On love at first sight (or not)…

Helen: We met last year at a lesbian festival in North Wales called L Fest. I was hosting and Char was helping a friend who was performing doing some filming and content creation and I approached Char to ask how to say the name of her friend who was on stage. It was a funny spelling and it just wasn’t clicking in my head. Anyway, I ended up going on stage and saying it slightly wrong and Char wasn’t impressed at all, were you?

Char: Yeah, it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, it was probably a little bit of the opposite. But I still managed to find her on social media and give her a follow. I slid into the DMs.

Helen: She fully slid into my DMs actually. It was very late one night and I was at work and she’d noticed that on my Insta stories I was wearing something different to what I was on TV and she slid into my DMs with lots of typos which is very unlike her, knowing her now! I just thought it was a very odd message. Then I watched her story and saw that she had put something about natal charts and star signs and that sort of thing and then I thought maybe she’s not that strange. Then the 16th is maybe when I slid into your DMs.

Char: She did a re-DM slide back into me and then we just became best friends.

Helen: We’ve spoken every day since.

On balance…

Char: I’m a lot more laidback than Helen. Helen is very much a goal-getter, she’s ambitious and passionate. Those are the things that I absolutely adore about her and we sort of have that in common, so it’s keeping the balance between being a goal-getter and then chilling back and relaxing. Making sure we have a balance between everything we do for work, everything we do for play and making sure we rest as well.

Helen: We do. We’re proper like yin and yang I think. Char’s the calm, I’m the storm and then we kind of meet in the middle.

Char: Yeah, I call it roots and wings. I’m more grounded I guess and Helen’s more up there. She keeps going and I kind of keep her steady.

Helen: We’re big into the balance, we probably talk about it every day, how we can keep the balance in what we do. We’ve both met each other and realised that we’re exactly what we’ve always wanted and its finding that and then keeping that and I think the balance for us is key. We’re really conscious of it.

On #Chelen…

Helen: I don’t even know how that came about! I think it started as a joke and then it just evolved. It goes back to the thing where we started off as friends, then we got together and then we realised that we had passions that aligned and we wanted to work with each other, not just as a couple but as two people who enjoy doing the same sorts of things.

Char: We just wanted to bring both of our positive energy together and put some of that positivity back into the universe and we were like, how can we do this together?

Both: Chelen!

Helen: Honestly, it’s not just us! We’re not just saying it ourselves, people message us like, “we love Chelen”, and it’s so weird! It’s something that started off as a joke but it just works and it’s easier to put our message across as a couple if we have something that’s both of us.

Char: The message is to love yourself first, you get what you put out into the universe and if you can be wholesome, be positive, be good, be kind. Kindness is everything to us so we’re just trying to be kind people out in the world so send that message of be kind to each other, love each other, respect each other, honour each other, humble yourself and recognise that essentially we are all one. We’re all the same so if we can do it, we believe everyone can do it.

On social media…

Helen: We get that social media can be a difficult space to be in sometimes, so I think what we like to do with our platform is bring the positive to social media. We’ve got an event that we’ve created called Positive Influence, bringing together the biggest LGBTQ+ influencers to talk about how we can use our platforms to do good, to give back, to be kind, to raise awareness in the right way, for the right causes and be a role model in that sense. We like to think that social media can be good if your intentions are good and that’s what we like to bring to our platforms, that good, positive energy. We hope that people look at what we do and feel good, feel happy and feel inspired to be good and spread it.

Char: Every day, somebody messages me talking about how they’ve been inspired, or how they’ve got this problem and they need help with it and just having that platform and being able to be so easily accessible. My mantra is, “who can I help today?” so if I can help someone just by having that platform and being visible, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And that’s what we do together, we have these people who are, I hate to use the word ‘fans’…

Helen: We like to think they’re like Chelen friends.

Char: Yeah, Chelen friends and family!

On the LGBTQ+ community…

Helen: Being gay, growing up and realising that you potentially have another family such as your community is important to us. It doesn’t define who you are but being a member of the LGBTQ+ community and knowing that you can make a difference, that you can give back, that you can potentially be a voice for people who aren’t able to speak for themselves, we’re really passionate about who we are and a lot of what we do is about learning about yourself and accepting who you are. We acknowledge that a massive part of who we are is that we’re gay and if we can do good by owning that, speaking out about what we believe in, being visible then we are so for it.

Char: We’ve both experienced different prejudices, down to our intersectionality and for us it’s important to be a voice for people who haven’t got the strength or the power or the family to stand up for themselves. If someone can look at me and say, “hey, there’s a black, lesbian woman out in the world being positive and maybe I can too” then for me it’s about that because I want to be that person that I looked up to.

Helen: And on the flipside of that, I think there’s no one in the media currently that I know of or that you can think of on the spot that’s a feminine, powerful lesbian woman. We don’t have that representation and so people still to this day tell me that I’m not gay! They will say that to me and so it’s changing the perception and teaching people that we’re not a stereotype. We’re not just what you’ve seen in a film or the only type of lesbian that you see on television, we exist!

On Pride…

Helen: I think Pride for both of us is probably quite different because of who we are and our backgrounds, because of our different cultures.

Char: For me, Pride is all about authenticity, it’s about standing in my truth, standing in my power, being at the parade, being centre stage and saying, “hey, I’m here, I exist” you know that saying, “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it”? That’s what Pride is for me, it’s about not feeling ashamed of my sexuality anymore, not feeling as though I need to hide it and keep it away from people, being able to say this is who I am, this is what I’m doing and I’m proud to be me. I’m proud to be my authentic self and I am enough. I am enough just being who I am. That’s what Pride is to me.

Helen: We have to remember that Pride started off as a protest because being gay wasn’t legal. So many laws have been passed, not only in our lifetimes but before us, so I think for me Pride is celebrating the work that was done before I was even born, before I was able to be at a Pride event myself. Now it’s a lot about celebration, about coming together as a community and that’s amazing. It’s amazing that we have that opportunity to do it when there are still so many countries, so many people who can’t do that because it’s not legal to be gay, to be yourself, to be what you were born to be. It’s about appreciating the work that’s been put in before we’ve been able to do this and trying to make people remember that there’s still work to be done.