Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival [TQAF] is a grassroots initiative aiming to "alter deeply entrenched misconceptions and prejudices toward the queer and LGBT community through artistic and cultural practices". The festival was founded by Tomas Diafas, together with a dedicated team of volunteers, whose purpose was to provide queer artists with a platform to investigate sociocultural phenomena relating to queer identities and experiences. This year’s edition takes place on 7-23 June 2019 in Thessaloniki.

According to the curatorial team, the festival is driven by the belief that "art has the power to open new avenues of communication" and connect different individuals and social groups, fostering dialogues and promoting alternative ways to address social discrimination. Artists, researchers, educators, performers, musicians and activists from around the world come together to give their insight into questions regarding what is Queer, what is Eros and how queers in love function socially.

The city of Thessaloniki was chosen because of its location on the crossroads between the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East, regions where LGBT and queer communities are often marginalised. TQAF hopes to develop strategies for addressing prejudice and resistance to queer inclusiveness in Greece, thus also serving as an inspiration for societies in neighbouring countries. As is also evident in the Festival’s posters, the organisers avoid giving a concrete definition of what constitutes queerness, opting instead for a "white canvas" where everyone can fill in their own interpretation of the queer identity.

The festival is co-organised by the Experimental Center for the Arts, part of the Metropolitan Organisation of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki - MOMus, a public cultural institution supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport, and is sponsored by the European Cultural Foundation.

TQAF’s programme features exhibitions, discussions, workshops, performances, public interventions, educational seminars, film screenings and other events. The festival’s various events will be hosted in several locations in Thessaloniki, including the Experimental Center for the Arts, as well as Bensousan Han, Facta Non Verba, FIX in Art, Labattoir, Ypsilon, Spectroom and other open air venues across the city.

Inappropriate Course - Queer Edition with Vasilis Alexandrou | June 11 at Bensousan Han

Exhibition

The main exhibition, under the title "What is Eros?", features 44 artists from Greece and abroad who examine the concept of freedom, identity, sex and sexuality through painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. Participants were selected through an open call that was announced in December 2018 and closed on 14 February 2019. The exhibition is curated by Eirini Papakonstantinou, curator at MOMus.

Discussions

The discussions, coordinated by Tomas Diafas, will take place over the course of the festival and will involve the public as well as educators, artists and activists in discussions on queerness, erotic love and the arts.

Workshops

The programme features artist-led workshops, coordinated by Tomas Diafas and Maria Juliana Byck, covering a wide range of media to examine the perspectives on Eros/erotic love and its impact, as a "tribute to our vulnerable bodies". The workshops are set to "reveal erotic potentials within the urban landscape to produce transformative mappings of lust" and "uncover the most intimate details of passionate relationships that rewrite the rules of desire".

Zine Workshop with Asparagus Plumosa | June 21 at Facta Non Verba

Performances

FIX in Art’s theatre and MOMus - Experimental Center for the Arts will host a selection of performances curated and coordinated by Eirini Papakonstantinou and Tomas Diafas. There will be many different types of performances dramatising various "experiences and understandings of queer desire and Eros".

Public interventions

Public interventions coordinated by Tomas Diafas and Maria Juliana Byck will take place all around the city and in open air venues, merging the concept of the almighty Eros with the stories of the city, its streets and its people. Playful, spontaneous and unexpected social interventions as well as more controversial and risqué provocations are intended to challenge, inspire and spark dialogues.

Screenings

TQAF will feature a selection of international short films and documentaries throughout the festival run. The film screenings, curated by Evi Minou, Magda Vaz, and Annie Tsevdomaria in collaboration with Balkan Can Kino, will be hosted at Labbatoir project. The films selected explore themes such as discovering love through self-acceptance, motherhood and familial dynamics. Some of the films are political in nature, while others explore sex, desire and how the queer relationships engender love within conventional communities.

The Poetics of Queer Trauma - Creative Writing Workshop with KUIR | June 15 at MOMus - Experimental Center for the Arts 

Other events

TQAF will also feature educational events and seminars, coordinated by Tomas Diafas, bringing together educators to discuss LGBTQ+ issues at local schools. Other events programmed for the festival include dance and theatre performances, poetry readings and music concerts hosted at various venues in the city of Thessaloniki.

