Lanzarote will join this year, for the first time in its history, the events that will take place during the last week of April to commemorate Lesbian Visibility Day. The highlight of this commemoration will take place on Wednesday, April 25, starting at 7:30 p.m., at the Arrecife Youth Center.
The event, organized by the Lánzate LGTBI+ Association of the Canary Islands with the collaboration of Somos Lanzarote, aims to "make lesbian women visible in the public space, as a way to continue advancing both in legal and real equality."
The event will begin with a reading of a manifesto, followed by the screening of various short films on lesbian themes, which will be followed by a talk-colloquium on the social visibility of homosexual women. The debate will include the activist, filmmaker and writer from the Canary Islands, Lorenza Machín (La Isleta, Gran Canaria, 1946), who from her perspective as an older lesbian woman will discuss aspects "such as the evolution of the visibility of lesbianism in our country during the last decades, or the way in which the affective-sexual reality of older women is lived and made visible."
Policies aimed at educating in diversity
The Lánzate Association highlights the need for "more and more women to take the step towards visibility, towards complete acceptance of ourselves and the abandonment of social prejudices inherited from our heteropatriarchal culture."
For this reason, the manifesto for visibility, which will mark the central moment of the event, calls for "the implementation of educational policies aimed at education in diversity, cutting at the root the prejudices that are at the base of homophobic discrimination; specific programs in educational centers against bullying for reasons of hatred and discrimination; non-heteronormativization in public services, whether education, health or social services, and the generalization of prevention methods against the spread of STIs for all types of sexual relations," highlight from the Lánzate LGTBI+ Association of the Canary Islands.
The organizers are confident that this first event for lesbian visibility, a commemoration that was born in 2008 and that this year arrives on the island, will be consolidated in Lanzarote, "a territory" open to diversity but in which, there are still social and family environments in which "other forms of love are not accepted than those imposed by the hetero-patriarchal model." That is why they hope that this cause will serve "to fight for all of us, because our best weapon is sorority, fraternity between women; because we are strong when we help each other."
