I guess so but I am not planning stuff like that for no one knows how the future will be, I have a lot of things to do and I think that I lots of things will change in my life. I have nothing against marriage but I actually prefer cohabitation, because it shows that you stay together out of free will and not because of some stamp in your passports. Responsibilities should also be by choice and not because you promise things to each other at a
wedding.
Ania (Ukraine/Poland)
I am married, I am married to my very good friend Teodara who is from Belgrade but lives now in between Berlin and Paris, she is a guest student in Berlin but normally she is doing her PhD in Paris. There are several ideological reasons why I married her, but it was also just because it was fun. And she needed a Slovenian passport. Marriage is an institution of capitalism and a patronistic system and because we both utterly despise that we decided to both make an absolute mockery out of marriage, so we married in the IUSY festival in Malmö in front of 3000 people and Mona Sahlin, then Swedish minister for trade, performed the ceremony. Otherwise this act of marriage that Teodora and me did is also a nice way of saying “I love you as a person” of course we would never marry in another, conformist, way.
Peter P. (Slovenia)
Yes sure, because I want to have children and then it is better to be married.
Anja (Germany)
Well, I don’t want to marry in the next few year, and if I would do so it would only be for judicial reasons and yes I want only if I have the feeling that my relationship with my boyfriend is everlasting and unconditional till dead do us part.
Rowdy (Netherlands)
Is this really a question? Married, me? Never! Well, maybe only for the papers… But I don’t believe in the institution of marriage and long term relationships are okay but marriage is out.
Pedja (Serbia)
Yes I want to have a long term relationship with some good man. In my country it is difficult to find a good gay man and in my country gay marriage is still forbidden.
Mr. Pook a.k.a. Mi-ner (Belarus)
I wouldn’t like to give birth but maybe in the future I would like to adopt one, there are lots of abandoned children and like working on somebody’s education and raising
Emilia (Serbia)
Yes, I would like to have children - once upon a time. But first there have
to be a man. First I want to live some years without them. Traveling around and
have fun.
Tobias (Germany)
Actually my coming out I connected with a certain person I met it was really a hard time for me, he helped me a lot by being nice and understanding. He was just a friend. After we spend two months together he told me he was gay and this is for the first time I realized that I belonged somewhere and that this was with the gay society. About my family I think they knew before I knew that myself, but we never spoke about it, never. We are no family that shares things like that. I had new friends that I met, they where gay so there was no point in coming out with them. Most of my hetero friends don’t know about it. They ask me why I don’t have a girl friend but I tell them that I think that its no point to waste time on women.
Azer (Bulgaria)
I had two trials for my coming out out, once when I was young and one later. Very helpful at this time when I had all these questions about not being heterosexual was that I knew somebody at “Die Falcon” who was openly gay. The first time I had nobody, or at least not the right person to talk to and I spoke with somebody of who I thought he may be helpful but he wasn’t so my reaction was to stay straight. 8 years later I was at first of my personal feelings convinced that I was not a heterosexual person and secondly I found a person to whom I could address my questions. The first family member I told was my brother who took it at first very rational and his second reaction after two or three weeks was to speak with all his friends about homosexuality and to act against discrimination. That was for me a complete surprise. Later on when my parents also realized that I was not heterosexual and I was living with a boyfriend it was very helpful that I had my brother on my side. I never really had an open bad reaction from somebody concerning my sexual orientation but did had some hidden bad talk from some of my colleagues. But all in all I can not complain about this. The bad thing was that a lot of people recognized me just by my sexual orientation instead of the things I am good in or my profession and so on.
Uwe (Germany)
When I was a child I understood that I like woman and my first experience with this was when I was 13-years-old. When I was 16 I had first serious “fallen in love” and she fell in love with me too.
I guess love is rubbish. But what is happening now, we will see.
***(Russia)
Before telling someone you have to be aware of the fact that you are gay, to have gone through an internal coming out, so to say. And I was lucky because with me this process took a relatively short period of time. When I was 16 I realised that I am gay and for me it wasn’t difficult at all to accept it but the main problem was what to do next, meaning what would happen next. I had the need to share what I felt with someone. When I was 17 I told my ex-partner that I’m gay. I expected to get some understanding from her but I didn’t. That was the first time I faced the fact that I can not expect that everybody would understand me and that there would always be people that would not accept me and would try to change me. My family knows, they understood a bit later after I told me fathers ex, and they still think, or hope, that it will change in time. Actually, the only person who at least tried to talk to me and understand how I feel was my aunt and I didn’t expect that because she has lived in a small village all her life and I didn’t expect that she would be so open minded. My best friends from my home town know, I told them when I was 18, my friends from the university know but there are still many people who I have not told but that’s mainly since I think that it does not concern them. I am only concerned about one of my friends and I am still afraid to tell her because she is really homophobic and she is very much afraid of all minority groups. And I do consider her as a friend and the fact that I still haven’t told her probably means that I still have some fears. But most of my friends are really nice and they like me the way I am.
