Sam Greene

Between the Folds: Autotheorizing Greek Queer Survival

Content Warning: Please note that this essay contains themes of homophobia and hate crime that may be upsetting to some readers. 

The day was gentle and expectant. It was one of those days with God rays bathing the white and turquoise kitchen, making dust swirl languidly in ways that spelled out afternoon siesta, but not quite yet, let’s just linger for a little while, awake. The air smelled citrusy and was warm on the skin. We were doing the dishes, bumping our butts against each other every now and then. I would come up behind you, ironically over-performing my deviant gender identity, and pretend to hump you. At that point I felt like an eternal boy riding his bicycle in short pants, even though I always cherished a floral dress and red lipstick. As nonbinary as they come, or a boi in drag, one could say. You felt euphoric, feminine, me coming behind you like that while you did chores. We had accepted that our gender consciousness had been systematically chiseled by a society that urged us to succumb unwittingly to preexisting molds. Thus, the least we could grant ourselves was not policing what made us feel warm and fuzzy inside, when we had struggled so much to internalize that feeling warm and fuzzy was a radical form of resistance. 

On days like this I would worship your body, play with it. I would bite your ear and pinch your love handles while you pretended to be annoyed. Eventually you would turn around and grab me by the waist, inevitably stronger than me, the clouds of your name turned into a jaunty kind of micro-thunder. You smelt earthy, of wheat and yesterday’s sweat. “Who’s laughing now?” you would cackle, tickling me and threatening to eat my nose, before ceasing to let me catch my breath, and asking me in a faintly strangled voice: “Do you think your mother will like me or will she hate my new sandals and my stupid toes?” 

I stared gravely at you. “She won’t let you step on her impeccably mowed lawn with those goblin toes.” 

I cackled while you simultaneously complained and fed the cats. It was teatime for them. The bedroom, smelling faintly of ammonia and lavender from the litter boxes, was filled with their infantile voices protesting starvation. The beige and peach tones of my surroundings had turned into lavish platinum from the sun that was pooling on the tiles, making my eyelids heavy with summer. 

I lay down and my limbs melted inside the swamp of bedding. The cats, their hunger now satisfied, found their respective places: Kate, your beloved chaotic black boy snuggled up on my feet, and Gatis, the grey beast that stole my heart six years ago, nested on the crook of my neck. I watched the small, wet gap between minuscule teeth and her delicate bearded chin as she inhaled the air I exhaled, or maybe the other way around, an antisocial feline with a babyish meow and a clingy disposition towards me, always saturating my loneliness with kinship, softness, boundaries, and conversation. 

It was nap time, and I loved the intimacy of the habit: drifting with family. 

* * * 

Mum brought us mushroom pasta à la crème, crackers with cheese, the fluffy lemon pie you had brought, and filtered coffee with ice. Seeing you for the first time, assessing and approving you, she looked like a little girl, graceful and timid yet playful, dressed in purple and orange, tired and refined, small lines framing her olive-green eyes as she laughed genuinely at our jokes. You had both been feeling nervous about the meeting, but soon the tension was diffused, and we leaned into the familiarity of the setting sun, the pleasant breeze, the trim lawn, and Lucy, the cherished family beagle. 

My dad, fat, thinning hair, charming and eternally boyish, took up space telling us stories from his army years. You engaged politely even though the thought of mandatory army service had been a cause of great suffering and anxiety during the previous winter, when you had to present psychiatric evidence to be exempted. My brother was getting ready for his army service and was quite pumped up about it. It was a thorn prickling against our family ribcage, his refusal to attend university and his admiration for all things military, conservative, and reactionary. The family mantra at the time was “the army will either do him good, force him to mature, or it will be detrimental and lead us to lose him completely.” 

The fact that he was joining us at the table, ostensibly carefree but looking a bit lost, had been a cause for surprise, as well as concern for the both of us. The house we were visiting, the home I had grown up in, was haunted with memories of violence, of children fighting viciously, of stationery and toys being thrown around with the intention to hurt, of breath-stopping word-punches in the stomach. His reputation had reached your mother who, creased with concern, had advised you to text her should anything go wrong. 

We had been together for almost a year, and our parents were either relieved and elated at the prospects of a heteronormative relationship or just genuinely liked us for each other (why not both?). The fact that we appeared like a genderbent version of our trans selves was not doing their fantasy any harm either. In their mind, I had finally settled for a smart, nice boy. How wrong they were! But still, it was a milestone of approval we were after, so that our historically turbulent lives could finally enjoy some peace, assisted by their emotional and practical support. The closet was the price we had to pay for the privilege of parental presence. 