Read also via Greek News Agenda: Athens Music Week - First edition; Rethinking Greece: Stella Belia on Civil Partnership Rights, LGBT claims and human rights agenda in times of crisis; Kostis Georgiou: “Art’s purpose is to provide a zone of unlimited paths”; Denys Zacharopoulos: A museum should function as an open window between the private and the public life of people

N.M. (Intro photo: Dare to Stitch - Workshop with Anna Bonarou | June 8 at Facta Non Verba)

The post Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival 2019 appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Artemis Leontis is C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature and chair of  the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Her field of specialization is Modern Greek Studies and her research interests range from the study of Greeks and the Greek language to the idea of Greece cultivated in the West in the modern period. Her latest book, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2019), tells the story of an atypical American philhellene, while at the same time addressing larger issues such as the modern reception of Classical Greece and the challenges posed to the West by Modern Greece. Greek News Agenda* had the opportunity to interview Professor Leontis on her recent research on the life of Eva Palmer Sikelianos, as well as on the present and future of Modern Greek Studies in American academia.

Your recent monograph, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins (PUP, 2019) depicts the life and work of this atypical American in Greece. How did her vision of Greece differ from established foreign and native views at the time?

Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874–1952) was a countercultural figure. A New York debutante, she studied ancient Greek and Latin briefly at Bryn Mawr College but left school to pursue an unconventional artistic life. She became a crucial member of the lesbian circle of Natalie Clifford Barney, then moved to Greece and married Angelos Sikelianos. She studied weaving among village women, became proficient in modern Greek, and achieved the status of “master of Byzantine music.” She planned an international school of non-Western school with Khorshed Naoroji, a Parsi woman from Bombay who later joined Gandhi’s non-violent revolution, then abandoned this plan to produce the Delphic Festivals with Sikelianos. In her direction of Prometheus Bound, she brought together techniques from all her previous pursuits. Now, deeply in debt, she returned to U.S. to make a living by directing theater; but the Great Depression followed by World War II limited her prospects. Impoverished and struggling to put a roof over her head, she followed international politics obsessively in the 1940s with an eye to identifying the sources of political repression in Greece. She wrote over two thousand letters to American newspaper editors and politicians supporting democratic forces against the “imperialist tangle” of British and American interests. In 1951, now blacklisted for her criticism of American imperialism, she was denied a visa to travel to Greece in the “Return to Greece” European Recovery Plan. A few weeks before her death, she did manage to return to Greece and was given the funeral of a national hero.

Though classicizing in her interweaving of the Greeks with every aspect of her life, her vision does not align either with established foreign viewpoints, which typically see Greece as an archive of the past, or with Greek views that claim elements of the Greek past as native traditions. I would call it an “in-between,” or “queer” in the fullest sense viewpoint: it problematizes not only gender and sexuality but also nationality, class, politics, and temporality in ways that do not fall neatly into categories.

What I find truly fascinating and actually quite current is her restless striving to realize herself by making herself different: by running against history’s course to reach an impossible transcendent untimeliness.

In what sense does your biographical study of Eva Palmer Sikelianos address larger social issues?

The book addresses the erasure of women, particularly queer women, and other marginal groups from history. This is a major social issue. Patriarchy and homophobia are major social problems. As a cultural biography of Eva Palmer Sikelianos drawing on the abundant, diverse, and richly layered archives of modern receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity, it brings special attention to the kind of systematic erasure of women, gays and lesbians, and other undervalued users of the Greek past from the archive of Greek learning.

Eva Palmer Sikelianos has been strangely invisible in cultural history, even though she is a crucial link connecting the search for new identities and artistic forms in the early twentieth century with classical learning. In Greece, where she is known as Sikelianos’s wife and helper, her story was censored in order to promote a particular legacy of Angelos Sikelianos. Sikelianos actually wrote her out of his account of the making of the Delphic Festivals, and his literary executor, Anna Sikelianos, worked to make inaccessible the sources of Eva Sikelianos’s life that revealed the scope of her polyamorous attachments with women. After her death, people covered over her political opposition to the monarchy. Her work was fitted to the procrustean bed of patriarchal, nationalist, and heteronormative discourses.

This kind of systematic erasure is a matter of social concern because it has shaped the stories we tell ourselves in ways that short circuit our understandings of how things came to be and what they are. For example, the erasure of the transnational, gender queer aspects in the staging of the Delphic Festivals contributed to a Greek national reading of the events. By this I mean that diverse performance aspects developed through her wide range of collaborations have been ignored: from her work on lesbian theatricals to her collaboration with Konstantinos Psachos and intense dialogue with Khorshed Naoroji. This huge oversight has for years given free rein to Greek national interpretations of the popular aesthetic derived from the festivals.