Asja (Bulgaria)
It's not yet to the end, I told about myself to my male friends, and mostly heterosexual friends, to make our relationships clear because you know, sometimes its like, you know, we are friends but… Sometimes people say that friendship between man and woman can not exist, so when I meet a heterosexual man I now say it quite fast who I am. My parents they don’t know, but its because they, I think they are not well prepared to hear it from me, I observe them and how they react to, for example films or gay pride parades on TV. And their reactions are different. My father might say, this awful gay man, what do they want, they want to adopt children and hurt these children. Sometimes I tell about my friends, especially when we go to the club, they don’t know that I go to a gay club, I try to say it indirectly.. when I would say that directly that I am a lesbian.. they are really are not prepared for it… I don’t think they ever met, no, I think they never realized that they met any homosexuals.. they are rather strict Catholics.. it’s a taboo for them and they don’t want to talk about it, homosexual contacts for example, for them the sexual act can only be heterosexual, they cant imagine any other kind of sexual contact.. but of course its not only about sexual contact.. I will tell them, but at the moment I don’t have a job, I’m doing my doctoral studies and I am depended on them, but I try to show them that I try to work hard, help around in the house, to show them that they don’t keep me here for nothing. But I hope that soon, I don’t know when, I will tell them, and I hope it will be better then, it will clear some relations.. I have not told my brother and sister either, but I think my sister knows because she knows my friends.
Aşka (Poland)
My religion is important for me since I was baptized several years ago, I did that on my own, nobody forced me. Religion should be based on faith but its based on different things now, not on faith but on power and influence, that’s why many people gave up on religion. What the bible says people perceive the bible as they wish and as is comfortable for them t explain.. But Jesus said, “Blessed are the unique, those who are born unique, those who are created unique…” He doesn’t forbid, those who judge and those who do this because of their own sins. Jesus said, “Don’t judge.”
Assia (Bulgaria)
Religion should be a guideline to people, it can help you in making choices and gives you a certain feeling of security. But at the same time it can close your eyes, it makes you blind to the beauty of diversity. So you end up narrow minded and xenophobic, afraid of everything out of the ordinary.
Servaz (Netherlands)
First of all I want to say, Yes!, it is important but why is it important for me? Because I always wanted to be someone special? J As I recognized that I am gay I also recognized that it is an important part of my personality, to be gay. People are, somewhere in society, being defined about the way they are choosing their partners, because I don’t want to hide my sexuality that the reason that it becomes so important to me.
Ralf a.k.a. Grobi (Germany)
I don’t think its an important part of my identity, but I think that it is important part of how other people see my identity.
Maja (Croatia)
I think its important and just I compare with my past and models that I perceived from the family, what they put in my and what chanced in my after I realized that my sexual orientation is different.
Ivan S. (Serbia)
Yes, it is sexuality and my orientation is quite important, not the most important but I think, its somehow, connected to many things in normal life. So I think sexuality, well not maybe sexual orientation really defines very often really the way I behave. But I don’t that “discovering” and accepting my homosexuality didn’t change my life. And when its about perception from my friends I think it’s not a problem and a subject of talk and gossip but my mother I think that its one of her favourite topics of some kind of women discussion with friends and colleagues but I think its good because she in a way makes the job that we try to do in our organisation, I mean that she shows to other people that she accepts it and that its nothing bad. And she has really good contact with my boy friend Artur and sometimes Artur knows better what is going on in my house than I.
Artur J. (Poland)
I was about 15, and this boy was, I moved from my mother to my father, my parents were divorced and I moved to his neighbourhood, and we became best friends, we where in the same class and in the same courses in school and people were already talking, but I didn’t realise, it was for my coming-out. One and a half year, once, one night when my father was not at home in the weekend and he slept in our house and we watched some pornos and we drank some alcohol and I tried to touch him while he was sleeping and he was realised that but didn’t said anything but we didn’t talked about it but the behaviour changed. And I had a good relation with the mother of this boy and I told her what happended and she reacted really scared, she separated us and she wanted to go to the police and tried to get me off school, talked with my parents, really everything, but she failed. After that we never talked again to the whole family. This was the first time that I thought I could be gay.
Ingo (Germany)
She was cute, her name was Caroline, she was studying microbiology and I was sitting next to her in class and we started talking about the problems in society and there was some kind of sparkle between us and then we had a relationship. My parents did not liked her to much because she was not very open and was from a different region of the country and thus could not speak our dialect and… ehm… ehm… ehm… ehm… Finally we had a big fight…
Maurice (Nederlands)
It happened three weeks ago, a girl followed me in a pub and caught me near the toilet and made an attack on me by kissing, I thought it could only happen like that in films, but its true, its really true. It’s not like I am bragging like “ah, girls hunt for me”, I just tell it because I think its important that people know that these things really happen. We spend an evening and we met two or three times more and she is currently taking her exams at art college, she’s an artist and I had to go to Berlin now. For the first time I’m here but I didn’t want to go here because of her.
Dima (Belarus)
I don’t know where to start, it happened quite accidentally he was rather physical kind of relationship and it developed in something really big after a while we got really addicted to each other and for quite a long time there was not a single day that we would not see each other, almost two years. We where very different but at the same time had many things in common. The end was more or less like this, I made the decision to finish my studies in Poland, at the time I was studying in the UK, so that was the biggest contribution to the fact that we split up. Even though we split up we stayed a lot together during my last time in London, we still call each almost once a week and we remained good friends.
Sylwester (Poland)