In The Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick writes: “the fact that silence is rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the closet, depends on and highlights more broadly the fact that ignorance is as potent and as multiple a thing there as is knowledge.”¹ She describes the very state of “closetedness” as “a performance initiated as such by the speech act of silence […].”² Our silence had never been hollow, an absence of words: instead, it was theatrical, conciliatory, convincing in what it disguised, affirming of people’s assumptions, loud and provocative, a word play. Our existence was subtextual, we found shelter in the crevices of interpretation, we blossomed in the fields of others’ guesswork. 

My brother was measuring you up, and you were conscious of all the silent negotiation at work. You played your part successfully, humoring him and doing your best to ignore his try-hard racist comments. I could see the adoration glimmer in my parents’ eyes as it grew—you were even making an effort with their son! This was going well. 

The concept of being well held, described by pedopsychiatrist Donald Winnicott,³ became a buzz-phrase in—or maybe the conceptual framework of—my inner dialogue after I read The Argonauts. When on a later day my therapist asked me when was the last time I felt safe, I slid back into my childhood, at a time when we were still living in our first apartment with the bougainvillea entrance by the park where book fairs used to be held in the summer. I told you that up until my brother’s birth, for which I had been very excited, before our relationship went to pieces and had then to be stitched back together, I had really felt well held.

That was what I desperately craved on that evening, for our small family, for little us to be accepted, nurtured toddlers. I wanted to curl up between my parents in their bed and have them name me “good” in a way they refused to do six years ago. I wanted to let go, be honest, be transparent, and be loved not despite, but because of it all.

My love for my parents can take over me like a tornado, crush me, lift me up, throw me around. I hope someday I can find a way to openly be myself, without feeling derelict in the potentiality of their disappointment, of the grief for that long lost miracle kid that was once deemed to be deserving of a good holding.

I suggested looking at baby photos to complete this much sought-after Hallmark moment. I brought the Snow White, Winnie the Pooh, and Goofy photo albums from upstairs. They were laced with marginalia in childish handwriting, an early effort to take control of my life’s archivization. You laughed at the funny faces and poses of the gremlin in the photos, of my two front teeth and my pigtails in a photo where I am barely taller than my mother’s knee, standing next to her in front of an almond tree in full bloom. My parents’ narrating stories from my childhood, all this tender attention on me, felt reparative, intoxicating. They told you about the time I had lifted my dress all the way over my face to hide my embarrassment after my mum’s colleague had addressed me at her job, and about the way I used to ask questions and include the answers, like “Dad, why do we wear a coat so that we don’t get cold?” They then proceeded to reminisce about my brother’s childhood, a gesture of pure tenderness, unconditional, like saying “nothing you ever do will unmake you our child, a profoundly venerated creation, a bird in flight,” which made me wonder whether they would still love me if they knew about my gender identity. 

I took out my phone and digitized some photos. I then led you upstairs to my childhood bedroom, to show you my hardback and paperback treasures: my illustrated Jules Vernes editions, Enid Blyton’s Saint Clare’s series, and the pop-up book with Donald Duck about ancient Egypt. The house I grew up in was a strange kind of dollhouse, structured yet minimalist, modern yet immaculate, like the cover of a glossy interior design magazine, or an exhibition at a design museum. I had always worked diligently to turn my room into a maximalist woodland utopia, with posters on the ceiling when I was a kid, and fairy lights, garlands, and impressionist prints as a teenager. Apart from my books, there were no remnants that revealed I had once been the owner of the room. I was okay with that. My parents were paying my bills, catering to my need to live alone from an early age, to get away from my brother and their own conservative beliefs. They deserved a utility room, and I was okay with my mother using my childhood bedroom as another redecorating project to satisfy her unparalleled passion for interior design. A passion which I seemed to have inherited, only mine focused on the more colorful, cottagecore, chocolate-box end of the spectrum, which would never fail to give her a killer headache. 

Kitsch has always been my mother’s nemesis, filling her nightmares with polychromy and mayhem. She would watch videos of minimalist villas on TV during family gatherings, eagerly inviting my grandmother and aunts into her Bauhaus realm. I was glad to see her get so pumped up about something, although I had always dreamed of growing up in the Burrow instead, with all the scruffy Weasley boots lined at the entrance, a place bustling with life, a place filled with people and things, a family music box made for containing. Her almost masculine love for functionality and symmetry made me feel hollow, and I often, almost rigidly, expected her to change. Why don’t you braid your words with flowers, mum? Why do you show your love by cooking for me, why don’t you tell me you love me so much it’s making your head swell, why don’t you become a poet in my own love language? Why did you weep when you first read my poetry?

