“We only have each other”
Article by Ilirida Musaraj
Trigger Warning: This article discusses anti-LGBTIQ+ labelling; therefore, the content may include elements that some readers may find distressing or unsuitable.
Last month, the Prishtina Queer Festival took place in Athens. A festival of queer visibility originating in Kosovo, it found support in Athens through Costa Gjokrushi, creating a space where queer Albanians from Kosovo and Greece could come together through creativity, expression, and community. Along with events organised by the queer Albanian migrant collective “MIQ” and the drag shows of Aurora Paola Morado, these are the only public expressions of queer (Greek-)Albanian identity that I have witnessed.
Experiencing this event was deeply moving, precisely because the existence of queer Albanians has been systematically erased, not only in Greece but also in Albania itself. Homophobia in Albania was so widespread that it became normalized and rendered invisible, much like queer people themselves. Queer individuals were situated within a broader regime of patriarchal oppression that prescribed rigid norms of masculinity and femininity for all people—queer and cisgender heterosexual alike—and frequently gave rise, and continues to give rise, to forms of gender-based violence. Within this context, the very existence of Albanian gay men, lesbians, and, even more so, transgender people was unimaginable.
Later, in Greece, queerness became identified with Greekness, which was seen as something that “degenerates” Albanians, and it was often regarded as a reason for individuals to become estranged from their families, their communities, and even from their very identity as Albanians: “You can’t be both Albanian and a faggot.” The disclosure of one’s queer, gay, lesbian, or trans identity was accompanied by the risk of an intensified sense of loss. The first loss comes with migration itself: the departure from one’s first home and extended family. What remained to us—the family we managed to rebuild and the family we left behind—risked being lost once again by admitting that we were not straight or cisgender.This is why it is hopeful to witness openly queer people of Albanian origin in Greece, as well as the struggles of queer people in Albania and Kosovo. They offer us hope that we might one day “return” without silences and without losses.
To be both queer and a migrant is difficult. Especially for the first generation, we can only imagine the pain and entrapment brought by silence, and perhaps the moments of freedom that contact with queer experiences here could offer. And we can only imagine it, because (almost) no one ever speaks about them. This silence, just like the silence surrounding one’s origin, begins to fade with the second generation, which claims the right to a genuine existence.
Queer migrants can become the bridge connecting migrant and queer struggles, carrying across borders the need for solidarity. Unfortunately, up until this moment in Greece, queer and migrant issues are publicly linked almost exclusively by the far-right discourse. The two primary targets of the far-right are migrants and LGBTQI+ individuals, especially trans people. These groups are instrumentalized by (extreme) right-wing political forces in order to build a homogenized, national, and heteronormative “we” defined in opposition to the marginalized and threatening “others.”
However, this is a lie. There is no homogeneity in our society. First, there are multiple social divisions based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, etc. Second, LGBTQI+ individuals and migrants are neither marginal nor insignificant minorities. Migrants are a dynamic part of modern societies, producing wealth and culture. Queer individuals are also found everywhere in society, whether they are out or not. As my father says, “every home has at least one gay person.” If we add together migrants, LGBTQI+ individuals, the working and lower-income classes, we realize that those who are a minority in reality are the white, cis-straight privileged people who try (and usually succeed) to impose their own interpretation of society and their own experience as universal and dominant.
Against this, we can put forward a new form of co-existence based on the need to live freely, with dignity and safety. Without co-existence in common struggles, we ultimately end up being scattered “minorities,” easily subjected to exploitation and instrumentalisation. The struggle for trans people’s rights to legal gender recognition, formal employment, and pensions is the other side of the same coin as migrants’ struggles for regularization, citizenship, and full pension rights. Those of us who, once again, inhabit the in-between—bearing multiple forms of oppression while also standing at the forefront of shared struggles—need, now more than ever, an LGBTQI+ community that stands with migrants, and a migrant community that stands with LGBTQI+ people.
This article was originally published in the Greek magazine “ANTIVIRUS.”
