05/05/2020 | Writer: Yıldız Tar
“20 years ago, even the word lesbian itself was unacceptable, today we can shout it with pride.”
We talked with Kaos GL's Seçin Tuncel about the COVID-19 outbreak, quarantine and lesbian visibility day.
"Because of the coronavirus, many of us have a different life experience. Some of us are alone, some of us experience this process with their partner or family" Tuncel said, adding that the safe spaces that has been told are controversial for lesbians:
"Like many people who are not economically strong, some lesbians have to sit in the family home hiding their identity. For open identities, even houses that we think as safe are pretty overwhelming now. It was already hard to walk hand in hand with our partners outside of our neighbors and even there the neighbors were calling us as sisters or friends but now, as the colleges are shut down and our partners, flirts had to go to their hometowns and reaching them became even harder, so we are meeting online."
Online meetings in quarantine
Tuncel, said the associations are one of the primary safe areas, and added:
“In this process, the lesbian* online meetings organized by European Lesbian* Conference called Locked-down Lesbians Listening (LLL), with the cooperation of Kaos GL gave us a breather. In these meetings, the problems we experienced in areas such as organizing, old age, health, housing, unemployment were again on our agenda.”
Reminding that the acceptance of identity is the first step to talk about problems, Tuncel concluded her words as follows:
“20 years ago, even the word lesbian itself was unacceptable, today we can shout it with pride. Instead of lesbian, there were various other words that got proposed, one of them was women who love women. On the other hand, we all experience that cis-gender lesbian politics is no longer inclusive today. We must not stop coming together to make all these problems visible. Don’t stay silent, shout: Lesbians exist!”
Translation: Yiğit E. Korkmaz
Tags: human rights, women
