WE ARE NONE OF THAT
This year's Pride Parade takes place in an atmosphere of denial and destruction of society. It is not the first time that the universal bonds between people are systematically denied and destroyed. You must be of appropriate nationality, race, language, culture, locality… and of course appropriate sexual behaviour and gender.
But we are none of that.
Lesbians and gays, bisexuals and transgender people have long been faced with boundaries that divide our society, our world. We remained beyond them. But we try to surpass the boundaries, not to become similar to those that set them, hoping our experience of exclusion would humanise them. This is not about integration. This is about the humanistic revolution.
We see universality as a social condition, as the only condition of society, but it does not succeed. Obstructed by the whole machinery of enclosure of assets, resources, capital, values, mind. Obstructed by the whole machinery of limitation, the assembly line of fear, hatred, provincialism, prejudice and racism.
Racism is setting up a hierarchy between people, it is setting up boundaries between people, where boundaries should never exist. It is expressed as the elementary denial and destruction of the fundamental humanistic principle: we are all human beings, equal and free at birth and equal and free in life. Racism is expressed as the elementary denial of equality in humanity and as a denial of freedom resulting from equality.
Let us look at today’s reality: it is expressed as thousands of forms of homophobic discrimination. It is expressed as thousands of forms of open hunts on migrants and as thousands of forms of their expulsion. It is expressed as thousands of forms of class differences. It is expressed as a normality and acceptance of differences. Racism is movable. When we think about racism, when we fight against it, we think about all of its forms, we know how to recognise it and reject all of its forms and all of its evils.
We are aware of the manipulation of compromise politics. We are aware of the hypocrisy of politics that declare support to equality and freedom only to mask and wash its real distinctive, discriminatory, restrictive, antisocial, racist program. All these years we’ve talked about human rights and all these years human rights have been denied to us because of racist programs.
We, lesbians and gays, bisexuals and transgender people, are aware of that. We are aware that the ultimate goal is the powerlessness of the universal and the strengthening of the particular. Total alienation from thinking about the common and the retreat into individual privacy. But we are also aware that this alienation and retreat will not save us from our own responsibility and from odious days ahead. We resist homophobia with a clear perspective. We know we will only rise together.
That is why we are here. We created ourselves out of rejection of the world of discriminatory boundaries. We are entering into society together, we are creating ourselves out of desire for a community, for a common society, and we are doing it together, we are changing society together. We are creating ourselves out of rejection of dispersion and separation, knowing that dispersion and separation impede not only social change, but also our own creation. And here is our Pride parade, and here is our message: we are none of what the eternal siren of racist hatred wishes and wants and requires. We are creating ourselves out of this struggle and in this struggle we are staying together.
Ljubljana Pride 2016
