There are spaces where the fire has not touched, where I find little or no space. The grocery store, under the unforgiving incandescence. I go at night and park close to avoid the jaundice light of the parking lot, the groups of men and their cars gathered at the edges, the aggressive machismo brewing trouble. I hit the needed aisles with precision, never strolling with Ginsburg or Whitman, feet always moving, head always down.
Independence Day at the fairgrounds where the throng of bodies moving in close quarters squeeze out that which doesn’t fit the mold. The combination of feverish nationalism and alcohol becomes a potent mix that never fails to combust. I watch from afar, reminiscing a youth spent sprawled on quilts staring past the red-chipped barn roofs into a coarse July sky.
The mall, the microcosm of the consumerism’s worst traits illuminated by piercing fluorescence and hard, unwelcoming floors. The building contains my body, hyper-visible, unable to escape the gazes of others or the memories amassed in a decade of working here. I won’t risk going.
I circle back through town breathing in the smoke from so many fires. The smoke has seeped into my hair, my pores, the fabric of me. The thick scent conjures faded bodily memories, summons in me the realization that no matter how I’ve tried to erase the traces of this place, the Ohio country has stuck like pollen to every inch of me. No matter how I’ve changed or tried to wipe the dust of wheat and corn from my being, I can’t. The mountains have opened my senses to a different way of knowing, of being so that no matter where I go or who I encounter, I weave them into the quilt of my past.
The city weaves into a patchwork before me, the fires burning holes that provide glimpses of pathways regrown and growing, membranes seeping and spilling, the ecosystem pulsating, glimpses of eternity. I know the story of this place is not a linear trajectory, not the narratives inherited from my ancestors, the writing of will onto landscape. The land is the land is the land, and while it has never been open, it has opened me.
In Rising Park, four hundred people spread out under trees and by the many ponds celebrating the county’s first Pride parade and celebration. The unusually cool Ohio June—free of rain and its usual high humidity—helps celebrants relax, let down guards so readily worn, guards that often keep them from participating in, let alone appreciating, the daily spaces they inhabit. When possible, relaxing in the summer often brings anxiety, fear, and violence to those unable to buttress themselves inside away from other bodies and the necessity of light dress. The day carries a peaceful density cuts through the usual tension. No protestors come to intimate; no preachers on bullhorns come to shame. For an afternoon, the tension rages on outside the confines of these bodies melded in hill, shade and tree. And in the center of the park by the largest pond, a new tree sprouts in the shade of old ones, finding room amongst all that is already present, the genesis of eons of soil, climate, and topography, the creation of the flux.
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