“Stereotypically ’women’s tastes’ still stand outside the ’true’ canon of aesthetic values of the dominant culture … characterized as they so often are by gilt and glitter, soft pastel colors, rich textures, ’frilly’ decorative effects, and a general sense of cosiness.”⁴

If masculinity is considered to be unmarked, natural, and the artificial that beautifies (my pink hair), considered to be kitsch, decadent, feminine,⁵ so much so that it made you not talk to me for two months (maybe there is such a thing as too feminine, as so feminine that it becomes deviant, perverse, genderfluid), then how did I, out of the two of us, end up being the not-woman, mom?

It’s queer, isn’t it?

* * *

The Monastiraki square was bustling with voices, colors, and scents: piss, wet grass, and the sizzling odour of gyros penetrating our face masks. The heat was sweltering and the size of the crowd inconceivable in the time of a pandemic. People were too tired of the restrictive measures that had been enforced during the year, and now it was finally summer, which meant that in the face of tourists flooding the country, Covid-19 suddenly stopped being the kind of hazard that required my grandma to spend the last few years of her life in isolation. Few were wearing face masks, and everyone was nursing ice cream in cones or with takeaway mini waffles. All these people scared us—after all, we had spent more than a year living like hermits in the small merry bubble of our home. We clung tightly to the protection of our masks and waited in queue for our ice cream, at the place I used to frequent when I was with him. We said we would reclaim it together, and you spent the waiting time joking about the beeper they had given us to notify us when our order was ready, pretending you were a Luddite both hostile and in awe of those fancy blipping gadgets. 

We nibbled on our waffle bites, cheesecake and panettone ice cream on a bench at Plaka, our backs turned to the ancient city and all its cats. I took photos of you eating your ice cream and then we set to walk around, our clothes sticking on our skin with sweat, our temples damp from the hats we were wearing. We walked around the busy and loud open-air market, inhaled the antiquarian scent of forgotten objects, walked among vintage typewriters with Greek keyboards, a metal commemorative goblet from Brown University, Soviet pins, silky Louis XVI chairs in pastel colors, old photographs and books, vases and teacups with intricate illustrations of the countryside, a cello without strings and a diving bell turned into a lamp. 

What followed was a visit to a second-hand bookshop in Thisseio, a small nebula of old things. You bought nine hardbacks of Don Rossa comics and I bought a rare feminist fanzine from the ’70s, fiery and frail, in its protective plastic case. You and I walked into a park under the Acropolis to take a break from the heat and rest by the shadow of trees. You had a new phone and we played with its camera, making faces, and taking selfies. By then, the sun had started to set, turning the Parthenon and the tops of buildings the color of peach sorbet. We could hear the languorous song of cicadas and feel the golden light that peered through the branches soft on our faces. 

The headquarters of the queer activist group I had brought you to after we started hanging out was nearby. The sky was peach, and I remembered it pouring onto the dome of the church we could see from the windows by which you used to sit and smoke. Back then we were just friends. I remembered the cobblestone street leading to the office, the tourist tavernas and the cafés with chairs and tables out on the pavement, the tobacco shop with the engraved pipes and the new age shop with the mandala wall hangings and the incense. It had been years since I last set foot there, trying to escape memories and the juxtapositions between now and then that made me feel old. I thought of a passage from Paul Preciado’s essay “An Apartment on Uranus”: 

“I have not come for that. As my indigenous Chilean mother Pedro Lemebel said, I do not know why I come, but I am here. In this Uranian apartment that overlooks the gardens of Athens. And I’ll stay a while. At the crossroads. Because intersection is the only place that exists. There are no opposite shores. We are always at the crossing of paths. And it is from this crossroad that I address you, like the monster who has learned the language of humans.”⁶

In what language could I speak about the city that annihilated me and nurtured me at the same time?

Back then, part of me still missed him.

Back then you were my world, but he was still my centre of Athens.

You were there to pick up the pieces when he left, so I spent the following years writing letters of gratitude to you, from our shared bedroom.

* * *

Each time I returned from a trip where I had gone either alone or with my then- boyfriend, George, I insisted on walking with eyes closed, in denial about being back in Athens. We used to get into the train like that, hand in hand, and I would complain with the drama of a consumptive Victorian character that my own lungs were suffocating me, and I just had to go back: to Marais, to Ballyboden, to Tokyo Garden at London, to places with cherry trees, because Neruda must have been onto something.

No greater tragedy existed than the absence of cherry trees from Athens. Almond trees were good enough, although ephemeral, blooming in the cold of February to announce the upcoming spring, but they had been tainted by the Greek educational system and its obsession with making collages of almond blossoms out of twigs and popcorn.

