I'M Gay and I'M in Cyprus
It’s not that he’s been the victim of prejudice or homophobic bullying, at least not since middle school. It’s not that he’s closeted. It’s not that being gay would be an issue at his workplace. It’s just that he likes to be discreet. How discreet? What if he were at a party, for instance, talking to people he doesn’t know well, and the subject came up? Would he ‘out’ himself?
Well, he replies, if someone said something like “Yesterday I went to that club where all the faggots go,” Nikos would probably keep quiet, unless someone asked for his opinion. (Admittedly, the Cypriot poushtis may be less offensive – if only because it’s more widespread – than the English/American faggot.) Only if they said something he found reprehensible – for instance that “faggots like to sexually harass 15-year-old kids” – would he intervene, and set that person straight. Would he add ‘I should know, because I’m a faggot myself’, though? Only if they asked him directly, he replies. That’s pretty discreet.
On the other hand, he doesn’t hide his sexuality. He has a bag that reads “Nobody Knows I’m Gay” – a way of poking fun at “some people who are afraid for no reason” – and likes to walk around with it. He wears a rainbow flag on his T-shirt, a small medallion with two interlinked male symbols (shorthand for homosexuality) around his neck, and a large tattoo of the same emblem on his back, just below the left shoulder. He’s never had any trouble because of it, though he does recall being in a cafĂ© once and hearing one girl – having noticed his bag – say to another: “Kori [girl], that guy’s a faggot!”. “But it didn’t bother me,” he shrugs. “After all, that’s what I am! Big deal. It’s like she was saying ‘Kori, that guy’s tall’.”
Nikos is indeed quite tall, for what it’s worth. He’s also quite beaky-looking, a gangly 29-year-old with close-cropped hair and an earnest expression. He likes to talk and indeed he likes to opine, in the way of someone being interviewed on TV. “Let me say a few things about that,” he’ll declare by way of preface, or “I have this to say”, or – holding up a finger, after I mistakenly assume his story’s over – “I haven’t finished yet”. Yet he’s not pompous. His opinions don’t sound like he’s pontificating, nor is he shrill and strident like so many activists. I don’t think he’s an activist at all, to be honest – just an ordinary person, hoping not so much to transform Society as simply to make sense of his own experiences.
He does sometimes talk like an activist, as when he trots out the well-worn argument that homosexuality exists in animals, ergo can’t be unnatural – but his views in general are surprisingly mild, for someone with a blog on the subject. He doubts the trendy ‘rainbow’ theory, viz. that almost all of us have homosexual and heterosexual elements in various proportions (one researcher, Sandra Leiblum, even claimed there are as many different kinds of sexuality as there are people on the planet), preferring the older theory that LGBT types make up about 10 per cent of a population, the other 90 per cent being straight. As for gay marriage, though he thinks it should be legal, he doesn’t insist on a religious aspect (maybe because he himself isn’t religious). It’s absurd that our laws “recognise the marriage of an 80-year-old man who marries his housemaid, supposedly out of love but really so he can keep her [in Cyprus], and don’t recognise the marriage of two people who are in love and want to get married,” he asserts – but it doesn’t really matter (to him) if those people get married in a church or a registry office. “Religious marriage isn’t our business, it’s the Church’s business,” claims Nikos. “If the Church believes in a certain dogma, and says ‘we don’t want to make a religious wedding’, we should respect that.”
The key to his beliefs, I suspect, is “visibility”, a word he uses again and again. That’s why he wants LGBT issues to be out in the open – because “to accept something, you have to see it. If you don’t see it, you can’t accept it”. Acceptance has its limits, he points out; it doesn’t mean “we’ll be kissing in the streets”. But these issues can’t be hidden away, if only for the sake of young kids – kids like Nikos himself – trying to make sense of their urges. In the end, it all comes back to his own troubled adolescence.
“When I was 14, how could I accept myself if I didn’t know there were others like me?” he asks plaintively. “I didn’t know!” He had a dictionary, so he’d read the definition of ‘homosexual’ and knew there must be others – “but maybe they’re in other countries,” he thought, “and this thing only recently came to Cyprus”. Seriously? Oh yes, he insists: at age 14, “I assumed I must be among the first homosexuals in Cyprus.”
This was in Kofinou, though he went to school in Larnaca – and didn’t hang out with the other village kids, in any case. He’d always been a solitary boy (mostly because he didn’t play football, he claims), and spent most of his time reading. Even now, there’s an innocence about him, as if still carrying vestiges of that sheltered childhood. At the age of 12, when he went to middle school, he still didn’t know where babies came from or the meaning of ‘masturbate’; even in his teens, well into puberty, he devoured Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books, written for young children. He told his parents he was gay at 17 – “17 years and 19 days,” actually – having led up to it in the previous year by telling his classmates and brothers. His dad said he’d always suspected it, and later told the psychiatrist that “Nikos has always been very isolated, and I’ve always wondered what was wrong, whether he was hiding something. Now that he’s told me, I feel like a weight has been lifted.”