Case studies such as Eva Palmer Sikelianos draw attention to nonspecialist users of ancient sources who turned to Greek antiquity to imagine their social alterity. Moreover, we recognize the contribution of these undervalued creators to cycles of renewal that revise old codes of interpretation to make Greek sources relevant to new generations.

Your work on Eva Palmer Sikelianos reminds us of the inevitable weight of classical heritage on the imagination of modern Greece—on academia included. In what ways can the discipline of Modern Greek Studies negotiate this ambivalent relationship?

I can address the academic side of your question. From the time when Modern Greek Studies emerged as a field in the early 1970s in the U.S., it has been negotiating its relationship with the field of Classics. This has been an institutional matter, since many Modern Greek programs are located in Classics departments; it is also an ongoing, dynamic intellectual concern.

The first Modern Greek programs were housed in Classics departments for an odd assortment of reasons: because a faculty member happened to know modern Greek; graduate students working in Greece wished to learn to communicate in the language; no other modern language department presented itself as a better home; etc. To bridge the disciplinary gap, the first-generation of scholars drew connections of recent Greek literary works with the classical heritage. They pointed to the persistence of good writing from Homer to Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis, and Elytis—some of the poets they singled out for their powerful self-expression against the background of a weighty literary inheritance.

A decade later, scholars studying contemporary Greece from a broader set of disciplines took a more critical, nuanced stance on the relationship of Greece with the past. Many works stand out: Ours Once More(1982), Michael Herzfeld’s account of the emergence of folklore in nineteenth-century Greece, mapping out the intertwined perspectives of newly liberated Greeks and Westerners who expected them to prove their ancient ancestry; Vassilis Lambropoulos’s Literature as National Institution(1988) identifying the nation building aspects of Modern Greek literature; Stathis Gourgouris in Dream Nation (1996) advancing the argument that Greece functioned figuratively both as an alibi for the cultural ideal of colonialist Europe, and as an unpredictable institution unraveling the certainty of European history. My first book, Topographies of Hellenism (1995) on the contrapuntal relationship of foreigners’ projections of their idea of Greece on the Greek landscape and Greek literary modernist’s reterritorializations of them, was part of this project.

I bring these up as examples of the kind of politically conscious scholarship appearing in Modern Greek Studies in the 1980s and 1990s that identified the classical as part of the self-figuration of the West and represented contemporary Greece as a living, changing context within which the classical has been continuously reworked and reimagined. With respect to Classical studies, scholars in Modern Greek studies were trendsetters in their insistence on paying attention to the contexts in which the cultural construct of a classical heritage gained its enduring power and versatility.

In important ways, Modern Greek Studies functioned as a precursor to Classical Reception Studies, the subfield of Classics emerging in the late 1990s that studies the contexts in which the texts, materials, and ideas of Greece and Rome have been received and reimagined. At the University of Michigan, the endowment in 1999 of the C. P. Cavafy Professorship in Modern Greek contributed to the creation of “Contexts for Classics,” the interdisciplinary faculty consortium that explores the reception of classical antiquity. Modern Greek Studies thus became a crucial voice making Classics aware of the critical importance of context and ideology.

Today, the classical and its legacies in the West are under scrutiny as never before. As Chair of the Department of Classical Studies, I am seeing the most concerted effort from within the Classical studies to dismantle the Eurocentrism of the field. It is an unfortunate sign of the lingering power imbalances handicapping Greece, however, that only a few classicists—Joanna Hanink stands out—point to the ways that idealized classical imagery is deployed to denigrate Greeks still today.

Meanwhile Modern Greek studies programs institutionally located in Classics departments continue to grow in numbers, with the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara announcing the most recent new hires. This puts scholars of Modern Greek in a position of responsibility as never before. We must continue to bring attention to the ideological construction of a classical heritage that excluded people living in supposedly classical lands. This work requires allying ourselves with scholars in other fields and working side by side with them to dismantle exclusive claims of ownership of the past.

What would you consider to be the main developments in the study of Modern Greece, and how do these communicate with more general trends in the Humanities?

