Dari left today. It was all too much for her. It was different for her. We all used to live in what seemed to be a modern society and in many ways was. But these people always existed. I have called this an occupation. And it is, but it is an occupation of our own people. They invited them. But it is easier to handle if I believe I am not linked to them. But with Dari leaving I can no longer believe in my fantasy. Have things changed so much? I don’t know. It is like living in the mirror image of all that had been. Where once we wore the shroud of progress and acceptance, it only hid the unspoken prejudice. Now it has been reversed and the conservative is worn on the sleeve, those of us the children of the past must now wear our progressive ideas in concealment and underground. It was too much for Dari, so she left. She was no more oppressed that I or anyone else on paper. She had all that she needed, but could not live and love.  She could not walk down the street holding her girlfriend’s hand. Or even laugh and embrace. Not that you see any of that anymore. People only do these, once so publicly shared acts, behind closed doors. I don’t know why or when we stopped, merely that we did.

I wonder, if like Chinatown on a holiday Monday,we all decided that it needed to stop or that it was no longer accepted in one collective moment it did. As we were all involved and felt like independent individuals we never noticed until long after it had ended. I didn’t notice but I feel it now. Our lives have become so absurd that there are moments that I think there is nothing left to do but stand in the middle of the street and begin to laugh and howl, doubled over until tears are streaming down my face. But then my fate would be the same as Dari. I would probably be commited if viewed by the right or wrong people. Because that is what they do to people practicing intimacy of an ‘unfavourable’…gay nature in public. Obviously you must be diluted and a threat to the moral fibers of society. Committed. I hated watching Dari go, but I don’t know if I would have survived that either.

There are no real rules about laughter or homosexuality here, in fact nothing here has officially changed, and yet everything has. You can feel the conservative ideaology in the air. And as they fling off their shrouds they manage to cover us and we did not even see it coming. It is my parents generation who run this country, this world, and feel safe in this governing. We watched it happen in other countries. We saw the ideaology slowly sweep those around us. And yet we thought, naively that we were safe, we were different. We are open minded, and not only tolerant but embracing. We love, we do not fight, and we celebrate diversity. Well I did.  Do. And it was fashionable for all to claim these ideals. But there was that shroud that we couldn’t see. Blinded by our own progress we couldn’t see the wave when it enchanted its way here. Now it rules. All of a sudden those like Dari and myself did not dominate and were forced underground by popular opinion. We are going in reverse. And Dari left. She is trying to out run the various fundamentalists that seem to be convincing the world. But where can she go? If even we did not stay immune who will? Who ever would have thought that those hints our parents made about piety and virtue, over experiencing life and loving uninhibitedly, would take over.

We, or at least I, thought that we had moved past the days in which religion and the classical family unit were the ideal. At least here. Apparently that was ignorant.  Based on what we are now, it was most definitely naïve. It all returns to that world that never seemed to change for me and was never supposed to. How the world has cracked and begun to crumble.