The Roots

So often stories of the LGBTQ+ experience center on coming out, tragedy, physical injury, or the trauma of being forced to comply with heteronormativity. Even now, with more diverse stories in media, happy endings are few and far between.

The Queer Joy Project is a a multimedia project that celebrates other queer stories: daily lived experiences, moments of happiness and serenity — each a form of resistance against today’s political climate. Through interviews with LGBTQIA+ subjects around the world and archival research, creator Aimy Tien reminds us not only of the world we are trying to build, but the community and happiness people find, even in the margins. LGBTQIA+ folx are not a monolith. We deserve to hear more stories than we have been told. We deserve narrative plentitude—so many stories that no single story or person has to serve as representative for the whole. We deserve to not just feel joy, but to share the infinite ways we have experienced it.

Rooted in a framework of abundance and pleasure, this project is for allies, for the curious, and for those reluctant in the face of social change. But most importantly, this work is for queer folx, a love letter to the lives that never got better, the lives that did, and the lives that are still finding their way.

The Work

At present, Aimy is interviewing subjects around the world and working on the first component of the project: The Collection. Are you interested in participating? Reach out.

The Creator

Aimy Tien (she/they) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist who fell into storytelling due to a combination of an irrational childhood fear of lions, a Val Kilmer film, and an overactive imagination. As an actor, writer, director, and producer, Aimy, a queer Vietnamese Chinese American, is driven by narrative plenitude, bringing the stories of people of color and marginalized groups to the page, stage, and screen. Selected collaborators and credits include Free Street Theater, About Face Theatre, the Guggenheim, PBS, and other national organizations.

She is a company member of 2nd Story and the founder of tinheart productions where they are developing multiple narrative projects centered on the intersections of race, healing, and sexuality. They produced the Cheri Oteri and Ashley Joyce led comedy series Zen Room, where she also co-starred. They are also currently producing Go to the Body a feature film focused on the stories of survivors and secondary survivors. She was recently a department head on South Side Season 2 (HBOMax / CBSViacom). Beyond producing commercials, industrials, and narratives, Aimy is a certified intimacy coordinator with IDC. Recent credits include Somebody Somewhere Season 2 (HBO), Single Car Crashes, and other productions.

They received a creative writing fellowship from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and her collection, Mosaic, was one of the top entries for the Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award. Outside of her film and stage work, Aimy facilitates conversations and workshops around the country on storytelling, queer advocacy, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. She is currently at work on a new multimedia collection, The Queer Joy Project, which will comprise of essays, poetry, personal narrative, film, and live performance . Previous work can be found in Sundog Lit, The Manifest-Station, WirehouseCo, and other publications.