Athens felt to me like prison, like national exams that killed all freedom and creativity. I used to pick fights with aunts and grannies at the family table, trying to convince these women who had lived so many winters surrounded by the turquoise blanket of the Mediterranean, with its songs of love and its jolly dances, with brothers fallen at the resistance, only their brass bicycles left behind, that life doesn’t happen here, art doesn’t happen here, this is a damn cultural desert. What I really meant was, I haven’t met any gays here, although the remnants of adolescent pretentiousness persisted as well in my definition: I was better than everyone else and no one understood the parts of me that made me different. 

So, I started dreaming of student exchange programs in Paris and making plans to take the train to visit George when he would start his master’s degree in the UK. I felt like Ladybird from the titular indie film with Saoirse Ronan, where she longs to go abroad, away from her motherland, to go “where culture is.”

It was most of all a matter of cherry trees. Every book with pink blossom branches on the cover, no matter the plot, every sweater or wrapping paper, I used to buy manically. I used to scribble Cummings and Neruda lines on my desk at uni, I deemed what spring made me do to them the epitome of poetry, its residuum. I budgeted all my pocket money and intended to spend it on airplane tickets to meet my pen pal in Dublin, for walks at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris to see Oscar Wilde’s tombstone, with lipstick marks and the condoms that tourists left there as a tribute. Being a tourist myself, I squeezed the juice out of all the cliches, and I drank aesthetic pulp. I used to play the theme song of Amelie on the piano of Shakespeare and Company across from Notre Dame, in the sitting room where Hemingway was supposed to have hung out. Later I saw somewhere online a sign, “Please don’t play the Amelie theme song.”

Retrospectively, what I felt was a profound need to run away, both from the city that I felt constricted by, and from everything people around me taught me that my life should be. The ideological division between high and low culture was not as much of an issue as I thought when seeing my classmates as uncultivated (cis, straight) peasants: my escapism drove me to popular fictional worlds to which I could travel without the need of money or a passport: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as well as Victor Hugo’s Paris during the uprising of 1832, which is described in the book, depicted in the musical version, and worshipped by the Les Mis fanbase. I used to belong in online communities and write fanfiction. I would write Harry Potter and Les Misérables crossovers, as well as what we called “Les Mis Modern AU” (as in Alternate Universe), in which the group of students who died at the barricades lived in modern age Paris, were racially diverse and, on a high percentage, trans. I loved writing about young people with pink hair, piercings, fat bodies and polyamorous families, who punched neo-Nazis, fell in love, and had lots of gay sex. I needed such a group to contain me.

With the help of modern renditions of Les Mis written by the strange cult of Hugo fanatics, I realized that gay people weren’t sick, broken, or immoral, as I had been brought up to believe. Not only did they help me move away from the homophobia and transphobia of my upbringing, but through reading and writing, I also realized that I was attracted to girls. I used to watch Orange is the New Black obsessively, I witnessed the trans awakening of 2015 and swooned over Laverne Cox, the first trans actress playing a trans character I ever came across. I looked everywhere for the queer: people on the streets, the subtext of texts and TV series, from Hugo’s reference to Orestes and Pylades, to the Greek mainstream TV show Para 5, a show that normalized queer expressions without clearly articulating its queerness and was pivotal to the development of my identity as I grew up. 

My boyfriend, George, and I ended up opening our relationship because my need to do things with girls was becoming increasingly pressing. George was extremely supportive, but I wasn’t ready to deal with the guilt. I had a girlfriend for two weeks, a classmate at uni. We used to steal kisses behind the bathroom and spent one weekend at my family home, when my parents were away, in our knickers and swallowing Nutella off each other’s mouths. It was the year when my brother brought Lucy home, and I got over my dog phobia. 

I dreamt of being out, being fearless, celebrating my bisexual identity, but most of all, I dreamt of belonging in a queer community, something I was certain that I wouldn’t find in little old Greece. So, I kept on living vicariously through my fanfiction in which parents accepted their children for what they were, in some other, imaginary country, where I imagined people embracing their differences and living together harmoniously. “Les Amis de l’ABC,” those fictional characters and their modern versions, both written by Hugo and not, became my diverse group of friends, the group of proud dykes, fat enbies, immigrant trans women, pathologically anxious students, and queer activists. Queerlings in their twenties around the world live like that, quietly celebrating their identities through those stories, imagining what it would be like to truly belong. 

