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Charlot, President of the Executive Committee

If I am to engage in politics, it is as a homosexual. For many amongst us, KOURAJ’s creation was a revolution, the beginning of a long struggle…but for me, it was already victory. When the moment arrived to submit my memoir project on homosexuality to my law school, my professor told me she could not accept it due to her religious convictions. I finally understood that we had no other choice but to engage ourselves immediately for this type of behavior to end. I am masisi, and since I was 18-years-old, my family finally accepted me for who I was after a long struggle. They even went so far as to welcome into the home my partner, despite the fact I grew up and live in still a poor district. I believe it is possible to be and live as a homosexual in Haiti, but this is a right that we must win.

 

In a country in which school appears to be the only solution for social ascension, your classmates refuse that you apply for a leadership position for your class because you are too effeminate, you understand very quickly that discrimination has no limits, that it insinuates everywhere, link a horrible stench that stains you. I do not want to leave this country because I do not want to youth who are born homosexual or transgender to have a more difficult life than others solely due to something they did not choose. I do not believe for one second this fallacious argument that says respecting human rights is a luxury of rich countries; to the contrary, when we are poor, our only wealth is the feeling of our own human dignity.

If only all of us homosexuals and transgender persons had the feeling of their own human dignity. Yet faced with such permanent and brutal stigmatization, violence, and insults, many of us – if not the totality – have lost hope to see our own dignity respected.

 

That is what I want to fight; I want to fight this fatalism, I want to fight the hate that lowers us. KOURAJ is not the solution to all of our problems, yet for the first time, it represents a sign that some homosexuals have become engaged, have reacted, have acted, and most importantly have begun to believe in Haiti, a Haiti that will be dignified in its history and in its struggle for human rights. We do not yet have numbers, but this will change. KOURAJ is the spark, the possibility that there is an alternative to enduring suffering; it is the means that we masisi have chosen to finally change Haiti.

 

For more (charlot@kouraj.org)

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