Pathfinder clubs - Λεσβιακή Ομάδα Αθήνας

Because we are tired to see around us the hetero "normative".
Because we are tired to hear love stories between men and women.
Because we are tired to learn a history that does not know us.
Because we cannot admire "masterpieces" that never speak about us.

Tonight. Here. Screenings in a political/public/hospitable space.
Tonight here - we speak about solidarity.
We speak about things that change.

Tonight. Here. Together.

Athens Lesbian Group, June 2004

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Screenings of Films and Documentaries by the Athens Lesbian Group, June 2005

We enjoyed coming here last year, so we come this year again.
We are here for 2 and a half days. For something like a small festival of films and documentaries.
We are here, because the reasons that drew us together in the first place are still present and pressing. And the need for organising these screenings of lesbian films, after 5 years, still remains a strong one.
So we came with new films and stories. We chose them in order to hear the narrations, to share the experiences, to travel in time, to travel in various countries in the world. And to find the lesbians. The lesbians that we are. To collect pieces of a route that are similar and different, common and personal.
We came to choose from the women that we see in the screen, those that we like, those with whom we identify, those that we understand, those that we look like and those that we lust.
We came because we like to witness stories of lesbians – and of gay men.
We came because we like to imagine how many more stories have been gathered here during these days, in this space, in the centre of the city. Our own stories and the stories of those who sit next to us while watching the films.
We came because we like our stories.

Athens Lesbian Group, June 2005

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Gay Pride Parade 2006

Our lust is a caleidoscope of feelings that propels us in our most generous action.
Our lust is movement towards the outside world. It brings and offers a bouquet of colours.
Our lust makes sense of the absurd and justifies the unreasonable. It wards off our loneliness.
Our lust walks around the streets and seeks meaning passionately. It changes the dimensions of the world.
Our lust ignores the exposure and defies danger. The most explosive creation is trapped beneath our fear.
Our lust does not announce in advance joy but lets the horizon wide open.
Our lust has female nature, it is related to our nature.
Our lust is released from our female nature and embraces our body.
It does not count and measure, it herstorises...
An old story about amazons, witches and the garden of Sappho.
Our lust claims existence and speech in the present. It subverts us.

Athens Lesbian Group, June 2006

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A text about a party

In the following text we have written a few ideas, regarding the third party that Athens Lesbian Group is organising in "Immigrants Place".

This space here is not for us like any other space, it is not just a friendly space, not just a "tolerant" space. It is something more than that, it is a space that is ours as well, since our systematic presence here co-creates its image. It is a space that gets to know the lesbians and which the lesbians get to know. After each party, after each Thursday here, our image becomes visible in a public/mixed/political and social space - an image that we control - in which we can perceive our collective self together with and around others -and this experience is often explosive, because here we are "out" and yet we can be lesbians. And this is something, that rarely happens, at least in such an explicit manner and when it happens, it always demands a great effort from us. Because when our social experience is an experience of non-existence, or of a "double life" for some of us, an experience of proclaiming again and again what is self-evident about who you are, then those spaces, spaces that are "yours", are incredibly important. Furthermore, the appropriation of such spaces is a process through which the space becomes again and again "yours" - therefore and safe - and this process is a profoundly political one: you learn how to claim parts of an identity, you learn how to recognise the power relations which organise social life, to recognise the privileges of others and your own privileges, you invent a language that can describe your experience, you find ways to speak with others, you learn what it means to work with others in order to change things, to extinguish discrimination, to destroy stereotypes and prejudice.

When we came here for the first time to ask if we could organize a "women's only party", we made an important transgression. First of all, with this move, we were choosing to create a collective that would not depend on commercial spaces like the lesbian bars. Secondly, we were trying to create new meeting places, new spaces in the city that would accommodate our sociability. Thirdly, we were searching step by step how to build a new condition and we came here without hiding, carrying our thuths, needs and experiences. Thuths, needs and experiences that in our feasts, the way we have learned to organise them, are often expressed through the code "only with/for women". We do not want to apologise for that but rather to try and explain. When violence against your self-image, against your sexual desire, your love is being re-produced, again and again, by a dominant culture, when the word you use to name yourself is for the rest of your society a derogatory word, then you create survival strategies. And the condition "women only" has been for us, lesbians, part of our very own history of social survival. Besides, sociability amongst women, as each sociability of a specific group, has its own characteristics. In this sense there is a certain pleasure in dancing and feasting with other women that liberates some unique emotional dynamics. Sometimes we just want to enjoy the dynamics of these emotions. Nothing more, nothing less.

When we came here for the first time to ask if we could have a "women's only party", it seemed that we were violating some of the basic structural rules of the space -this was a space that was build in opposition to the logic of racist exclusion and the creation of ghettos –so how could that compromise with a party which would exclude some of the people of the space? Still, despite the seeming contradiction, the political choice of approving our feast the way that we were asking for it, craved a new meeting point that enabled the creation of solidarity bonds and a deep understanding between different groups and people. It did not support the ghettos, the boundaries, it broke them with great strength. Mentalities of exclusion are multiple, complex, deep and extended in everyday life practices -exclusion can be experienced constantly and reproduced in vicious circles of the denial to accept others. When we fail to recognise the special conditions under which individuals experience various exclusions that differ one from the other and are subjected to their consequences, we can not organise effective ways of resistance. Athens Lesbian Group was fortunate, because the people of this space did not ignore the experience of the lesbians. Even those who still believe that women-only parties are a mistake. Today, three years after the first time, we are still here, with screenings of lesbian films and documentaries, with public discussions, we are here with joy behind the bar, voluntarily, two Thurdays every month. We are here trying to find the paths for right and wrong.

