I grew up thinking that life was a long motorway
that all you had to do was follow in order to be happy.
Everything would flow like some long quiet river:
my first teenage romances,
university, my career, my family,
but nothing happened quite as expected.
As soon as I turned 15,
I was drawn to unmarked paths.
I would feel strong desire for some boy,
watch artists' lives in fascination.
I, too, wanted to find spaces to express myself.
But every time I took a step towards my dreams,
invisible hands would grab me, hold me back,
drag me back onto the 'right' path.
And so I kissed that girl in a club one summer night,
to pretend and be accepted by my classmates.
I chose the most socially-accepted jobs.
I was 26 and I couldn't see anything anymore,
I was travelling at full speed through darkness.
I knew there were many other people like me,
who felt different,
crushed by expectations,
and who couldn't find their place in society.
I wanted to meet them,
nourish myself with their experiences,
and perhaps express myself through their voices.
This film is the story of that journey.
It's 9:50 AM and we're on our way towards
a small pebble lost in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Bermuda archipelago.
Surrounded by paradisiacal beaches,
I'm meeting Linda,
one of the most influential activists on the island.
I want to talk to her about teenage years,
which in my experience, were the hardest.
Teenage years are that time where
you're supposed to be just living your best life,
you're supposed to be stress-free,
just exploring life.
But for me, because I knew my sexual orientation,
I couldn't enjoy the normal teenage experiences
about dating and getting to know people,
because I knew that if I had revealed what my preference was,
it would have had an impact on my relationships
with my friends and family.
And so it was a very, very difficult time in my life.
and I struggled through my late teens,
becoming a young adult
because I knew it would be something that
- I believed - I would get kicked out of my house for
and so I turned to religion.
And I became a Jehovah's Witness
at age 21,
and I stayed in that religion until I was 30 years old.
And that was, I have to say,
the worst time of my life.
Hiding my sexual orientation was like a battle inside me,
where I was constantly fighting against myself,
trying to be someone else.
Since my efforts to be more accepted were vain,
because people usually prefer authentic people,
it was like fighting a lost battle.
But what happens when every aspect of society
plays against you?
Vany grew up in Cameroon and now lives in Spain.
He comes back to a conversation with his mother
that changed his destiny.
When I got home, my mother called me and asked me:
"Are you [gay] or not?"
I said yes, and we had a very big argument,
and I left the house.
My sister called me the next day and said:
"Yesterday, after the fight with your mother,
did you know that she had a heart attack,
she's in the hospital, it's very serious."
I said, "No, we just talked
when I left, she was fine."
My sister: "No, you have to come right away."
I got to the hospital and a few hours later,
she passed away.
I was rejected even more.
I could not attend my mother's funeral
because they blamed me.
"She died because of your sexual orientation,
because of the harm you've caused."
"She found out and that's why she had a heart attack."
"We don't want to see you in our family, anymore."
I watched the funeral unfold.
When they lifted the body, I was in a corner, alone.
Honestly!
But she loved me very much, rest in peace,
honestly.
After his mother's death, his father kicked him out,
and his uncle seriously wounded him
in the head with a bottle of wine.
He decides to flee his country
and embarks on a dangerous odyssey.
February 2016. 2 February 2016.
When I leave the north of Cameroon
and enter Nigeria, where it was not easy.
I had to dress up as a Muslim
to cross the desert.
But I made it.
Even in the desert, we were assaulted, and all that,
but I managed to cope.
At some point I was very affected,
when I arrived in Morocco.
I spent a month at the train station in Fez.
To be able to buy food, I had to do
what we call
prostitution,
because I really needed my daily bread in Morocco,
where it was not easy, there was no work.
So you sleep at the station, without a father or a mother
there is no one to feed you,
at 10pm, in front of the station.
you wait for someone who can give you some money,
in exchange for sex.
... to survive.
After months of travel, he arrives at the Strait of Gibraltar.
I attempted the crossing four times to enter Spain.
Four times.
The most difficult crossing, but thank God,
we arrived in Spain.
Now, the good thing is that
I am free to live my life.
