Читать книгу Sweeter Voices Still - Группа авторов - Страница 14

Cyprus Pride

Columbia, MO

JOANNA ELEFTHERIOU

When I was thirty-two and a graduate student in Missouri, a Greek Orthodox priest would tell me that being gay was not a sin, but more like being born deformed.

It doesn’t damn you, he said. It merely keeps you from some of the pleasures of being alive.

I did not think, at that moment, seated on the cushioned pew of a Greek church in Missouri, how little sense the metaphor made. Just as people with deformed feet cannot run, the priest explained, so gay people cannot touch the person they desire. I did not, in that instant, recognize the fallacy of comparing physical and cultural laws. I only watched the emphatic pumping of his shoe, as he kicked it out from beneath his cassock each time he said club foot. I did not, in that instant, think about the mountain Taygetus, whence the Spartans flung children who were born deformed. From that mountain, every Greek school student learns, children whose bodies did not match the Spartans’ ideals of strength and health were tossed. When I was young, we had driven together up the slopes of Mount Taygetus and stood on the spot where, I’d learned in school, the ancients had left their infants out to die if they were born sickly, or imperfectly formed. My maternal grandmother was Spartan. From that mountain I imagined that if I had been born two thousand years earlier and deformed, I would have been taken to the mountain by the parents that had given me life, and left on its glistening limestone for my flesh to become food for the jackals and the hovering birds of prey. Some accounts insist that in Sparta infants weren’t merely left, but hurled from the cliff, a brutal sacrifice made for the sake of the Spartan nation—for the strength and purity of the tribe.

I would remember Taygetus later, in the empty hours of spring break. But as I left St. Luke’s that day, thoughts scattered like birdshot, I wasn’t thinking anything yet; I sensed nothing but a blinding sun, and the heat of the steering wheel that felt suddenly foreign, and difficult to hold.

Father Michael’s message was not a new one. Since I’d first apprehended a whisper of the erotic pull, I had received notice of my self as unacceptable, impermissible—exactly what the church hymns and prayers referred to in phrases like dark pleasures of the night, impulses of passion, and turbulence of our flesh. I had felt the impact, and incurred imperceptible, persistent, devastating damage. What was new was that it was said out loud, directly to me. For years I had been told implicitly that my self, as it was constituted, was a problem, a perversion, and that my bodily integrity was at the mercy of a culture that required its members to conform.

It’s been three years since that conversation with my priest. My island has been awake for hours by the time I, in my Midwestern subdivision, rise and hunch over a laptop screen to wait for news. It is May 31, 2014, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Cyprus is having its very first Gay Pride Parade. Victorian sodomy laws remained on the former British colony’s books until, in Modinos v. Cyprus, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Cyprus could no longer keep a law that made sodomy punishable by five years in prison. I was fourteen when the court ruled in favor of Modinos, but Cyprus resisted decriminalizing homosexuality until 1998, when I was already in college. This is the Cyprus in which I spent my adolescence and half my twenties. This is the island on which I tried not to believe that I, too, was gay.

Between Nicosia’s long rows of towering palms, a sea of people moves, rainbows on their chests and on their backs, love in three languages: αγάπη, love and aşk. Limited as I am to what I can see on my laptop’s screen, it is impossible to tell which of the people are the Greek Cypriots, which are the Turkish Cypriots, which are the gay and which are the thousands of straight allies who have driven from all over the island for this parade. The island has been partitioned for forty years, and presence of Turkish Cypriots on the “Greek” side is radical in itself.

My friend Erika has ridden a bus from our town of Limassol into the capital, and when she calls to tell me she’s arrived, I thank her for marching for me.

“I’m not just here for you,” she answers. “I’m here for everyone.” She tells me she can’t reach the parade’s starting point yet because members of a group called the Pan-Cypriot Christian Movement (ΠΑΧΟΚ) are blocking access to the parade. The police have formed a line to keep the marchers safe. The “Movement” pays lip-service to the rights of all Cypriots “Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, Armenians, Maronites, Roman Catholics,” but in practice advocate only for right-wing Greek Orthodox Christians. Until I started reading on my own, I bought into the perspective of my conservative Greek school books, which presented Greek Cypriots as the only victims of intercommunal violence, and the only ones who needed their rights restored. From that conservative perspective, the Turkish-Cypriot minority had not been oppressed, and Gay Greeks weren’t really Greeks. In anticipation of the 2014 Pride parade, the archbishop of Cyprus made an official statement that homosexuality is, and has always been, an imported, foreign disease.

Today, all this is different. Today, the rainbow flags make gay Cypriots real.

Suddenly, I exist.