That psychiatrist was the reason he’d come out – because, influenced by old-school sexology books that insisted homosexuality was “treatable”, Nikos wanted to ‘cure’ himself, and needed his folks to help out financially. A big part of his thinking stemmed from an incident (actually two incidents) which had taken place in his very early teens, when he’d been alone in the changing-rooms at school – the others were playing football – and another boy had come in. “Come on, let’s do it!” the boy said to him. Nikos got up, thinking the other boy was about to hit him (he was often bullied in those days), and his classmate grabbed him, pushed him against the wall and penetrated him. Both were fully clothed, albeit in P.E. clothes – but a few months later the same thing happened again, this time naked, and “my heart started beating really fast straight away,” he recalls, “because I liked it”. Later, as he changed into his school clothes, his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t tie his shoelaces.
Nikos was 13, hurled into a maelstrom of trying to figure himself out. “What did I like – men, women, both? Did I maybe want to become a woman myself?” By the age of 14, he knew he liked men – but even then he wondered how permanent it was. “I thought that maybe, if I found the right girl, things could change.” He also wondered if that incident in the changing-rooms had somehow warped him: “Maybe the magnet of my heart had been pointing to women, and because this thing happened it had changed direction. So maybe I should go to a doctor, to shift my magnet back in the right direction again.”
In the event, of course, the psychiatrist was a bad idea, and Nikos quit after three or four sessions – though another psychiatrist helped later on, namely Sigmund Freud whose book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (borrowed from the Larnaca Public Library when Nikos was 18) helped settle his mind, even though the book finally finds it impossible to say whether homosexuality is genetic, environmental, psychological, or caused by biological changes (Nikos himself tends to think it’s genetic, but can’t prove it). “And that’s when I started to feel that I am what I am,” he concludes. “And that maybe I should just accept it”.
Gay rights have become a social Issue – but being gay remains an intensely personal experience, as I’m reminded by talking to Nikos Darkman. Things are surely different for a boy today than they were in Kofinou in the 90s, with internet chat-groups and a more gay-friendly culture in general – but Nikos still went through a bad time in his early teens, and it’s marked him deeply. He was bullied, called a sissy, hit and threatened, all in addition to his own desperate soul-searching and the sense of living a double life.
By and large, he got over it. Nowadays he flirts unabashedly, and recalls a night in Thessaloniki – where he studied Languages – when he took part in a male striptease contest (in a non-gay bar) and won wild applause by telling the room that he liked men. Then there’s the story at the swimming pool in Nicosia, when he ogled a good-looking guy and left his phone number on the sun-lounger as he was leaving. The guy called the next day, admitting that he was married but had had a fling with another soldier in the Army, and wouldn’t mind having one again – adding fuel to the theory that most of us are both gay and straight, whether or not we admit it.
But the most intriguing tale is perhaps Nikos’ attempt to have sex with a woman, at the age of 21. He tried again at 27 (i.e. two years ago), both times at the behest of his brother who – convinced that his magnet can indeed be shifted back in the right direction – dragged him to a cabaret in Limassol. The second time was slightly more successful (but only slightly); the first time he couldn’t even get an erection – and, noticing another young man waiting his turn in the corridor outside, asked him to come in and “show me what to do”. The surprised young man obliged, and started taking off his clothes – at which point Nikos complimented him on his body and one thing led to another, the Russian lady being presumably delighted to have been paid just for being a voyeur. Once again, this story implies that gender roles are more fluid than we think – but it also implies something else: that even now, after all these years, Nikos is still slightly tempted by the thought that maybe he’s not entirely gay after all.
“I wonder…” he muses. What if his solitary childhood played a part in shaping his sexuality? Or what if that incident in middle school changed him from a boy who liked girls to a boy who liked boys?
“If it weren’t for that incident, what would happen today? Would I like women? Would I have discovered at some point that I like men? Would I have got married, and only found out after I was married? Would I still be married and feel that something wasn’t going well, but not know what that something was? If at 14 I didn’t have that experience with a male classmate, and had it with a female classmate, what would things be like today?” There’s no simple answer to that question – but Nikos Darkman keeps being drawn to the thorny mysteries of human sexuality, in his life and now in his blog. ‘Strange love’, indeed.
Theo Panayides
Cyprus Mail...
actup.org
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