Like other EU Embassies here in Belgrade, the British Embassy had publicly supported the holding of this year’s Gay Pride parade. In the words of the Swedish EU Presidency, which we put on our website too, “Any discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity must be condemned and rejected as being incompatible with the basic principles and values on which the EU is founded: equal opportunities and human rights. Every individual is entitled to the rights and freedoms set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, without distinction of any kind. It is the very essence of European values.”
So, like many others, I was disappointed to hear that the Parade had been cancelled. Those people who had wanted to demonstrate peacefully had lost. Those who were prepared to use all means to stop them had won. In the words of my Swedish colleague, it was a sad and strange day.
But I can’t say that I was surprised. In the days before the planned parade, there had been widespread talk of violence. Graffiti on the walls called for ‘death to pederasts’. The extreme right re-circulated the old lie that homosexuals are a threat to children (in reality, most serious sex crimes involving children are by adult males against girls). In the days before the Parade, some senior politicians publicly said that they would prefer it not to take place. The Acting Head of the Orthodox Church spoke of „the parade of shame, parade of Sodoma and Gomorra”, a parade of those “who chose the path of obliviousness and death instead of path of life”. And in conversations with a number of people, I had come across a common view that the parade should not happen, that holding it would be ’undemocratic’, as the majority did not want it – as though democracy gave the majority the right simply to suppress the views of the minority.
Across western Europe, all our societies have been through the difficult process of facing up to, and trying to overcome, long-established prejudices. Homosexuality seems to many people to be a fundamental challenge to our image of a ’conventional’ family – so somehow it is ’abnormal’, even ’wrong’. But research into human sexuality has shown that, while we still do not understand everything, our basic sexual orientation – whether we are heterosexual or homosexual – is not a matter of choice, but something we are born with. So the only real choice, for the gay person, is whether they live their lives openly and honestly, and hope to find happiness with a loving partner; or whether they try to deny their real feelings, and struggle to live a lie. For such people a Pride Parade is a way of standing up in front of others, and saying, ’This is what I am, accept me’. It may make other people feel uncomfortable, but that is only a measure of the prejudice that we feel, that we all still have in our societies. The choice for those who are not gay is whether they are willing, in turn, to accept gay people as equal citizens, or will go on trying to force them to deny their real personalities and live their lives in the shadows. This time, clearly, Belgrade wasn’t ready. Maybe next time, it will be.
Posted at 09:41 21 September 2009 by Stephen Wordsworth | Comments[8]
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