Meša Selimović wrote more than fifty years ago that "I guess love is the only thing in the world that doesn't need to be explained, nor to look for a reason." And really, love simply is - emotion, energy, strength, pleasure - the force that moves us. Although the world around us is full of worn slogans about love, when we return to its essence - the core of what it means to love - we will see that we have neglected and perverted this pure emotion.
Few people today in Montenegro know how important love is, how much you have to fight for it, how many tears and sweat are needed to preserve it, as we know whose love is "same-sex". Here, of course, I mean all of us from the LGBTI community - strong and proud queers, lesbians, bisexuals and all other people who have been forbidden by this society to love and be loved exactly as they are.
If we know that in 2020, sixty-six percent of the citizens of Montenegro believed that LGBTI people are "sick people", that they have a "mental disorder" and that they "need to be treated", and that an additional forty-four percent of my fellow citizens considered that people like me are "perverted/freaks" (CEDEM, 2020, p. 34), then maybe it will be a little clearer why today, on International Human Rights Day, I want to talk about love.
I am not writing this text as an LGBTI activist, not even as a completely average Montenegrin fag, but as someone who (wants to) believe in the power of a pure emotion, in the good in all people around him and in the power of that emotion to move us, unite us and gather under the banner of fighting for truly true values - for love.
On my own back, many times, I could feel how difficult it is to "be different" in our society, especially when what makes you different is the object of strong, public hatred. And here we come to the core of the problem, which is that we allowed the values on which we built and are building our society to be based not on love and all that it entails, but on hatred and divisions.
And precisely these divisions, into "us straight and normal" and "them gay and sick" have led to parents throwing their children out on the street because they are gay, to families subjecting their loved ones to various forms of violence in order to "cure" them. that hatred is something that has become an indispensable and "normal" part of our lives, and that violence is the "default" response to our existence. This is not the Montenegro of its honorable and honest people and these are not values that we can agree to, but we must eradicate them through a joint struggle.
Every act of violence, discrimination and hatred towards us, the citizens of this country who are also LGBTI, Roma, people with disabilities or anyone else "from the margins" is an act of violence, discrimination and hatred towards the whole society and the state itself as a whole us. Think about it the next time you say that LGBTI is a "disease", when you turn your head on the street from your fellow citizen who is Roma, when (knowingly or not) you accept that hate should be the emotion that dictates your actions, not love.
As Selimović wrote then, it should be the same today - instead of having to explain our love and our existence to anyone, to give reasons why we are or are not something and why we love someone, it is time for our fellow citizens to accept our love and our lives as such - as an inseparable part of this society, as a unique part of our history and culture and, finally, as a value that can strengthen, move forward and fulfill us all.
The author is the executive director of the LGBT Forum Progres
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