Perhaps sooner or later we will not need women-only parties, but even then maybe we will still have them because we will enjoy them –or perhaps after some time there will be parties "only for..", from others. But until then, we will shape our action and language together, widening the capabilities and the potential force of collectivity. And perhaps this is much more important than anything else...

Athens lesbian group, december 2004

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Lesbian identity as politicai identity

The following text was the contribution of our group in a seminar that we organised during the 4th European Social Forum, that took place in Athens in May 2006. The title of the seminar was "Lesbian identity as a political identity". Women from lesbian groups from serbia, portugal and turkey also participated.

Our group emerged in the city of Athens in the fall of the year 2000. At that time, there was no other active lesbian collective in the city (all earlier ones having been and gone a number of years before). This absence was felt intensely by a number of lesbian women who jumped on the opportunity during a meeting under the title "Athens Pride 2000" organized by the "Greek Gay Community" (EOK) where a number of them came together. That formed the starting point of a group for and about lesbian women. During the 5 and a half years which have elapsed since, many women came, stayed and went, from the premises of the "Athens Feminist Centre" where our group was hosted at the beginning, and of which it became an integral part later. What brought us together at the very beginning and still constitutes a basic feature of our existence was our need to meet, to share, to communicate and, of course, to act. The Lesbian Group of Athens evolved as a lesbian collective which aims to construct a real sense of community between us. Our weekly meetings constitute the basic tool of our group existence. The group functions as a support group, itself an experiment in autonomous organization and an exercise in freedom within the settings of the group. This group experience of ours is what we wish to share with you today. Ours is an experience of assertiveness in a positive direction, an experience that generated in us the wish to come together with other lesbians in the context of this Forum, lesbians from other countries and from other life-settings in order to talk about the lesbian experience in the public space. To talk about the potential and the limits of doing lesbian politics as well as to talk about the ways in which the lesbian identity constitutes a political identity.

Of course we do not and we cannot claim to speak on behalf of every lesbian in Greece. We can only speak about what we live through and what we are in the process of constructing. This point exactly has been one of our main political principles: We share and talk about/analyze our own experience, we talk about ourselves, believing and trusting that our very experience and our working through it, becomes a political tool which guides us towards the acquisition of awareness, power and knowledge. The fact that the personal is political has been declared by feminism many decades ago. Such an important axiom, nevertheless, is still hard to digest and be recognized by the dominant perception about what is political action, even by the radical left. As a result, our work is seen as "not very political" or "not exactly political", just because we choose the personal experience as the tool and starting point of our analysis. It is characterized as "less", as something belonging to the sphere of an introvert search, which cannot be recognized as real political action and praxis/deed.

However, the Lesbian Group of Athens persists. While we consider as very important all the policies, which focus on the claiming of legal rights, so that lgbt individuals are not treated as second-class citizens, we still place the main emphasis on the collective exploration of our everyday life. This is our primary material, which takes us to the next step: action. In which ways have we moved all these years? We shall try to give you a glimpse.

As we have already discussed, the focus of our activities since the very beginning was dictated by the wish to share our everyday life experience and, thus, discover and unveil those social practices which keep us imprisoned in a double exclusion: one regarding the social gender in which we found ourselves inscribed since the moment of our birth, and the other regarding our sexual choice and orientation, which (exclusion) banishes us, more or less, to an invisible space. At the same time, we wished to focus at the formulation of a framework that encourages the creation of a common language –as much as possible-, as well as the implementation of effective action. In other words, we try to understand the ways in which homophobia and sexism work, using as a starting point the way we feel, the things that happen, every day and night, at our workplace, in the family, in our relations, in our bed, in our family celebrations, in the street. We re-evaluate feelings and behaviours of ours in the public as well as in the private area, so that listening to ourselves and to each other we are able to create a space that surpasses personal experience, transforming it into a shared experience, an experience that is common to all, even if initially this was not the case.

In this context, the questions we set forth often start from zero point. Nothing is self-evident or given; everything has to be re-told in a new language which we ourselves will create. These investigative processes gradually reveal resemblances and diversities, as well as common but also radically contrary experiences and viewpoints that exist amongst us. If all of us say that we are lesbians, what does that mean? A first point that emerged immediately from the beginning of our group's life was the recognition of the heavy burden of violence with which a homophobic society such as ours has charged us. A burden that often annihilates us, as we carry it in a solitary privacy where it is and feels unbearable. However, the very moment we express and describe the abuse that we have been through, we discover, at the same time, that there exist many different survival strategies that render our lives possible. It is thus that we become conscious of the process of transformation of the social and emotional experience within each one of us, to what we should call a political experience. We become aware of the ways in which we are agents of action instead of passive victims. In the meantime we are developing the ability to produce a discours of our own and, in addition to that, to imagine our eventual political action. A sort of action that would fit us, and, one that we would be able to sustain with our own presence and not by means of "representatives" or by those among us that have the possibility to be "out". Thus, what initially seems as a place of confession of solitary experiences, in the process it is being transformed into a collective political sense of oneself. This is a reclaiming that we are gaining to the degree of our ability to organize the process. What we gain is our self. By relying on our collective power, we demolish up to a certain point the conditions of our exclusion. We are present with our body and our voice. We are not invisible.

