“Save us,” chorus the voices from the stage of a theatre in downtown Athens, Greece. Among the three speakers is Yasmin, a transgender woman from Tunisia who is appearing in public to tell her story as part of a production documenting the experiences of LGBTQ refugees. The 25 year-old dancer left Tunisia a year ago, after violent homophobia—mounting with the rise of Islamism following the country’s 2011 revolution—reached a lethal peak. Extremists broke into her house and attacked Yasmin with knife, she explains. “They tried to kill me with stab wounds to my body.”
But even prior to these threats, Yasmin’s youth was defined by abuse and marginalization. She was expelled from high-school for her distinctly effeminate behaviours, and then at age 17 detained for more than two months in an adult prison, where she was raped and beaten. “My pain started when I was born,” she says. “I grew up with family problems because I was effeminate, so the problem was first myself and my family, and then people in my country who don’t accept those like me.”
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Like Yasmin, countless LGBTQ people have escaped threats of death and brutality in their home countries to seek refuge in Greece. But while Europe may pride itself on its purported embrace of diversity and tolerance, most of the new arrivals here have found little in the way of relief from fear, prejudice or insecurity. “This is a nice country, with good weather and a good energy,” says Yasmin. “But it is no place for a shemale.”
Following the peak in 2015 of what has been dubbed Europe’s refugee crisis, the past year alone has seen more than 200,000 people cross the Mediterranean, or take land routes, to the EU frontier of Greece. The majority now remain stranded in refugee camps or informal squats on the islands or mainland—unambiguously bleak conditions that are made all the more hellish for those who “deviate” from dominant cultural and sexual norms.
Although individual countries like the UK have recorded a spike in the number of LGBTQ individuals applying for asylum, gauging the size of this specific refugee population in Greece—or worldwide—remains an impossible task, due to the legal and cultural barriers preventing individuals from identifying themselves in host countries. As a recent report by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) noted, “LGBTI persons in forced displacement are at a high risk of remaining invisible in countries of asylum, due to the fear of further persecution by state and non-state agents.”
My father took me a psychiatrist because he thought this was a psychiatric illness.
These individuals are also “subject to severe social exclusion and violence in countries of asylum by both the host community and the broader asylum-seeker and refugee community,” the report notes. Abuse and discrimination are most virulent in refugee camp environments, but the report also notes the difficulties LGBTQ refugees face in accessing justice and support services due to widespread prejudice among law enforcement and judicial bodies in host countries.
“LGBTI persons face a wide variety of protection risks in countries of asylum, including further persecution by authorities,” the report explains. The threats extend to all aspects of refugees’ daily lives, including their ability to secure “appropriate living arrangements, access health services, and remain free from subjection to violence.”
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These findings are reflected in first-hand accounts from refugee camp detainees in Greece. Describing her experiences of abuse and alienation in one of the country’s most notorious detention centers on the island of Lesvos, Yasmin says she was “still always scared. Even here in Greece. I had many problems with people mistreating me there—one drunk guy [another refugee] was always threatening to hurt me.”
In 2015, the UNHCR rolled out an LGBTQ-specific training programme for its staff and other agencies working with refugees. Yet there has been little effort by other parties to grant special protection to LGBTQ refugees. Speaking from a camp on the remote island of Leros, Ali, a gay former science student from Baghdad, describes his daily visits to the nearby sea to contemplate suicide. “I haven’t yet managed because I’m too much of a coward,” says the 31 year-old, “but I hope one day I will succeed.”
Ali arrived in Greece in January after more than a decade of death threats from his own fanatically religious brother: “When I was 13, my brother came into my room and saw me with a friend. After that day, my life became hell,” Ali says. “My father took me a psychiatrist because he thought this was a psychiatric illness. The doctor gave me injections and treatments that made me like a dead person: without any feeling.”
In Greece, they have a certain view of Syria—thinking that we are all the same.
Ali’s parents came to tacitly accept his sexuality, and his father made an effort to protect Ali from his brother—and from the extremist, homophobic group to which his brother belonged. “My brother’s group does not know the meaning of humanity; they killed many of the homosexuals I knew in Iraq,” Ali explains, pointing to graphic images of their victims posted online. “One day in 2009, my father travelled to another city and left me in the house with my brothers,” Ali continues. “In the night, [my brother] came into my room and lit a fire while I was sleeping.”
When his father passed away in November, Ali’s mother warned Ali that she would not be able to protect him, and that his only choice was to flee. “So I left Iraq and today I am here,” he says, “but as far as I’m concerned, there is no difference between here and there.”
Though Ali has escaped one immediate threat of violence, the hostile and despair-ridden environment of the refugee camp—under-resourced in medical and psychological support—has only fermented his trauma. His medication is erratic and often mis-prescribed; he has no understanding of, or information, about his application progress; and despite having been hospitalized multiple times for self-harm, has no access to regular counselling. Meanwhile, the EU’s increasingly strict refugee policy means he will have to plead his case for asylum in Greece, facing a real risk of refusal and deportation back to Turkey.
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But for some of those who have escaped the punishing limbo of refugee camps and application procedures to be granted asylum in Greece, Europe has afforded some respite; even liberation. “It was my most dangerous secret,” says Rima, a 26-year old bisexual pharmacist who came to Greece from Syria in 2016. “I could never have talked about it—even being an atheist was much easier.”
Rima was 15 when she began to question her sexuality; she remembers first hearing about homosexuality on the radio in Syria, and afterwards asking her parents what the term meant. “My father was so angry that I realised there was something forbidden, and I had to know about it,” she says. Despite her savvy research into sexuality, it was only when Rima arrived in Europe that she felt her pain and sense of isolation recede. “It was a nightmare for me there—I was suffering for ten years and never imagined that other people like me existed,” she explains. “But when I came here and saw people talking normally about sexuality, I was able to speak up without stigma and express my identity.”
They think bisexuals are not suffering because we have two choices about who we can love.
Nonetheless, she is critical of the narrow-mindedness around LGBT refugees she has encountered in Greece, on the part of society and of the European refugee system specifically. She says she was instructed by caseworkers to apply for asylum as a lesbian, and not on the grounds of her bisexuality—a category which, compared to homosexual or trans identities, was viewed with little credibility. “They think that bisexuals are not suffering because we have two choices about who we can love,” she says, noting that even among the lesbian and gay communities in Greece and Syria, the label is regarded skeptically.
She also points to the struggle of locals to compute the existence of LGBTQ communities in the Middle East. “In Greece, they have a certain view of Syria—thinking that we are all the same,” she says.
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Rima’s criticisms are reiterated by activists in Greece who note various strands of cultural prejudice against refugees in the country, including within the LGBTQ community itself. “Of course in some ways, refugees feel they can express themselves more freely here, but there are limitations,” says Sophia Zachariadi, one of the Greek founding members of an Athens-based LGBTQI+ group for refugees providing material and social support. “In LGBTQ-friendly environments things are fine, but if they go to the market for example, they might have problems—from insults and abuse, to being called [on] for sex-work—or even raped.”
Much of this intolerance stems from Greece’s own limited acceptance of sexual diversity, she continues. “You are always a spectacle—even as a lesbian. I all the time find myself thinking about who I am kissing in the public sphere. Many refugees say that they still feel like they’re in Arabia, not Europe.”
