Latest stories
Love letter to my girlfriend
You are everything to me! I love you so deeply I’d struggle to even explain it. You are my rock and my light and everything. You’re amazing. I look at you like you hung the stars in the night sky, and to me, you did. I felt blind before I met you. You opened my eyes. You showed me what love can be like. I know we aren’t perfect. In …
How I learnt important life lessons in Poland
In November 2011, I had to travel to Warsaw, Poland for a work meeting. I decided to take a few extra days to spend the weekend in Krakow and then go to Warsaw on Monday for the meeting. At that time, I was living in Amsterdam and working at a women’s rights NGO. I left Amsterdam anxious and in a bit of a bad mood – these work meetings were sometimes …
Unwanted and Unwelcome? Stories of Bulgarian LGBTI+ migrants
In 2021, I conceptualised and guest edited a feature series for the Bulgarian LGBTI+ portal Out.bg titled Unwanted and Unwelcome[1]. Its aim was to provide a space for LGBTI+ Bulgarians who live abroad to speak about their experiences with migration, including work, family, community life, successes and challenges, and anything else they wanted to share. This short article presents the rationale behind the series and summarises some of the main …
How Christianity played an unexpected role in my coming out
I was born in a small town in northern Bulgaria in the late 1970s, in a typical small-town family. Religion was banned, or at least severely restricted, by the state and no one in my family was religious. We followed the traditions that everyone else in our environment followed but no one was praying, preaching, or speaking about heaven and hell […]
From fanatics to friends
One of the constant internal battles we fight as people is with prejudice. I think no person is without prejudice and I think it’s human to be prejudiced. It’s more important that we recognise prejudice in our behaviour and work to overcome it so that it doesn’t affect our lives and relationships. I will tell you a story about a very religious family I met once. It made me realise …
“Love thy neighbour” – call for contributions
I'm launching the first "feature series" on this website, which aims to explore the experiences of LGBTI+ people (and our allies) with religion, faith, church, and spirituality. LGBTI+ people's relationship with religion is, let's say, strained. The three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – and their followers are usually (very) negative towards us. Among the countries that criminalise same-sex relations, the majority are Muslim and/or former colonies of …