Sing if you're glad to be gay

I found this video in YouTube the other day and though I’d share it with all, since it is part of the history of the gay movement in the UK and worldwide. It was originally written by Tom Robinson for the London Gay Pride march in 1976. It was released in 1978 as one of a four tracks EP called "Rising Free". BBC Radio 1 refused to play this song and instead played the less controversial opening track "Don't Take No For An Answer".



Read the lyrics and see how perfectly they fit in Greece today…

Sing if you're glad to be gay (1978)
The British Police are the best in the world
I don't believe one of these stories I've heard
'Bout them raiding our pubs for no reason at all
Lining the customers up by the wall
Picking out people, knocking them down
Resisting arrest as they're kicked on the ground
Searching their houses, calling them queer
I don't believe that sort of thing happens here

Sing if you're glad to be gay
Sing if you're happy that way

Pictures of naked young women are fun
In Titbits and Playboy, page three of The Sun
There's no nudes in Gay News our one magazine
But they still find excuses to call it obscene
Read how disgusting we are in the press
The Telegraph people and Sunday Express
Molesters of children, corruptors of youth
It's there in the paper, it must be the truth

Sing if you're glad to be gay
Sing if you're happy that way

So sit back and watch as they close all our clubs
Arrest us for meeting and raid all our pubs
Make sure your boyfriend's at least 21
So only your friends and your brothers get done
Lie to your workmates, lie to your folks
Put down the queens and tell anti-queer jokes
Gay Lib's ridiculous, join their laughter
"The buggers are legal now,
what more are they after ?"

Sing if you're glad to be gay
Sing if you're happy that way

2,355 miles

What’s in a distance? Nothing really… Just numbers…
2,355 miles is just 3,790 kilometers or 12,434,638 human steps…

Faces...

Suppose life ended in the next 30 seconds…
Is this time enough for farewells to people I liked, loved, cherished or despised?
Wοops… I haven’t got time. They are so many! So many people that influenced my life to the better or worst; and they all deserve a proper goodbye…
But no time for that. It takes so much time to remember names behind faces, dates, places, embraces, kisses, tears, laughs… Snapshots of a lifetime.
I guess I’d just had to say ‘goodbye all’ and that’s it. Or maybe just close my eyes and smile to hundreds of faces.
Would they have time to smile back?
Would they?

Café Atlântico

The night spit metal and sweat. Under the bridge, the sound of car tires and brakes was ripping the horizon far across Setúbal. Painful like a chalk against the school blackboard, it was fading away before it became a buzz at the other side. The bridge… Symbol of the fragile power of a dictator who, sunk in his vanity, gave it his name just to see it changing by the revolutionaries into the birth date of their carnations. Ponte 25 de Abril… From that moment on, river Tagus was never the same again… Twenty years later, in mid-summer, Lisbon lives through its warmest night. That was my first summer in the city…

(Soon in bookstores near you?)

Maite zaitut...

Do you ever get that feeling that you’re destined to grow old with someone? That among the tens of thousands of people one meets in their first half of life, there is one who stands out?

That one is Iñi for me. We met fifty centuries ago it seems and our relationship went through different stages, from desire to lust, from excitement to love, from jealousy to despair, from disappointment to friendship, from brotherhood to family…
It took ages to mature and become what it is today.

Distance is a state of mind… it may be. But somehow Iñi is never away… Among the hordes of humans, he’s the most human of all.

In a funny way, I know… I will grow old next to him.

Eskerrik asko Iñigo... Maite zaitut...