Beyond the Closet - tabelli tabelli

by Joséphine Caruana

Hello everyone! It’s your favourite queer Gozitan…long time no see! It’s been a hot minute, and as a freshly eighteen-year old girl with some newfound wisdom (because eighteen is sooo mature) I decided to come back to this blog. As always I am beyond (haha get it?) grateful for LGBTI+ Gozo for giving me a platform to share my voice and opinions.

As I’m writing, all the young queer Gozitans come to mind, especially young girls. I see you and I am with you. I hope you see yourself within my writing and I hope the stories I have to share resonate with you. Feelings are big and scary right now, especially for me at my big age.

I hate labels being forced upon me by my neighbours and people I grew up with. ‘Dik taf ta’ min hi??’

‘Eh iwa dik il-lesbjana’. It doesn’t feel fair. Like my whole identity revolves around who I get the hots for. It’s been like this my whole life, I remember in primary school, my whole identity revolved around being ‘good’ at drawing, it’s all there was to me. I hate seeing people from that period of time, everyone has this predisposed notion of me and that’s not fair. Nobody bothered to ask me if I even liked art or drawing, nobody bothered to get to know me, they just listened and took everyone’s word for it. Thinking they know everything about me. That always made me angry.

That was a very juvenile example, but I feel like it applies here especially as a local. I’m a lesbian first, that’s all there is to me. Forget that I like to read, that sometimes I start talking about the weather and mundane things to avoid talking about things that bother me, that I love LOVE pickles and watching old French films, forget the way I pull my shirt up to my nose when I’m shy and criss cross my legs when I’m talking about my hopes and dreams. Oh yeah! I have hopes and dreams! I feel like all of this is intensified as a local.

I do recognise that Malta is a very LGBTI+ friendly country when it comes to legislation, but this is not Malta, this is Gozo. I feel like local Gozitans feel like queerness is a very foreign California-esque thing and not something that one is born with. When Pride happens I feel like nobody really considers the fact that Gozitan queers are attending, LGBT tourists are tolerated because they are foreigners doing foreign things, the same way they tolerate an American speaking the way Americans speak because it is separate from their own identity. But with me, a local Gozitan, who has spent her entire life here, it's a completely different thing. I’m not a foreigner. I feel scrutinized for expressing myself.

And I know I can just ignore it, in one ear and out the other, but why does it have to be that way? I feel like with experience, I have gained enough emotional maturity (although I feel a bit pretentious saying it because what do I know? I’m just an eighteen year old girl

surrounded by adults with so much experience) to filter out the noise but it wasn’t always like that? Why is hardship being romanticised? How many young queer people have to resort to taking their own lives because of the pressure?

Law and culture are very different. Maybe I am asking for too much, call me naive. I don' t care, I want to make myself heard and to take up space. Who cares what Ċetta from church says about me? I want to be in control of my own labels, my own identity, not an agenda pushed onto me by everyone else. I am angry, for me and for my queer sisters and brothers.

We don’t deserve this, the whole notion that hardship builds character to me is nonsense, not when it’s about who we are, not when a child in primary school spends an entire night kneeling, praying to Jesus to possess her so that she could finally go to heaven and stop being a ‘bad girl’. I am sick and tired.

Do better.

And yet again, you’re not alone…I promise.