Why we need Pride
A 15-year-old boy in a village outside of Patra on the western coast of the Peloponnese was attacked by his father and uncle and sent to the hospital because he admitted to them that he was gay.
What a courageous young man! To come out to your Greek father in rural Greece, and many other places for that matter, requires an extraordinary dose of courage.
I am not sure that even at my age I could come out to my father if I was gay.
And the reaction of the father and uncle! These are the same people that, I believe, would have stood by their young son/nephew had he come to them and said, “Dad, I killed someone” – then the family would have said that blood is thicker than water etc.
Domestic violence is not a new phenomenon nor is it limited to Greece. What we have here is the added layer of violence against a vulnerable member of the LGBTQ community.
To be sure, there have been some positive developments; the recent law legalizing same-sex marriage is a major step in the right direction.
At the same time laws can only do so much if society as a whole is not willing to face reality. Only last month the ruling center-right New Democracy party, which championed the marriage law, received a rebuke at the ballot box in part due to the law in question.
These days in Greece, the United States, and many other places in the world where democracy is practiced, we celebrate Pride, but many people, in the US and in Greece, have taken to the airwaves and other media wondering, “Why do we need Pride?” The sorry story above answers such questions. Pride will not be needed only when our LGBTQ fellow citizens are not targets of violence because of who they are.
To those, and there are some, who claim that being gay is a choice, I refer them to the case above. So this young man, knowing that his family is socially conservative, knowing the horrible things people say about gay people, knowing the stigma attached to being gay, “chose” to be gay and be ostracized, attacked and discriminated against rather than “choosing” to be heterosexual? Do I need to make the case of how ridiculous this line of reasoning is?
And what about the rest of us? Good people who do not attack gay people, do not hurt them physically or otherwise, but who stand by, allowing this to happen? What is our responsibility? Is the fact that we did not actively participate enough to absolve us of culpability?
We Greeks take pride and comfort in our religion. Even those of us who are skeptical or outright atheists have retained some elements of our Orthodox Christian ethos. Allow me then (without meaning to be blasphemous) to paraphrase Matthew 25:36-40: “[The King will say,] ‘For I was gay and discriminated against and you gave me shelter and protection…’ [Then the righteous will answer him,] ‘When were you gay and we sheltered you?’ [The King will reply,] ‘Truly I tell you, what you did for one of the least of my brothers you did it for me.’”
Sometimes I think that when I appear in front of my maker, I will not be condemned so much because of what I did but rather because of what I could have done but I didn’t.
John Mazis is an author and a professor of history at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