Within a year—it must have been 2014—I counted a total of a million written words, half of which was awkward gay smut, the rest being descriptions of a romanticized Parisian aesthetic, almost pornographic in their cheesiness, somewhere along the spectrum that had cheap bath curtains with the Eiffel Tower on one end, and Hemingway’s Moveable Feast on the other. My magnum opus, with a language more saccharine than macaroons and yet appreciated by my internet friends, was the love story of the social justice warrior student Enjolras, with cynical Grantaire, a pansexual barista in a French bookshop cafe. In reality it was just an exhaustively detailed guide of a city, the memoir of the character out of one of Woody Allen’s movie, masculine, pretentious, and perpetually misplaced.

Thus, I might have attributed my wanderlust to cherry blossoms, and to Hugo’s tomb at Père Lachaise, but I was actually looking abroad for an idealized archetype of community and revolution, a queer place and way to love. I somehow ended up stuck with the idea that in conservative Greek society, at the private school I had attended, at the suburban home of Mum and Dad, there was no space for that. Oblivious about the real possibilities open to me and surrounding me, I lay on my bed listening to banjo songs that spoke of dawns that find you driving on highways with your friends, of butterflies in the stomach as the plane takes off. I stared at the ceiling and obsessively wanked with the idea of leaving, feeling that no Werther ever in the long story of Sadbois had shared my despair.

Fanfiction works have always been perceived—and ridiculed for it—as products of low culture. The rigid gender categories and stereotypes that persist in our society have led to the classification of fanfiction as a “feminine” genre, which has often resulted in the intense mockery of works of untrained young girls, women, and queer people. My experience with fanfiction has made me insistent about its creative and democratizing role in the process of female and queer socializing. I see fanfiction—as well as other forms of fan art—as a process that makes writing accessible in a non-elitistic environment, inviting people of all ages, genders and sexualities who often carry other precarious identities to create, to dare to share their creations with the world, and to receive feedback inside bubbles that are often created and moderated as relatively safe for their members, compared to the rest of society. It is a space that welcomes the self-insertion of the ever-so-dreaded “Mary Sue” (as if the character of Harry Potter is anything but that). I know for sure that I wouldn’t be able to write as I do today, nor would I have allowed myself to freely explore the world, had it not been for my first scribblings as a ten-year-old, of Ron fondling Hermione’s breast in a broom closet. I wouldn’t have discovered all I did about my sexuality, even before any sexual experience, if it weren’t for some awkward depictions of lesbian flirting. Fanfiction gives a motive—and a helpful foundation—to young women and queer people to write, explore, to create representations for themselves, and articulate their identities from the safety of fiction and anonymity. 

I have encountered literary masterpieces on archiveofourown.org, some of them including full sociological analyses of the universe they are describing, complete with citations. It is true that quality varies widely, but so does age and experience—everyone can try it, and then try it again, until they do it better. Fanfiction and fan art are more often than not looked down upon because of their preoccupation with sex—and what is considered “cringey” sex at that, which here means a focus on female and queer desire, unlike the more widely acceptable male-gaze sex⁷ that saturates our society. During the past couple of decades, fandoms have given women and other marginalized people space in the narrative. Now we take our strength back. Now we are the narrative. Now we tell our own sex stories, we explore without limitations but within ethical boundaries, awkward ships, questionable relationship dynamics, kinks of all kinds, in our own private-spaces-made-public, in a teenage room of one’s own exploration. 

During that period of loneliness and what I would later come to call introspection, a friend from uni told me: “Why don’t you go socialize at that LGBTQI group I was telling you about?”

I had seen them on Facebook. Deep inside I was scared to go, scared of being let down, convinced that the people there would never be as perfect as my fictional activists.

I first went to a meeting about polyamory, considering that George and I were giving it a go. I saw all of them from afar. I saw him too. Stefanos. I did not speak to anyone. In the end I left with some other queer kid. On our way to the metro, we shared our stories about coming out to our parents.

I did not go again, not for about six months, during which I once saw Stefanos standing across the metro platform and recognized him.

I felt an urge to attend another meeting after having returned from a trip to the UK and Ireland with George and feeling suffocated by my country and my queer loneliness. Without giving it much thought, one evening I put on the new Hakuna Matata t-shirt I had bought from the West End in London, took my straight best friend with me, and we went to join them at the National Garden. About twenty young queers were sitting in a circle on the grass, in the light breeze of September evening, babbling cheerfully and joking with each other. 

I noticed him, looking weary and nursing a cup of coffee, standing outside the circle, and chatting with his friends, looking unfazed and used to the dizzying new world I was just now entering. I was there primarily to meet girls, and my attention was first caught by a lesbian, and then by him. At the end of the meeting, I approached the lesbian and asked her how I could become a member, and whether I could help organize something for the upcoming Bisexual Visibility Day.

