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.
Jell-O Salad
Howell, MI
GABRIELLE MONTESANTI
Ask anyone from Podunk, from Backwoods, from Flyover. Find one of us redneck, white trash, Honey Boo Boo bitches. Talk to somebody whose dad wore a jumpsuit—either at the shop or in the slammer—and make sure their mama couldn’t help with homework past the fifth grade. Somebody who never had their own bedroom. Somebody who thought the county fair was vacation and Hamburger Helper was some real gourmet shit. What I’m saying is to ask the Lowdown, the Nobodies, the Hicks and the Hillbillies. Find one of us and ask. We’ll tell you about Jell-O salad.
Mine was cherry. Served in the glass bowl where Goldie died. Blueberries frozen like hail over a rocky pretzel wasteland. Cool Whip or mayonnaise to taste. Each year at Christmas, there were no chairs at the table, just a bucket of chicken and Jell-O salad for dessert. Paper plates, plastic forks, Grandma’s crucifix looking down on it all.
I’ve crawled through caves under Naples and dodged tourists in Times Square, but I’ve still never found a space tight as Grandma’s house. Cousin Cal always tried claiming the couch’s armrest; he’d perch there and squawk cuss words until somebody told him to get the fuck off before he breaks the damn couch. Aunt Susan camped out in the kitchen in case anybody needed a cup of well water tea or an off-brand Oreo. Aunt Donna sat on the floor in front of the La-Z-Boy to clip Grandpa LeRoy’s toenails, which were yellow and thick as quarters.
All nineteen of us cousins ate our Jell-O salad in the hallway, the only place we weren’t underfoot. We dug out the fruit with our fingernails just to chuck it down the laundry chute, threw around funny names for our future kids, like Ankle Biter and Butt-Licker. Most of us planned on staying in Nowheresville, or we just didn’t know we had any other choice. Cousin Jessica was perfectly content staying put even though she got called Hoebag by all the boys and Floozy by the gray-haired neighborhood gossips. Cousin Tony liked that his teachers remembered having his daddy in class and knew him as the most charming mailman in town.