that it was okay here to be gay so I was like Well, that's not really true because in the social space, in the public space, queer people experience it very differently.

And that conversation with my parents kind of motivated me to start making Lesbian Simulator because I'm an artist, I'm an animator, and I already worked a lot with virtual reality.

And I thought, if I can make a project that shows the people around me what I experience as a queer person, maybe that can help in creating more acceptance for the queer community.

So that was sort of the birth of the idea.

And that's when I started the project, when I started researching what I wanted to say and stuff.

Yeah.