“Sure thing, you can help out the guys.”

The guys: him and a girl, his ex, as I learned later. I met them both outside the Garden and we introduced ourselves to each other. He then hugged the girl, who was leaving. My friend left as well. Those who remained continued for drinks, twenty young queerdos walking in Exarcheia like kids on a field trip. We talked about our cats and dogs. I stared at him walking from behind and I was reborn, drowning in amniotic fluid. 

That night I returned home and texted the friend who had come with me: “I’m fucked.”

The stereotypical metaphor of the days became that of Icarus.

* * *

For certain luminous moments, the streets of Athens had been ours. The Psyrri neighborhood buzzing with tourists taking their breakfast on a sunny Sunday morning while twenty queers bought tyropita and coffee from the bakeries around the square before gathering at the headquarters for a general assembly meeting. The streets around Syntagma Square where we formed our ranks at Pride, where the parade floats aligned to begin the march. Our half-naked bodies covered in sweat and glitter, our faces painted with colorful eyeshadow and mascara moustaches, my short pink hair caressed by the gentle breeze of the early evening and the chants bursting from our chests, penetrating the buildings of expensive shops and hotels, and making the city vibrate. 

Those moments brought Preciado in my mind once again. A trans man from Spain and a nomad of the world, crossing boundaries of sex, gender, and ethnicity, who had fallen in love with my city like I had fallen in love with everywhere else, describing it more aptly than I ever could: “the school of metamorphoses,” “a city at crossroads,” “a unique observatory for understanding the processes of the neoliberal destruction of Europe,”⁸ “the repressed unconscious of Europe”⁹ that made him realize “that it wasn’t just me undergoing change, but that we are all plunged in a worldwide transition.”¹⁰

We had gotten together with Stefanos by then, in quite a dramatic way, which fed my drive for a rom-com narrative of my life. I remember a moment, frozen in time, pure joy radiating through our young, pulsating bodies, our words and the drums making the streets pound like a heart. The parade had stopped somewhere in the middle of the route to dance. There was some distance between the first people from our block and the last from the one in front of us. A large ribbon of asphalt was empty and colorful with glitter. You were there as well, my best friend, the prudent one, walking up and down and looking for right-wing moles. You knew the streets, you were always vigilant, the one who would, years later, help us seek shelter from the teargas. I used to tell you all the time about how he was the love of my life and you agreed that we were meant to be and made for each other. A lot has changed since then, thankfully. You and I, we eventually made space for each other.

Stefanos was standing in the middle of the empty street, a flower crown on his head, a trans flag wrapped around his shoulders and waving like a superhero cape as he looked ahead. At that moment we felt invincible, and his back turned against me was the promise of a future, amalgamated in a figure resembling Benjamin’s angel of history. 

“The moment has stayed in history of queer theory,” Dimitris Papanikolaou¹¹ writes, referring to Sedgwick, Elizabeth Freeman, Heather Love, Jack Halberstam and other queer pioneers who theorized the concept of queer time and queer temporalities. 

“How long does a moment of crisis last? Who defines how long something lasts, and how much duration connects or divides people? Actually, many people know what duration means. From everyone who has woken up next to another, and has already figured out that duration is what connects them and at the same time divides them while simultaneously being intersectional but also personal, to everyone who has felt the duration of a treatment’s side effects, and to that person who constantly wonders how long love lasts. What person hasn’t, after all, emphatically contemplated the question: how long does trauma last? (answer: a long, palimpsestic time).”¹²

Stefanos and I had been together for two years when we heard of Zak’s murder. I was spending the weekend at my parents’ house when I saw the news about the thief and drug addict who had been brutally beaten to death in broad daylight in Omonoia, by the owner of a jewellery shop after he supposedly broke into it. Only later were we informed by a post on Facebook, that the alleged thief was the gentle, beautiful person in colorful wigs we had drunkenly danced with at some queer costume party. Zak was a pioneering advocate for the rights of people living with HIV+, a famous drag queen who led the best shows in town, and had once, before my time, been a member of our activist group. My mind had to process that the colorful performer and genderfluid activist Zackie Oh had died—no, had been murdered—by a traditional Greek family man and the cops. Meanwhile, the popular media presented him as a criminal. An image that will forever stay with me as an amalgamation of the Greek context that led to and follow his death was this: morning show host Tatiana Stefanidou airing a poll, asking Greek people whether they agreed with the shop owner’s reaction or not, whether Zak deserved to die in such a way. 