I’ve already referred to several major developments: studies that pay attention to gender and sexuality; work that is comparative and crosses national lines; critical, politically engaged work on heritage. Once upon a time, we studied Modern Greek figures and sources in isolation. Now our view of Greece has become transcultural, transnational, and comparative. I’ve also talked about the shifting relationship of Modern Greek studies within Classics, which speaks to the more general trend to foster diversity in the Humanities by dismantling old hierarchies of power. These are all developments in Modern Greek studies that communicate with more general trends.

Another very exciting trend is the relatively new field of Modern Greek archaeology. This is a form of historical archaeology dealing with material sources for which there are written records and oral histories that help to contextualize them. Susan Sutton was a pioneer as an anthropologist working on the Nemea Project. Yannis Hamilakis’s archival and material excavation of the concentration camps on Makronissos was groundbreaking. Kostis Kourelis’s trans-Atlantic Deserted Greek Villages project moving between abandoned Greek villages and immigrant neighborhoods in Philadelphia is truly innovative. Some students of Classical archaeology have begun to draw lessons from these projects to apply their methods to interface more directly with surrounding communities in Greece and other countries where they work.

In undergraduate education, we have been introducing new pedagogies in language instruction, including classroom technologies that bring students in contact with their peers in Greece. Translation has reappeared in language classes at an advanced intermediate level to help students build linguistic and cultural knowledge and appreciate the challenges of intercultural literacy. These connect with trends in the Humanities that highlight evolving pedagogies and recognize the dynamic and omnipresent role of translation in a globalized world where translators are active participants bearing ethical responsibility in geopolitical conflicts. These and other pedagogical innovations place Modern Greek studies at the cutting edge of efforts in the Humanities to train students not just as learners but as culturally literate citizens in a global world.

The heavy emphasis on the relationship between Greece and “the West” is a recurrent theme in works pertaining to Modern Greece. Would you consider that this runs the risk of recasting structural asymmetries into “cultural difference”?

It depends on how precisely the work addresses the relationship of Greece and the West. Let’s take the example of English-language articles on Greece’s relationship to Europe during the debt crisis. These have tended to do exactly what you say: posit Greece’s fundamental cultural difference from the West to make claims that Greece does not belong as an equal partner in the West. In this case, cultural difference is part of the discursive practice of the West that creates structural asymmetries by stereotyping and degrading, and so justifying actions that subjugate them. A complement to this is cultural work that asserts something exceptional and fundamentally non-Western about Greece. The latter is a strategy of setting Greeks apart that partakes in the same discursive practice separating the West from the rest even as it tries to overturn structural asymmetries.

The scholarly strategy that matters today differentiates itself from the preceding by actually highlighting structural asymmetries in the relationship of Greece in the West. It addresses questions of power and analyzes the complex set of ideas and images that have made ancient Greece a cornerstone of the West while marginalizing contemporary Greece. By analyzing how the West, in its execution of power, asserts its superiority in the world, and how Greeks adapt notions of themselves borrowed from the West in ways that sometimes overturn them—this strategy has the opposite effect. It recasts cultural difference to bring to light the kinds of structural asymmetries that have been haunting Modern Greece since its inception.

You were recently appointed C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. What are the new initiatives planned from your new position?

Two prevailing conditions mark my taking this position. One is the status of Modern Greek studies at the University of Michigan. For the past twenty years, I have been part of the development of full-fledged Modern Greek Program offering a major and minor in Modern Greek and PhD opportunities in many departments. Under the leadership of Vassilis Lambropoulos, with the crucial contribution of Despina Margomenou, we have taught thousands of undergraduates, granted nearly 200 degrees, supervised honors theses and prize winning PhDs work, placed and supported students in internships and jobs, hosted hundreds of events featuring scholars from across the world, organized exhibits, built a substantial library collection, and communicated by way of our program’s website with the broader community worldwide. The position of the C P. Cavafy Professorship is endowed. This is a beautiful, strong, wide-ranging program.

The second condition is the canonical status of C. P. Cavafy. When Michigan named the endowed professorship in Modern Greek after Cavafy, he was already the best known poet in Modern Greek. I curated the exhibit “Cavafy’s World” with Lauren E. Talalay in 2002, and hundreds of people attended the opening. We extended the exhibit several months to accommodate visitors. Our companion book “‘What these Ithakas mean…’: Readings in Cavafy,” went through its first run quickly. The Times Literary Supplement listed it as one of the best books of the year. Our work was good, but its reception also showed that Cavafy has a central place in the universe of writers.

