Stories of Pride: Bigots Tried To Ruin Timisoara's First Pride, But Couldn't

The LGBT community in Timișoara, Romania, recently faced an onslaught of homophobic graffiti and came up with the best way of dealing with it.

The city hosted its first ever Pride festival in early June, but in order to avoid a negative reaction, the plan was to forgo a public parade and instead focus on cultural events such as, theatre, music and art exhibitions. The city’s beloved national theatre hosted one of the events and became the target of homophobes.

Last week, an unknown assailant painted a cross over the window that displayed a poster designed by the famous artist, Ovidiu Hrin, for the Pride event. A photo of the graffiti was shared all over Facebook, and finally someone came by and washed it off.

The homophobe, or homopbobes, returned and painted on the glass again.

No one wanted this to turn into a back-and-forth of vandalism and cleaning it off, so another local artist, Benedek Levente, converted the cross into a vertical rainbow flag. He left a space for the message of the original poster –“How do you choose to see the world?”—to shine through.

And it did. Timișoara fought for Pride; it fought the highly influential Orthodox Church for Pride. Last year the church managed to convince lawmakers to hold a referendum on changing the country’s constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, but voted down that proposal in October’s referendum.

And decided to have a Pride festival to celebrate.

Still, Orthodox priests stood outside events, praying, and another group of men infiltrated an event wearing ‘Jesus is risen’ t-shirts, and organizers received threats of violence, affirming their decision to keep the visibility of Pride to a minimum … for now.

But they held Pride, and they have Pride, and they will not stand down for bigotry and hatred. This may have been their first Pride, but there are more to come, in Timișoara and all over Romania.

The march goes on, worldwide …

Gay Star News