Zackie’s entire community sat in front of our TVs in silent shock, watching her body being violently kicked to death by god-fearing civilians and crushed under cop boots. A single shoe was found later, laying on the bloodied pavement, to complete the horrifying image of a middle-aged murderer sweeping the glass fragments from the broken window. Calm, collected, sweeping the pavement clean. The extent to which the attack was a crime driven by hate towards the parts of Zak that were visibly different, visibly queer, is much discussed, but what is certain is that Zak had never been a burglar, that his body lying on the ground, helpless and covered in blood, her begs and cries that remained unheard by passers-by, a body that belonged to a person who wouldn’t harm a fly, never posed a threat to those middle-aged Greek men, equipped and ready to kill.

What had turned these people into monsters? Conservative Greek masculinity is a terrifying thing to behold, one that has often made me wonder about my own desire to be masculine as a nonbinary person. These people, crushed by austerity and helpless in the face of state immunity, turned on the pariah, alienated the person who was, in their eyes, the threat to their God-given dominance. They did so in the only way they had been taught to deal with things: violence. In Greece, a woman is killed every other week by her domestic partner or ex. Νοικοκυραίοι: that’s what we called them in our chants: God-fearing family men, casually committing what the media called “crimes of passion.” Meanwhile, police representative Balaskas addresses the femicide killers on TV, calling them out on their stupidity and amateurism, essentially advising them how to be more efficient, how to not get caught.

Only my parents and Stefanos saw me crying during the following days. My parents who had never been supportive of my queerness were suddenly figuring out that I knew this person they were talking about on the news. My dad offered to drive me to a poetry event organized in her memory. “Call me when you want me to pick you up,” he had said. That night, I would learn to live in fear.

Stefanos held me on a bench in Panepistimio as I wept. We had already been together for almost three years and had always been very much aware of our precarity: At the beginning of that very Pride parade, neo-Nazis had photographed him and posted his face all over their websites. Stefanos had not slept for two nights once, staying up to write press releases concerning the participation of cops in Pride and I feared he would drop dead from the exhaustion at any minute. He was a trans man in the process of his transition, slowly but decidedly coming out, to the point where he was invited to speak at the parliament about the Legal Gender Recognition Act and was recognized by my appalled mother on TV. I had recently discovered that gender-wise, I moved outside the binary, just like Zackie. 

I was a closeted enby who had dared to sport a makeup beard and pack in public a couple of times while performing awkward femininity on the family Christmas table. Standing in between different gender experiences and expression, and outside the borders of normality at the same time. As you and I would too in a couple of years, Stefanos and I passed as a cis-het couple—something our friends often teased us about, reminding me that the sociomaterial order for gender expression permeates our own community. I belonged everywhere and nowhere. I shut myself in the closet and played in my clothes, and yet sometimes I’d stuff a dick down my pants, storm out, and trot the streets of Monastiraki.

Stefanos and I already knew how little our lives mattered in the minds of traditionalist, religious homophobes with whom we still had the courage to pick fights in the bus and at the bank. Still, Zak’s death was what really made us face our fragility. It was the first blow to our bliss. 

For you, it had been different. Being a transfem person that didn’t pass, you never had the privilege to think of yourself as invincible. You knew from the get-go that the queer existences we led in our country couldn’t be carefree ones. Trans women and feminine people are scrutinized, discriminated against, and facing violence more than any other demographic, in every country. People who have been assigned male at birth and visibly play with gender are abhorred by conservatives, more often than not. It is the blow to their own masculinities, a sort of “trans panic,” that traditional cis men cannot stomach. So, while we yelled chants and danced at Pride, you were guarding your friends, walking up and down and suspiciously eyeing the lurkers. Back then, we didn’t know how much we owed to you. “Safety” was a word you cherished and yearned for, long before we realized we needed to. 

The next time that we wore our glitter armors and took to the streets, we all held onto each other tightly. I did not feel expansive anymore. I felt shrunk, silent, derelict. We marched and shouted, “That is right, that is right, kick them with stilettos, dismantle the far-right,” and when we reached Syntagma Square we stood outside the yellow-lit parliament and played Zackie’s favorite song, “Like a Prayer.” The song had also been played at the funeral. “We sang Madonna to you and threw glitter everywhere. Ah, had you been there to see. It was windy enough and the glitter flew and made the aunties and grandpas shine.”¹³

Once again, the city I had grown to love because it contained Stefanos, you, and our community, had ceased to contain me. This time we had a trip planned from before his death, for the days following it. Stefanos was speaking at some queer conference in Vienna. I gripped on the possibility of escaping that trip offered me like dear life itself, all I could think of was flight, Greece becoming small beneath me as the plane would take off, it would go from Kronos swallowing his kids, to tiny, smaller than our fingertips. On the morning of the trip, the flight got cancelled due to dangerous weather. I completely lost it. I spent the entire day making calls to the airport, went full on suburban mum mode, demanding to speak to the manager. I had summoned yet another identity I didn’t know I had somewhere, stored. 

