Being Queer on the Island of Generational Traumas

a memoir/creative non-fiction by Mikail Bulak

When I speak of "being queer on the island of conflicts," it may sound like a metaphor. But if you were born and raised in Cyprus, you know it is not an exaggeration, it is daily life.

Cyprus is an island that breathes memory. For more than fifty years, it has been divided: Greek Cypriots in the south, Turkish Cypriots in the north, with the UN buffer zone cutting through Nicosia, the last divided capital of Europe. This separation did not appear overnight. British colonial rule nurtured mistrust between communities; the violence of the 1960s left scars that have never fully healed; and the war of 1974 sealed the division. Even today, grandparents retell their stories of hiding in basements during bombings or becoming refugees on their own island.

In such a climate, survival became tied to nationalism, tradition, and "masculine" strength. Schools reinforced these values, teaching us who the "enemy" was while leaving no space for difference. And in this silence, queer identities were not only ignored but actively shamed. On an island consumed by war, queerness was treated as a weakness, a disgrace. This small island was large enough to be divided, but for many, it was never large enough to allow queer people to exist.

What did it mean, then, to be queer here? It meant growing up in a society that had turned inward, clinging to traditions for safety, suspicious of anything that seemed "foreign." And queerness, too, was pushed into that category of the outsider. To be queer was to feel like an intruder in your own home, a stranger on your own land.

For me, this was even more visible because I had a twin. Having a queer twin meant double the attention, double the gossip, double the judgment. Sometimes it felt as though the island itself was not ready for us, not because we were unnatural, but because society had invented norms that rejected what was natural. We were simply ourselves. But to others, our existence was something wrong, something to whisper about.

My family story reflects this complexity. My mother is of Turkish origin, my father a Turkish-speaking Cypriot. My mother’s uncle came in 1974 as a soldier, believing he was "saving" Turkish Cypriots. For years, I grew up accepting such narratives, until I slowly began to unlearn them. Over time, I found my path in peace activism, in movements for reunification, in imagining a Cyprus that could belong to all its people. But I carried another truth alongside this journey: my queerness.

And queerness cannot be separated from the conflict. The same militarization that divides the island also enforces toxic "masculinity" and heteronormativity. The same tradition that clings to the term "nation" also clings to rigid gender roles. To resist one is, inevitably, to resist the other.

Yet there has also been resilience. From underground queer gatherings in the 1990s, to the decriminalization of homosexuality in the south in 1998 after a European Court of Human Rights ruling, and in the north only in 2014, queer Cypriots have slowly carved out space for visibility. Pride marches now take place in Nicosia on both sides of the divide. These steps may seem small from the outside, but on an island defined by walls and borders, they are revolutionary.

My story, then, is not only about growing up mocked, excluded, and silenced; it is also about learning to resist, to write, to organize, and to demand visibility where invisibility was imposed. It is about realizing that peace in Cyprus cannot exist without also dismantling patriarchy, heteronormativity, and the systems that keep queerness hidden.

So when I say "

being queer on the island of generational traumas," I am not exaggerating. I am telling the truth of a place where queerness itself becomes an act of defiance and where every queer life is a small but powerful resistance against war, division, and silence...

Mikail Bulak - 07.09.25 "Being Queer on the Island of Generational Traumas"