In this environment, my strategy is not to duplicate what has already been accomplished but to work selectively for maximum impact. Modern Greek studies at Michigan will remain at the cutting edge through attention to pedagogies, curriculum, and support of scholarly and artistic exchange. Regarding Cavafy’s work, I will continue to publish new work on the Cavafy Forum, a platform on our program’s Modern Greek website supporting debates, bibliographies, scholarly commentary, and creative work. For example, last fall I published “Greek Necropolis,” a poem by Peter Jeffreys accompanied by his essay, “The Greek Necropolis at Norwood.” I’ve just learned that the publication has inspired a campaign to restore he monuments of West Norwood. Next will be a bibliography of the substantial body of musical compositions and songs responding to Cavafy’s poetry.

Cavafy is canonical, as I said before, and so I consider it my responsibility also to bring attention to forgotten or undiscovered work. Of older authors, who has been overlooked and is crying out for translation? Of contemporary artists, who should be supported? Here are two initiatives:

One is to offer short visiting residencies by emerging scholars and artists, including poets, writers, translators, musicians, and visual and performing artists from Greece. I began this work in 2016 with the invitation of Cacao Rocks and Olga Alexopoulou, artists in residence at the Institute for the Humanities. These are made possible by a recent gift from Kathleen L. Vakalo, wife of the late Emmanuel George Vakalo, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and daughter-in-law of artist George Vakalo and poet Eleni Vakalo. The Vakalo name is known throughout Greece for the wide range of contributions to the arts, education and cultural activism. I want to open the door for young people from Greece with worthy projects to make use of the resources of this university and inspire and be inspired through dialogue with faculty and students.

My second planned initiative is to create and edit an active Anglophone book series for exciting interdisciplinary work in Modern Greek Studies with the University of Michigan Press. Nothing analogous to this exists, even though there is marvelous work in line to be published. I saw some of this work during my five years as the Humanities editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. I am hopeful that this will happen, and if it does, I think it can be a game-changing project.

*Interview by Dimitris Gkintidis

D.G.

The post Rethinking Greece: Artemis Leontis on the cultural biography of Eva Palmer Sikelianos and the modern reception of Classical Greece appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

A one-day colloquium titled “New Queer Greece: Performance, Politics, Identity” will be held at the University of Oxford, 10 June 2017, under the auspices of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture and the Sub-Faculty of Byzantine and Modern Greek at Oxford, aiming to address the issue of gender and queer sexuality in Greece in the context of current international and national debates. Academics and scholars have been invited to discuss a range of topics, including: The histories of non-normative sexuality in Greece; Greek queer cultures; LGBTQ communities in Greece, their interventions and activism; Current debates on same-sex marriage and adoption in Greece; Gender, sexuality and migration; Biopolitics and the Greek family; Heteronormativity and national identity; Trans experience and trans expression in Greece; Greece as a queer space in older and/or more recent international narratives; Socially and ethnically specific forms of queer expression; Aspects of homophobia in Greek society; New queer performance, cinema, and theatre in Greece; Queer historiography.

The colloquium will chart the field and feature formal presentations, roundtables, open discussion and a performance. The event programme can be found here and the presentation abstracts here. The colloquium aims to publish a special issue on ‘New Queer Greece’ in a forthcoming volume of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture.

Among the papers to be presented at the colloquim are:

Dimitris Papanikolaou (Oxford), ‘Critically queer and haunted; or, how (not) to do the history of Modern Greek homosexuality’: This paper presents recent developments in gender theorizing and activism in/on Greece, and reflects on how they can (together with the inescapable context of the ‘Greek Crisis’) radically reframe a queer-genealogical critique of Greek culture. In order to do so, Papanikolaou revisits arguments developed in his work in the past, including the suggestion that in Greece, especially because there is no stable and acceptable concept of a ‘homosexual past’, a certain traditional and belated narrative of gay history develops alongside its queer destabilization. It is precisely the exigency and urgency of the present moment (including the present of queer activism in a fast changing and precarious Greece), that makes so evident the ways it is haunted by the unfinished histories, the unclaimed territories and the untold stories of the past. Greece today has become a vantage point to see the demand for history not as a parallel undertaking to contemporary queer politics, but as its inescapable hauntology. What he argues is that the current predicament requires queer histories in the present to remain both critical and haunted. And this means, among other things, to fight in order to keep their claims as open processes: open towards their historical narrative and archival meddling, the political inclusivity of their demands, and the relationship to their future undoing.

