We don’t hide

Published by donnacha May 28th, 2008 in Riga Pride 2008. 0 Comments
da http://blog.amnesty.org/rigapride/

Three days before the march. This morning I came to Mozaika’s office and found one of the volunteers asleep on our cosy large windowsill. It’s a lot of work for a handful of people. By midday tomorrow, we are supposed to turn this office into the Friendship Days Information Centre. At the moment, we are drowning in posters, leaflets, whistles, coffee mugs and unfinished tasks on post-it notes. We are also sending press releases and reacting to stupidities that have hit the media in the past few days.
Some political parties actively condemn the march and ask people to ignore it. I guess it is better than asking people to go and throw shit at pride marchers… so should we be grateful ?… But, in reality, they are trying to make the Pride march look like some kind of event that will praise sexual perversion and should be ignored because it will be nasty. They bluntly refuse to accept this as a political demonstration – or simply don’t want people to see it.
We blog, press-release, write, speak and yell about equality and human rights, but unfortunately at the moment homophobes have louder voices and more listeners. It’s quite an unfair struggle to get the message across to wider society as long as the homophobes have a majority in the parliament, City Council and all the religious groups on their side and we have 5 people with passion and belief in what they do on our side. Still, we are not doing too badly.
Today we discovered that all our (Mozaika’s board members) private mobile phones numbers are published on one of the news websites … and people have been encouraged to call us and tell us what they think about Mozaika’s activities and about the “perversions” we “promote”. That information has been there for a week and nobody has called.
Luckily for us most of the homophobes are indeed too coward to call and actually speak to one of us. At best, they are brave enough to send anonymous text messages from the internet – not to be identified. Another unfair struggle of people with their names and faces publicly known against an anonymous crowd hiding behind their computers.
But hey - all that only makes us stronger. Because we believe in what we do. And we don’t hide.