Eventually I flew in the following day. Stefanos had taken a priority flight to be there on time for the conference. While he attended, I spent the sunny autumn morning at Setagaya Park. I walked around and saw a photoshoot taking place, a couple with long black hair and traditional Japanese clothes. They caught my interest, so I stopped and stared. Suddenly, they turned around and looked at me and I realized they were both white. I felt nauseous. I didn’t know whether I should attribute the feeling to their cultural appropriation or the realization that my own escapist wanderlust was so common a feeling. I walked away and sat at the edge of the bridge that stood over the pond to get some warmth from the unexpectedly bright sun that covered the water in glitter. The small rocks forming miniature waterfalls and caves were covered in wet moss. They suddenly felt familiar. I wanted to touch them, but the knowledge of my disgust were I to feel the slimy texture stopped me. It was the same knowledge, the same feeling as with every time I tried beer, hoping that it would taste like butter or caramel, but knowing that it wouldn’t. The running water felt just as familiar and looked so warm, but I knew that if I dived in, I would scream, petrified by the cold, I would remember I did not belong, like it happens sometimes when I return to the amniotic fluid of my country.

I was becoming me in the midst of things, in the middle of meaning, between several universes, experiencing what Muñoz calls “disidentification.”

When I go back and, full of shame, think about the ridiculousness of yelling at customer service for an early flight while people in my country, my people, were grieving and revolting, freezing and fighting, I remember my insistence on the flight. Possibly, that too was a trauma response. I am not the right judge of my decisions. I only know how I felt back then, trapped and endangered, doom-scrolling in Stefanos’s one-room apartment, alone with his cat. 

Papanikolaou wrote about the persistence that characterized the movement after Zak’s death. A persistence of public figures analyzing his murder in ways that went against the popular media rhetoric, slowly and methodically breaking the crime into its elements and explaining why Zak was the victim. A persistence palpable in the photographs of the protests that followed, with the raised fists frozen in time. He characterized it as both a symbol and a strategy with performative power in gender and sexuality movements, to “sidetrack[s] the dominant discourse” and “de-normalize[s] all that is presented as natural and given.”¹⁴

At the next protest for Zak, I saw Stefanos standing tall among the crowd and covering the pre-existing street sign with a sign that read “Zackie Oh Str.” It was an aesthetically fortunate moment, dramatically captured in photos that would become historic, woefully (for me) enhanced by his attractiveness and the privilege that came with it, yet gracious in its audacity. By then, I could only stare at him from afar. He had already left me. On that warm, autumn day, traumatized by my breakup, I flirted with you to make him jealous, and when I found your missing lighter you kissed me against a parked car, your laugh stumbling on mine. 

In a lecture from a series called “Queer Politics/Public Memory” that followed Zak’s murder, Papanikolaou stressed that the public space is not for everyone, it does not include or remember us all in the same way.¹⁵ It was tangible, it felt like a lump in the throat, a knotted muscle, like the imminent burning of teargas. That winter we marched to the Appeal Court and lined single shoes in front of the building, positioning them to face the building in the same way we were facing the cops that guarded the demonstration; we were a mob of multicolored heads, seismic chanting and arms linked in kinship, with babies and dogs, staring straight in the eyes of the cops and calling them murderers, offering our precarious bodies, murmuring an incantation: the name of our lost sister. 

* * *

In 2024, neo-Nazis would vandalize the headquarters of the organization I had long ago stopped being an active member of, drawing meanders, writing “Golden Dawn” and “Zakie Oh-1.” The organization lost the headquarters a few months ago, due to financial mismanagement. 

There is not a day that passes without wondering where a queer teenager like me will be able to seek shelter nowadays. My eternal burnout, and the pressure of paying a seven-hundred-euro rent with a nine-hundred-euro salary, quickly dispel those thoughts.

* * *

We walked to Omonoia and took the train from there. It was cram-full of people who were talking loudly, listening to music, and wearing their face masks without covering their noses. Anxiety had started building up inside me, a fist tightening around my oesophagus. I wanted to go home. Amidst the crowd and the noise, you held tightly on a pole and pulled me close. I clung to your shirt to maintain my balance as the train moved. Our foreheads met. I felt safe with you, against an outside world that felt hostile after two years of pandemic, as well as due to the endemic condition of a memory that persisted and always demolished me.