Elisabeth Kirtsoglou (Durham), ‘Free riders, or burnt out? Debating lesbian activism in a Greek provincial town’ The LGBTQI movement in Greece has made considerable progress in recent years towards the improvement of the existing legal status-quo as a result of strenuous social struggles that spanned across official and unofficial contexts, the public sphere and social media. In large urban centres, such as Athens and Thessaloniki, lesbian women become more visible as they articulate highly sophisticated political discourses against homophobia, sexism and ethnonationalism (among other issues). The richness of, and differences within lesbian politics in larger cities however is often missed in provincial Greece, where the majority of lesbian women stand ambivalent towards overt politicisation and in some ways unable to follow larger and more visible political structures. Based on new ethnographic material, the present paper discusses the lag in politicisation that characterises a certain provincial town in central Greece following the arguments of several ‘gay’ (as they identify themselves) women who debate lesbian activism. The paper wishes to investigate what constitutes an accepted form of politicisation and –ultimately- whether ‘the political’ is itself gendered.

Elisavet Pakis (Manchester), ‘Queer and feminist archives of feelings: Eleni Bakopoulou encounters Dora Rosetti on the border of the nation and belonging’. In this paper Pakis addresses an archive of Greek-speaking lesbian writing, and the archive of feelings or ‘structure of feelings’ it contains as marks and traces of lesbian subjectivity, memory, history and possibility. More specifically, she  engages with lesbian and feminist activist Eleni Bakopoulou’s recent publications ‘My Friend Mrs Dora Rosetti’, ‘Paraleipomena Doras Rosetti’ (‘Dora Rosetti: What Has Been Left out’), and ‘Like Sacred Ancient Mysteries’. These publications record Bakopoulou’s search for the disappeared 1920s author Dora Rosetti, who wrote the queer novel ‘Her Lover’ in 1929. ‘My Friend Mrs Dora Rosetti’ is an account of Bakopoulou’s encounter and queer friendship with Rosetti in 1984 and Rosetti’s testimony to her about her life and her novel. Bakis focuses is on queer structures of feeling, and on appearing and disappearing, shadowy lesbian subjectivities on the margins of the nation and belonging. She also focuses on Rosetti’s queer encounter and friendship with Bakopoulou and her testimony, as a moment of queer possibility, lesbian inter-subjectivity and connection, and history-making.

See also: 

Rethinking Greece: Stella Belia on Civil Partnership Rights, LGBT claims and human rights agenda in times of crisis

Nikolaos Papadogiannis: One bill fits all? Notes on the new LGBTQ/same-sex legislation in contemporary Greece (Journal of Modern Greek Studies - Occasional Paper 15)

Nikolaos Papadogiannis´ book “Militant Around The Clock? Left-Wing Youth Politics, Leisure, and Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Greece, 1974-1981”

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras interviewed by LGBTQI magazine 'antivirus' on civil partnership and gender identity Bills 

Athens Pride week 2017

J.L.

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ILGA-Europe is an international non-governmental umbrella organization, part of the European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans & Intersex Association (ILGA), working for equality and human rights for LGBTI people. The organization published recently its 2015 Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of LGBTI people in Europe.

Marking a significant improvement, Greece ranks at number 15 out of 45 European countries reviewed, above countries such as Germany, Ireland, Luxemburg, Switzerland, etc. ILGA-Europe bases its ranking on how the laws and policies of each country impact on the lives of LGBTI people,   using a wide range of indicators such as family law, hate speech, legal gender recognition, freedom of expression and asylum rights.

According to the report on Greece, the county has progressed a lot during this past year: “2015 proved to be an eventful twelve months for LGBTI activists in Greece. The election of a government led by SYRIZA, a long-time supporter of equality for LGBTI people, in January started the year on a hopeful note. Promises to introduce civil unions for same-sex couples were quickly reaffirmed but access to adoption was omitted and legislation was slow to progress. In December, civil partnership for same-sex couples was finally introduced by a large majority of parliamentarians. Intersex people were recognized in legislation for the very first time”.

The Rainbow Europe map provides a visualization of the scores Greece achieved on various categories such as family, health, gender recognition and public opinion, freedom of assembly, association & expression, bias-motivated speech, bias-motivated violence and more.

Read more: Interview with activist Stelia Belia Civil Partnership and LGBTI claims in Greece

The post Greece Ranks High on European LGBTI Rights Report appeared first on Greek News Agenda.