Queer Pride in Tunisia: Beyond Recognition and Beyond Celebration

In Tunisia, the streets are not adorned with rainbow flags. No public celebrations are held during Pride Month, no festivals, no official events honoring the lives and resistance of members of the LGBTQIA+ community. This month is often met with silence or fear. And yet, here we are. Present despite everything. Rooted in our queer, non-conforming identities, in all their beauty and strength. We do not wait for official recognition or pre-approved spaces to exist. We craft them ourselves. We reimagine safety. We transform the margins into vibrant spaces of love, desire, resistance, and pride.

Pride, for us, is not a temporary spectacle. It’s a daily act of existence and defiance in the face of oppression and erasure. It’s living as we are. Naming ourselves with our real names. Loving who we love. Expressing our bodies and identities without hesitation. That alone is resistance and that alone is pride.

We are not simply victims of this system we are agents and creators of our own lives. We build support networks. We produce alternative knowledge. We pierce the walls imposed upon us. Our existence is political, and our self-expression is resistance against long and systematic efforts to erase us.

Every day, we celebrate our identities and our power. We celebrate the care and support we offer one another. We celebrate our joy that defies fear, and every moment where we break the walls surrounding us. We celebrate our bodies that have survived, and our hearts that never lost their capacity to hope and dream. We celebrate those who came before us, those with us now, and those who are yet to come.

In this month, in every moment and every day we do not ask for symbolic representation. We demand legal recognition. Protection from violence. The abolition of discriminatory and regressive laws. And the guarantee of our rights to health, education, and work free from discrimination.

We demand the decriminalization of our existence, and the opening of social dialogue around gender and sexual identities from a place that respects human dignity, not one that normalizes surveillance or oppression.

Pride, for us, is not a decorative slogan or a curated campaign. It is a stubborn attachment to life itself, in the face of attempts to erase, suppress, and subdue us. Pride is choosing to keep dreaming. Keep organizing. Keep resisting even as prison doors stay open, even as stigma spreads, even as fear is carved into our bodies. But this fear will never freeze us as long as we remain a collective force facing it together.

We raise our pride today from Tunisia, not as a celebration but as a declaration of existence and a scream in the face of a system that sees us only as error to be corrected or a presence to be erased. We are here, and we will remain.

We will keep raising our voices in every space even in platforms that have refused to make room for us. Not to ask permission, but to proclaim our existence: We will stay. We will continue. We will hold onto our right to exist with pride, with love, and with every breath full of life.

Author:  

Adem Maimouni  

Queer activist and founding member of Trans Unity Coalition Tunisia