Joan Nestle Don't Stop Talking 2

Monday, 31 October 2011 13:10

On October 1, Lepa writes me that that State has banned Gay Pride Belgrade 2011. The community feels a mixture of relief, anger, sadness and resolve. Already endless meetings, plans for actions are taking place in Belgrade. This is how I want to end this entry, with the images of hope and refusal to hide, with an image of lesbians from the region picnicking in the park, sitting on the rainbow flag that offers its defiant messages and the parting image from La Professoressa's and my last night in Belgrade, where young lesbians laughed and celebrated their freedom in the night air. That bar, so wonderfully perched on a street corner near where Lepa lived, is gone now--the economics were too hard--but this is the wonder of it all, the persistence of community, in the face of national hatreds.

What is happening here is of the greatest importance, it seems to me, for it is here that ultra nationalism and homophobia are emblazoned on the walls, it is here, at these contested national spaces where the threat of violence is so real, that gay liberation takes on its deepest meanings in our times. It is here where the State and the Queer Body stand in the clearest opposition--not the here of Serbia only, but the here of so many countries where we are marked as bringers of shame to the national narrative of power and cultural purity. I think in America where the problem is different. There wealthy gay men rush into the arms of the Republican State to pay them back for support of gay marriage, for unquestioning support of the nationalism of Israel, where we thank the State for letting us be once again good soldiers, this time without secrets, this time openly queer participants in the mass murders known as War. The State and the Queer Body, the Border and the Queer Body, the Policing of Others and the Queer Body, Nationalisms and the Queer Body. Oh my young thinkers, you have much to ponder, while the people are in the streets.

Izvor