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In other words, we really knew how to hurt each other.
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As intimately, wholeheartedly and quickly as we were capable of giving love, we could also take it away, just as quickly. The experience had given me a new angle on gay life: where I used to think lesbian love was the best love, and lesbian people the best people, I was now certain that lesbians were in fact the absolute worst. The last woman I’d really liked had evaporated into thin air after three intense months when it was all over, I was dazed, bruised and practically hallucinating from the impact of the crash-and-burn. When I still thought gay bars were utopian spaces filled with magical queer people. My present-tense queerness was more jaded than before, though. The world needed to know about this politically expedient, historic occasion, and, according to me, I was The Queer for the job. Since then Latvia’s “embattled gay rights movement,” “desperate for support and visibility,” had worked tirelessly to bring EuroPride to Riga, hoping “that an event of scale would bring international attention to this issue.” Or that’s how I pitched it anyway. Latvia’s first LGBT Pride march in 2006 had been violently attacked by a mob armed with human feces and holy water, placing the country on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Watch list. I came across a feminist anarchist punk named Marina, who agreed to accompany me to one or all of the city’s gay bars-a bar called Purvs, meaning “swamp” in Latvian, advertised as a club for " gejiem, lesbietēm, biseksuāļiem, transvestītiem.” I visited another of the city’s gay bars, Golden, on the following trip.Īfter my grandparents died, I didn’t return to Riga until the summer of 2015, when VICE Magazine (print, RIP) enlisted me to report on EuroPride Riga 2015-the first time in the event’s 24-year history that it would take place in a post-Soviet nation. On one trip in 2007, I did a search on MySpace for “lesbians” in the area.