chatted for an evening. Both she and Roel are two wonderful friends who left far too soon. Why her? Why her?
It felt to me as if I had known Linda all my life. During the bus ride home, I stared into space. Jeroen took both my hands.
“It's going to be okay, it's going to be okay.” Is that right?
Despondency is a difficult feeling to resist. Seeing how Linda was rejected by her own family simply because of her orientation – it evoked so much despair and deep sadness.
Just like me, and all other non-heteros, she was judged. Rejected, condemned, because of who we are.
Of course, life went on. I traveled, lived and met beautiful people, on adventures in my little world, which kept getting bigger.
But this sadness and this injustice always stuck, somewhere very deep. Years after Linda's accident, a small miracle happened. She didn't come back from the dead, but I did get a call from a friend one day. He worked as a teacher at one of my old secondary schools. He asked if I would like to volunteer to speak at his school, as a kind of lecture.
“About what?” I asked.
“About homosexuality”.
I didn't hesitate for a second. It was the mid-90s. It started at that one school in Limburg, but eventually grew into a project throughout Flanders and Brussels. They became conversations rather than lectures. I introduced myself and talked about the difficulties that had arisen, and continued to arise, in coming out as homosexual. I invited students to respond with their own opinions, feelings, and thoughts, whatever they were. The question of faith came up very often. The Bible says this, the Koran says that, ... We entered into dialogue about this. There were also heated discussions - some more sensible than others. Sometimes students came out on the spot, in front of their class. This was work that had an impact. I could do something. I could be there. I could help. I was able to give young people a perspective that was really not common in society until that moment. I felt meaningful because I could make a difference. A while after I started lecturing, I moved to Brussels. Karel, an activist affiliated with the PVDA and whom I had met by chance in a café, had invited me to a kind of “climate camp”. It had been since high school that I had actually been consciously involved in activism or social protest. I had been busy with so many other things – trying to accept myself as I was, among other things. In the meantime, almost 20 years had passed. Speaking to Karel further fueled this old, but well-known fire. Giving the lectures on homosexuality had given me another taste of the benefits of doing militant work. I fought for the acceptance of homosexuality – for myself and for all other LGBT people. For Linda. The conversation with Karel and the climate camps that followed focused my life on a battle against everything else injustice.
The best place to go for that is Brussels. The climate camps took place in the summer and preparations were made in the winter and spring.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was already very clear among activist and scientific circles that all was not well with our planet. Protest actions were conducted from the camps in Brussels. Only the organizing staff, the activists themselves and initiated volunteers, such as myself, were allowed to know about these actions in advance. The camps always had a closed “home base” where employees, volunteers and activists could rest in complete safety when they returned from the protests. Here I had my role: I manned the welcome tent. I was very sorry that I could not go into the field. I couldn't protest, demonstrate, or join the fight. I was certainly still able to walk, but during such actions it can get intense and the police often hit the spot. It was no exception that ambulances sometimes had to be called for injured activists. That could have been fatal to me, it was not without reason that I was on lifelong disability. I had limitations, but they were invisible. It wasn't on my forehead – what if fights broke out? What if the cavalry came? I couldn't risk it. I tried to make the best of it in my own way, and I was able to do that by arranging everything from the welcome tent. We organized discussion afternoons in that tent, people with questions or concerns could contact me, I even handed out condoms to people who shyly asked.
At one camp, a young couple came up to me and asked for a discreet chat. We sat in a quieter corner and she told us that the condom had torn during sex. The woman was afraid that she might now become pregnant. Even then, and still now, I always had a list of doctors at hand. They were all in my phone book. I called one doctor and the couple was able to visit immediately. That practice was quite a distance from the camp, so I arranged transportation for them. A few days later they came to thank me; they had received a good explanation from the doctor and could continue. My task was accomplished! Even though I did not seek out risky situations in my activism, I still ended up in hospital regularly. Sometimes due to
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