L.ART en LOIRE 11

a legitimate reason to die), we saw a lot of
people we knew hating other people because
of their love (hating people for loving
is not a legitimate reason to hate).
People who were dying didn’t choose to die,
but people who hated chose to hate.
It was frightening to realize at a very young
age that if your crime was to be in (gay)
love, you had to die for those normal persons,
for your mom and your dad, for your
grand-parents, for the ice-cream pedlar on
the beach. At a very young age, we realized
that our parents didn’t love us, the only thing
they loved was their (hetero) normality. But
at a so young age, we needed to believe
that adults were heroes, good and perfect,
that they were only love, not that they were
people inhabited with hate.
On television, Western movies from the 60’s
and 70’s were always shown. And we saw
whites playing the colored, often in a ridiculous
or nasty side, repeating endlessly
that a good (amer)indian is a dead (amer)
indian. On television, they only presented
us as African kids plenty of glanders, suffering
from starvation, and wars. But never
they showed what our people built, our
richness, our modernity. They filmed us
close to death in a lava flow 6 . They were so
voyeuristic with us. We heard white adults
and white kids saying racist things against
us, and in the meantime never considering
themselves as racists. Even if whites lived
in a post-colonial time, we lived in a colonial
one.
We were babies, we were 5,6,7,8,9,10 years
old, we were girls and boys, we were colored
and white children, we were future
gays, bis, lesbians, trans, heteros, even
if we didn’t know at that time, we were
growing up in occidental countries and/
or in the third world, and the only lesson
we received was that if we do not become
white-heterosexual-bourgeois, we die too
when our time comes, just like the young
gays and bis of the 80’s.
We lost all of our illusions, and it broke our
kid’s heart seeing people dying because of
love, and seeing people being hated because
of love.
Because of death, because of hate, because
of what we saw, what we heard, what we
lived and experimented, we cried. It was
a traumatic time for the little children we
were. So we found refuge in irony and cynicism,
to survive a world plenty of hate and
death. It was our way to become resilient.
Notes :
1/ first patient having an epidemic disease, in medicine.
To know better about the origins of aids, watch the report
“Les origines du VIH” in Xenius. ArteTv. http://www.
arte.tv/guide/fr/051090-041-A/xenius?autoplay=1
You can read too “Le SIDA 2.0” by Didier Lestrade and
Gilles Pialloux. Ed. Fleuve Noir https://www.amazon.fr/
Sida-2-0-D-LESTRADE-G-PIALOUX/dp/2265094528
2/ The metamodernist generation was born between
1976-1995, was raised and educated in the 80’s and the
90’s
3/ ESMA by Wikipedia (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Centro_clandestino_de_detenci%C3%B3n_
(Argentina)#La_ESMA
4/ Le Canada ouvre les portes des orphelinats de la
honte par Ludovic Hirtzmann pour Le Figaro.fr http://
www.lefigaro.fr/international/2013/02/08/01003-
20130208ARTFIG00571-le-canada-ouvre-les-portesdes-orphelinats-de-la-honte.php
5/ « La cocaïne des années 80 dans la littérature » par
Cécile Guilbert. Les Inrocks. http://www.lesinrocks.
com/2010/07/18/actualite/societe/special-ete-la-cocaine-des-annees-80-dans-la-litterature-1127971/
6/ Le calvaire d’Omayra Sanchez par Renaud Février
pour L’Obs http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/photo/20150728.OBS3296/le-calvaire-d-omayra-sanchezmorte-sous-les-yeux-du-monde-entier.html
Omayra Sanchez et la polémique https://fr.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Omayra_S%C3%A1nchez
Tumba de la nina Omayra Sanchez, « atractivo turistico
» 30 anos depues, Notimérica. http://
www.notimerica.com/sociedad/noticia-tumba-nina-omayra-sanchez-atractivo-turistico-30-anos-despues-20151113174935.html