Children are raised up on their parents’ shoulders towards the sun at the same level as the flags and the signs: same love—equal rights. Above a first story of adult bodies, the bodies of children, the rainbow flags, and the signs form a second story of hope: homophobia harms you and those around you. Another says Kuir Kibris Derneği, or Queer Cyprus Association in Turkish. Another sign says, in Greek, FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT YET BE HERE. I’m sure it does not only refer to people like me, who live far away, in places where it’s easy to hide out, easy to wear T-shirts from gay events, and say that I’m gay, because no one will hurt me. Rather, the sign also refers to those who are living in Cyprus, but would risk being beaten or put out of their houses if they were seen at the Pride parade.

I never thought it would happen, not, at least, so soon, not before my hair turned white and my sadness grew so heavy I could not find a way back. During my eleven years on the island, I heard the word gay every day and always as a slur. Much later, when I moved to my progressive Missouri college town for graduate school, I began to talk about my love of women, and to refer to myself using words that I had learned as insults. In academic circles of twenty-first century America, I was called brave. It was sweet to earn praise for speaking so uncomplicated a truth. I felt, however, that if I’d had real courage, I would not have left Cyprus, where being gay was hard, and where pride parades were not safe.

The counter-protesters carry no guns, only banners with words. I spot the word for hell in Greek, κόλαση, and in English, disaster, along with quotes from American demagogues and from quacks: cannot be strictly genetic. Some men peer over the policemen, bouncing in place, yelling, “Hey! Are there gays back there? Eh? Are there gays?” They begin to shove the police, who are in their riot gear. They are hit by the men carrying banners of Bible verses, nationalist tropes about the blood of Cypriot martyrs, and translated propaganda from right-wing America.

The helmeted police officers lock their arms. Priests in their long black cassocks and their cylindrical priests’ hats try to stop the men with banners from beating the police. These clerics must not have realized that when they recommended banners that condemned gay people weeks ago, they were arming their congregation not only with words, but with sticks.

When a television reporter stops a man from the counter-protest to ask why he is there, the interviewee seems puzzled by the question, as if the reporter had asked why he was defending the country against an invading army. He answers with a question. What are they trying to do? Proclaim their… their… perversions?He doesn’t understand why they —we —aren’t hiding.

The appearance of videos and online reports on my computer screen slows as the parade in Cyprus comes to an end. Night has fallen in Cyprus and no one has been hurt. It is still daytime in Columbia and I want to watch more videos of religious, banner-bearing men. I want to watch even though it hurts. I will later ask myself what drove this compulsion, and why watching felt good. I will realize that it feels good to have proof that the hatred I feared was real. That this is what they do. This is what they would have done if I had let them see who I am. If I had been there.

When there is nothing new to watch on my computer, I go for a run in the humid Missouri heat. I think of my friend, the poet Carolyn Forché, who insisted that one person, one person’s art, can change the world. The year we met, I explained that I was trying to decide whether to give up my Orthodox faith or renounce my love of women and remain celibate because there aren’t any people who are both Orthodox and gay.

“Then you’ll have to be the first,” she said. I told her about the priest in Missouri and she said I should find another.

I’m running now, thinking of a run years ago when a pop song on the Cypriot radio said, why don’t you believe that I love you? Why won’t you come back ? And I, a teenager, felt it was God, speaking through the pop song, because he had noticed a hesitation in my prayer after a year or more of passionate, ecstatic prayer. I apologized to the pop singer (or Christ), and said I would come back. I wasn’t yet aware, then, of my homosexual desire, but I had been feeling the resentment the church’s rejection of that desire had produced.

Twenty years later, running on a Missouri trail, a trail that goes all the way to Kansas, I feel it again, someone asking why won’t you come back? I respond to God with a condition:

You’ll have to take me as I am. The girl I used to be, the girl willing to pretend she doesn’t fall in love with other girls, she’s gone. This is who I have become: a woman who sees the beauty of women as the brightest of all beauties. I can’t love a God who doesn’t love me this way.

I head back to the house, feeling like maybe that conversation changed something. It’s getting so dark I can hardly see but it is still hot, so hot I feel different in my body, different about my body. The endorphin-ecstasy that takes me over while I stretch brings with it a new way of seeing. I see that there isn’t love without body, there isn’t person without body, that this soul I used to associate with love isn’t real without the reality of bodies, of desire. I wasn’t just scared of being gay—I was scared of the body that responded to women’s beauty in ways my mind could not control.

When my sweaty self turns on my computer, I find that Erika has posted an image of the demonstration to Facebook, writing for Joanna Eleftheriou and all others who could not be here. For a minute, two minutes, I want to take down my name. I imagine my Cypriot neighbors shouting that I, a shameful deviant perverted lesbian, don’t deserve to be called Greek anymore—I have brought shame upon my parents, and must not be allowed into Cyprus, not even to visit my father’s grave.

I leave my name up. I turn off the computer, and go to sleep, changed.

A version of “Cyprus Pride” was first published in The Bellingham Review in 2018.