On a second level, our group has tried and still tries to set the foundations for a discourse which will challenge our relationship with the world, the identity or the potential identities of homosexual women or of the women whose sexual choice does compromise with or fits the dominant stereotype. In this context we approach issues like our relationship with the institution of family, - the family that bred us and the one that we would like to have -, our sexuality, the workplace, religion and the church, our relationship with political action and activism, the political spaces that work against sexism, racism, class exploitation, social exclusion and so on. What emerges from this all, of course can not be a homogenous identity, which may include all women who define themselves as lesbian or homosexual. We can, however, slightly touch upon those elements which construct the complicated conditions on which our identity is based and, moreover, proceed in the direction of politicising this identity. The need to give a political dimension to the way we experience our identity was not created automatically, neither is it a concluded issue. Again and again our discussion turns towards questions trying to open new paths, which will bring us closer to liberation. In the cycle that we form, space is given to every woman, in order to permit her voice to be heard, this being another right that we struggle to fortify. We know and feel that not all of us are "equal". We start, each one, from different positions and we struggle to build the equality between us without pretending that it is a given thing. We have different life experiences, different ages, different educational levels, and different class backgrounds, even different origins. In addition, we were not given equal chances of coming out ("outness"), neither we share same expression abilities, and we have different talents, wishes and resistances. We are not afraid of individual initiatives but nevertheless we try to build a collective, which will be able to recognize all these differences without forming hierarchies and power relations between us, like discrimination between those that "know better" or "those who can do it" and those others who simply follow. We try to combine our strong aspects in a big mosaic where each one of us will be able to express her own self and offer what she has to and can offer. In this way we work on our collective self-appreciation and discovering our self worth. This work for essential equality is probably one of the most difficult and demanding enterprises. But it is worth every effort on our part if there is to be effective political action and gain.

A third axis of our questioning is invested on the major issue of adopting action strategies that will express agonies, needs and political demands on social and institutional rights and will construct the bridges between us and the "others" and that will eventually render us visible. The visibility issue has been a hot issue for the lgbt movement. Every identity that denies or transgresses compulsory heterosexuality is condemned, symbolically as well as literally in non-existence. The problem of choosing an action that will not crush us against the homophobic attidutes of our society but that it will be able at the same time to demand and create our equal place in the social mosaic is always a big question for us. The group is trying so every one of us can feel strongerin order that we can collectively deal with the stigma that our sexual choise and orientation is carrying in the context of the dominant culture.
Having this in mind we try to create alliances with all the other people in society who try to subvert and transform the structures which produce discriminations and social injustice. In order to achieve this, all these years we tried to bulid bonds with the feminist movement, the social and political rights movement, the radical movement in general. Nevertheless this attempt to meet with others is not always a simple venture. Here we would like to offer you an example on how heteronormative conditions put limits problematize our effort to communicate our experience as lesbians to others.
Our group is active within a social center of Athens where a lot of different political collectives work on a variety of issues, from social/political rights and immigrant rights to civil disobedience and solidarity initiatives. We are involved in the function of this center for more than four years and twice a month we work voluntarily in the bar, creating a space where lgbt people in Athens can meet out of the context of the pink market. There we also organise a number of events, from film screenings to public discussions. Once or twise a year we also have there a party, a "women only" one. Nevertheless, those 4 years constantly our choice to organise a women only event initiates discussions and even reactions and our desire to have such a party is questioned. It is very difficult for us to prove how and why such a choise is not enforcing the ghetto but it is actually taking us out of there. It becomes very difficult some times not to feel that we have to "apologise" for the women only event. It is very difficult to explain why we need sometimes to celebrate and dance in terms that we decide our selves. And it is as hard to explain that we do not exclude some others (men in this occasion) from that but that we rather simply m ake a sttement about our life and our experience.
However this is how things work. We are there and the people we meet support us even if some disagree politically. We expose the realities of our social experiences to others and thus create a space where we can feel we can trust and that we are respected. And this is how a party can be an opportunity to challenge stereotypes and create new realities.

I would like to finish by connecting the atmosphere of our weekly meetings with this space we have created today. In the context of the circle, every Tuesday evening, for the last 5 years we are able to look to ourself and at eachother and that image, the image of other lesbians in the room is a proof of visibility, a sign of existence. And every time this happens our oppression is demolished. And we believe and hope that this is what is happening right now, that we collectively dismantle the mechanisms of oppression, with our bodies and desires being visible and recognised, while we stand one next to the other.

Athens lesbian group, May 2006

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