Remembering the 2016 Amnesty X Colour Youth IDAHOBIT action outside the Greek Parliament

[cw: brief mention of s*i /d**th]

Before anything else, this is particularly emotional to me because the person I was kissing for this action is Emily Voukelatou, not only a dear friend, but also an incredibly perceptive and necessary intersectional feminist that is now long dead. Before writing this, I was devouring the first pages of Max Porter's 'Grief is the thing with feathers', and 'tis the season to mark transitions, and converse with those dearly loved and also gone.

Her femifesto-of-exiting included these words now forever haunting a deep layer of the building blocks of values and duty: "there is no place [not even] within the LGBTQI community for people utterly destroyed by violence."  There is no place. I clumsily but vulnerably lament about her here. About our shared internalised death drive: about the duty to stay, and about the duty to forgive those who don't.

Here is a video capturing the action, and I am also talking a bit about it on behalf of Amnesty (and I radiate so much joy to be among some of the coolest people I know, being in community, doing important work). Note that the guards are talking to us in English because it was unfathomable at the time that Greeks would be misbehaving in this way.

[Note that it's unbearable to watch oneself (I do it once soon after in order to improve, but that's the maximum I can tolerate it), so if anything I say is outdated, I ...would not know, and well: I hope I know better now, and asking for lenience as this is the cost of exposure.
Alas, I misquoted a very famous poem while addressing the Greek PM once, so I know how humiliating this process can be.]

We organised this with such ease, and incredibly fast. Something that was only possible because of the tight and reliable connections we had as the counted, few LGBTQI activists in Athens at the time, during what could be described as a Spring for the movement. While this takes place in May 2016, by the end of the year, the first law recognising same-gender relationships in Greece would be passed. [And, scandalously, we kissed again. This time, inside the Greek Parliament. Symbolically, it was the four of us "leading" the two ECtHR cases against Greece (see here & here[*]). We decided to do this on the spot after I whispered the idea to the always battle-ready (and legendary activist, and forefather) Gregory Vallianatos.]

Since then, a lot of the central figures of that movement -- our peers, people our age; Youth -- have been massacred by the stress of the frontlines, by neglect, by self-medicating, by the many things that are not easy to describe but we (we) know and feel in our bodies. That low-vibrating nausea.

There is also a great merging of worlds happening here for me personally as by this time I am already living in London for a few years: I had already seen that a better world is possible now. Athens was (and largely remains) the topos of trauma; greek the language of trauma. Merging.

Even further: prior to this position with Amnesty - a great, great, great school, especially for someone like me that is an atypical candidate (I am truly so grateful they picked the "wild card" that I was): someone with a background in ...the Arts (Theatre/Film Studies), a ...wig-wearing working-class eccentric, and a grassroots activist who had previously assembled a direct action group called 'Pousti Riot' in Athens -- a spin-off of and a tribute to Pussy Riot, and a wordplay as "Pousti" means f****t in Greek. We had organised three direct actions [one of them here] against a theocratic regime (and the then rising neo-nazi party Golden Dawn that was closely affiliated with this particular part of the Greek Church -- note that Greece is not a secular state) that was openly dehumanising & hate-crim-ing us. At another of our actions, Mayor Michaloliakos of Pireus left from his own event only because we attended and intervened to ask some questions after he said he does not want to see LGBTQI people in the public space. Well. We showed up for a little visit. Good times.

More to say about Pousti Riot, about Pussy Riot, and all of our riots, about merging, about remembering (and the duty of), about splitting between worlds (of Athens, of London -- and more) and all of our dead (so many! too early!). But, for now, just marking this memory, and copying from the description of the video: 

Amnesty International and the NGO Color Youth, organized a kiss-in in front of the Greek Parliament in Athens for the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia & Transphobia. Syntagma Sq, Athens, Greece. Sunday, May 17 2015 Report: Tassos Morfis Camera: Yannis Drakoulidis Edit: Gerasimos Domenikos

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[*]= It is not easy to untangle how the people involved are interconnected, what Baldwin refers to here, when he proclaims that "the world is held together by the love and the passion of very few people". For example, the ECtHR case was under the wing of the Helsinki Monitor of Greece, an organisation that I have supported as a volunteer throughout the years, run to a great extent by the tenacity and "the love and the passion" of Panayote Dimitras, someone that I pay tribute to here, and who is currently persecuted and framed by the Greek government in a smear campaign (and more) because he relentlessly reports on how Fortress Europe and Greece violate the human rights of asylum-seekers (often actively involved in their deaths en masse).