#title [poem, title unknown] #author Katerina Gogou #LISTtitle [poem, title unknown] #date 1986 #source The Absentees poetry collection #lang en #pubdate 2025-03-03T23:59:45 #authors Katerina Gogou #topics Return Fire, poetry, rememberance, cisheteropatriarchy, #notes Re-printed in Return Fire vol.6 chap.3 (winter 2021–2022). To read the articles referenced throughout this text in [square brackets], PDFs of Return Fire and related publications can be read, downloaded and printed by visiting returnfire.noblogs.org or emailing returnfire@riseup.net She bent her pale head with a sigh and fell asleep for ever Above her the sky mountainous Barren landscape -dark- stones only and rocks not even rain... Bride you with the plastered mouth red Brocade hands melted handiwork Offered pleadingly Some lilies Around the fresh earth your girlfriends Sad and over-painted Making strange noises As craving attention In order to play in some film Here this ring child poem Word of Honour This hour that the future-ones Learn the eagle’s flight This hour that your forehead Reveals what is hidden Always the same hour That the RED KNIVES Kill the Different ones… ---- “The red knives in the poem referred to the traditional communist policy against homosexuality deemed by the KKE [Communist Party of Greece] “a bourgeois perversion that will disappear with the revolution”. The mid 1980s was a time of fierce gay liberation struggle in greece. Only a few years before, in 1979, the right wing government had proposed a law for the displacement of homosexuals to barren island camps. The law was overturned only by way of mass grassroots reactions as well as international pressure from intellectuals like Foucault and Guattari. The struggle against the displacement law was the cradle of the gay liberation movement of the 1980s mostly led by the leftist group AKOA. The most militant part of the struggle however was played by transvestites (this was their self-referential term) who even clashed with riot police forces. Sonia was an anarchist transvestite closely related to Paola, the leading anarchist trans figure of the decade who published Kraximo (Heckling) a transvestite anarchist magazine that led her to numerous arrests. Sonia’s assassination and the abandonment of her brutalised naked corpse on desolate rocks on the Attiki coastline was an emblematic call to arms affair at the time.” – Switch-Blades in Dirty Dead-Ends, Negative Press