Dear homosexuals, did you think it would eventually get better? That their world would open up and we would be able to love without limits? Did you really believe that all those happy films and sexy TV-series, The L-Word, Queer as Folk, Better than Chocolate and D.E.B.S., those avant-garde products about intangible bodies would chase away the torment of our existence – in which we are inevitably trapped? Did you believe that they would penetrate our eternally separated walls and our civilizational unacceptability? That they would dissolve the fate of our migrations? Did you really believe that all these new words about your exquisiteness, your daring, the exceptionality of your bare life would appease you and spare you from being kicked in the head? Did you realize who it was saying those words to you? It was no one like you. Did it ever seem to you, dear lesbians, during moments of deranged judgement, conceived by the iridescent cocktail of despair, claustrophobia and stinging sparks of desire, which any one of the women who uttered those words would actually go to bed with you? Homosexuals are everywhere? Not really.

I entered the lesbian scene and activism before the so-called informational revolution in 1993, or rather, just before it surfaced. It was already present at the time, but there were still old patterns of communication in use; in the then world, divided into sectors, meetings were taking place in fought-for, publically accessible and precisely marked spaces. In 1989, Ljubljana’s Klub K4 (Club K4) opened the Roza Disko (Pink Disco) on Sundays. In 1993 a gay and a lesbian club were formed at the ambushed Metelkova. This spatial condensation was a continuation of the transitional cultural positioning through the formation of specialised gay and lesbian publishers, magazines and the Ljubljana Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. From a world where my lesbian life depended, as the old homosexual saying goes, on strangers and their unexpected kindness, I did not hesitate when entering this gay ghetto where everything depended solely on me – and I wished never to leave it. It appears that generations which grew up alongside information technology feel a certain contempt towards being spatially situated. This contempt is manifest in the increasingly fashionable repudiation of activism that was founded particularly on territorial premises. It is also manifest in the recurrent criticism of the public that breaks out at open expressions of gay and lesbian presence, Pride Parades, and the Ljubljana Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, or of successful breakthroughs of lesbian and gay literature. What distinguishes these critiques from the old frontal homophobia is that, more or less benevolently, they question the importance of such kinds of connectedness, or of taking a stance in a time when, due to the (allegedly) end of homocide (ha ha!), it is all but unnecessary. I feel this contempt in the renewed objectivisation of homosexuality, which is now rarely displayed through the repressive eye of psychiatry, medicine, biology or the criminal sciences, but rather through the authoritarian and patronising manners (as was the case in the manners of the aforementioned sciences) of the University, institutes, human rights organizations which no longer acquire venues for connecting communities, but, of course, only offices, which are continually multiplying. I also feel it in a large part of the queer paradigm which, although it welcomes principles of fluidity of identities, conceals unsolved problems regarding basic postulates of gay and lesbian liberation. And I feel it in the new gay and lesbian referential platforms; the densely populated virtual space of cyber cafés, internet chat rooms, web networks, websites, and online diaries, which in Slovenia, despite the fact that they are intended explicitly for the homosexual population, are called “iridescent”, or “women’s”, or something like that. Who would know?

That is why every evening I, an unaccustomed urban bitch, have to sift through the entire city to run into three lesbians. Or anyone else. In these times, after 7pm, when all homosexuals are at home domains with pseudonyms or in the closeted private sector, it appears that the new mobile revolution has not liberated us, nor discharged us, but that we have simply vanished together with all the differentiating scenes, collectives, communities and cultures. New generations are not bound to and defined by space. They do not need liberated territories. I think I was not aware of this disintegration of the community and ascribe my lesbian disappearance from the world solely to my own subjective choices. At first I thought that, being restless, powerful, supreme, and always in love, I was driven out by a gust of happy love stories, the gilded and priceless legacy of the old passing ghetto. I was convinced that millennia of civilizational restrictions no longer concerned me. It seemed to me that at 40, life had carved me out just about right, honed me like a crystal, making me look perfect. It seemed to me that the whole designed, flexible, fluid, cyber, multitudinous, cool, post structural, postsubjective, trendy, broadband world in which no one had prejudice any longer and in which no one left the table in the face of tribbing inappropriateness, was real, that there were no hetero-homo borderlines. I did not know, however, that its super-straight-heroines lived in a rigid social matrix regulated by thousand year old Christian criteria (never mind their critical conscience of it), not knowing that humankind will become extinct before they would think about giving it up. And this is what happened. Listen, if you lived a bit of my life, you would be less of a machine, and if I lived some of yours, I would not burn out on the street, weak, scabby and devastated.

Yes, at first I thought that our homo ghetto became too crowded, too positivist, too lustful, not eager enough. I thought that the legitimacy of desire, this modernist imperative which we are heirs to, was rapidly losing its value, and that the vitalist expansionism of this perpetually pushed-to-the-edge ancient species too hastily gave in to the promise of a never seen nor experienced schematic of living together in a warm home. Yes, first I thought it was an instantaneous incident when younger colleagues wanted to invite a Catholic priest to speak at the Pride Parade in Ljubljana and the public space became crammed with privacy to the extent that there was nothing else in it but a homosexual Reality Show; full of their coming-outs, confessions, grandmothers, mums, fathers, relatives, kitchens, singers like Nuša Derenda, without any people from the scene who deep below their Arc de Triomphe still avoided their coming-outs, confessions, grandmothers, mums, fathers, relatives, and their kitchens, and especially singers like Nuša Derenda. They kept on cruising. I found out that colleagues from the International Gay and Lesbian Association in Brussels, who should be experts in recognising biopolitics, greeted the European epidemic of anti-smoking laws with excitement, but had no idea that Jacques Brel was born in this city, although they knew where the European Quarter was. By the way, the European Quarter is right there where Jacques Brel was born. Yes, at first I thought that this signified a radical lack of knowledge of European history and theory (or at least a minimal activity according to the two), that this jovial directness, this stubborn inaccessibility, this paranoid precaution, this new semantic insanity which liberates words, this new privatization which liberates power, was something more abstract, something I could avoid. And while avoiding, I realized that the very avoidance lead me back into my own past, and that the strangers that are always by chance (unexpectedly) helping are nodding to me smilingly; that we have come to the end of the population trend. It did not finish for everyone however, but this is not of my concern anymore. For centuries, the age-old homosexual camp, faggoty and lesbian, preserved homosexuals and homosexual culture as being recognizable, unique and physical. In my desire to remain present in the modern-day historical regression, in my return to the empty defragmented places, I gradually, as if I were the only homosexual on the planet, found myself at its core. Waiting for me there were Renée Vivien, Djuna Barnes, Quentin Crisp, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini with his ragazzi, Sadie Lee with her Amy Lamé, striptease dancers and Holly Woodlawn, Antony, Rufus Wainwright, dead and alive, embodied in the ancient culture of stoic melancholy, cultivated love, suspense, a phantasmagoria of romances that do not exit in the physical world, but only in twilight zones of rejection, violence, dreams and art. That is where I found myself again watching “The Killing of Sister George” by Robert Aldrich from 1968 and seeing the old waspish sister George in a different way during that last scene when she ends up without a girlfriend and with no work, smashing the set of the film studio which included a coffin meant for her written-off character saying: “Even the bloody coffin is a fake!” – For her your civilisation ended.

Nataša Velikonja is a sociologist, poetess and lesbian activist. She lives and works in Ljubljana.

Translated from Slovenian by Jernej Možic.