As I cross the French border,
I think of all those young people,
who, unlike Vany, will never leave their country.
It's hard not to believe in coincidences,
because when I arrived in Toulouse, ready to film,
I spotted a girl staring at me in a familiar way.
"Hey, why are you standing in the rain?"
She offers me a coffee.
I am 34 years old, soon 35
and since I was about 18 years old,
I've dated women.
I've been in several relationships, both short and long,
and I have blossomed thanks to those relationships.
But I think I would be much less so
if I told my parents about this.
Because if they knew, it would cause conflict,
and they could really suffer from it,
maybe even fall ill as a result,
and I really don't want to live with that burden.
So to fully live my relationships,
I think it's better that way.
Even if I'm not being honest with people
who have been close to me in my childhood,
growing up, and who still live in my heart
I can't share that part of my life,
because they wouldn't accept it.
I think that when I will be 60,
if they are still alive, hopefully,
I won't tell them either.
Should I say it or not?
I have lived with that question throughout my childhood,
my teenage years and even as an adult.
The first time I fell in love
was with a Moroccan boy.
We used to spend hours together,
talking philosophy, walking around, learning Arabic.
I had been longing so badly
to experience such feelings as a teenager.
I believed I'd seen, in his gaze,
the beginning of a great story.
One day he invited me to dinner,
It was a big thing,
I remember being excited all day long.
Then he looked me in the eye
and told me that homosexuality
was an 'original sin'
and that he respected my decision to sin.
I was heartbroken,
you gave me the will to understand.
That's why I'm meeting Jamal.
a North African refugee who accepts to tell me his story
I am 24, I am an Arab, a Muslim,
I am gay but I prefer to say it in a foreign language
because in my language,
there is no respectful way of saying it,
my mother tongue is closely related
to the true Islamic religion.
I am gay but I am not psychologically ill.
I began a journey, a journey of suffering.
Why?
I have suffered a lot
because I am from a country and a society,
that would rather you were a murderer, a thief, a rapist
instead of a gay man who wants
to live a life of love and happiness.
His father caught him kissing another boy,
and kicked him out at the age of 18.
I was left without the warmth of a family,
unable to live in society and interact with others,
finish my studies and pursuing the dream of my life.
I was deprived of a mother's love,
the warmth of a family, in my childhood.
Left to his own fate, Jamal forged the documents
that his father had refused to sign
to attend university.
He lived in a restaurant where he worked 16 hours a day.
I suffered because of my family and society,
but also because I couldn't do anything more than
exchange looks with other gay men,
who would not come out, out of fear.
Out of fear of being discovered,
they humiliate each other.
Yes, I'm gay, but I've never stopped attending
religious rituals and respecting Islamic precepts.
Fortunately for me, there is another world in this world,
a world that is contrary to Islam, but a 'humane' world,
that respects humanity,
Europe.
Now that we've discussed rejection by family,
physical violence, the fear of the other,
we discover another dimension: self-rejection.
Jake comes from Wales.
He tells me about his struggle against himself.
I myself just really didn't want to be 'not straight'
because people would act very negatively towards it,
people were bullied about it,
and this kind of culture led me to believe it wasn't OK.
So I kind of oppressed it,
and I never really thought about it that much,
or I tried not to think about it.
So I would say the main challenge was not that
I felt awful like I was hiding something,
I think it was more that, I feel like it stalled my development
a lot.
It's like being denied the possibility of discovering
an essential component of our personality,
with all the psychological consequences that can entail.
I do consider suicide...
fairly regularly,
due to just ... not superb mental health
but sometimes I wonder like
cause I have a few mental health problems
I do wonder how much has my sexuality,
like those years where I really suppressed it
and disliked myself,
how much of this has fuelled the sort of ... anxiety
and depressed feelings I had in later life.
I feel I'm in a very bad place
and I don't know ... I don't know the source of that.
I also had very dark thoughts
when I thought I had no place in society
"Why do you always hang out with girls?"
"Why is it that you don't have a girlfriend?"
"You dance like a girl!"
Those questions would terrify me.
So my brain preferred to erase entire chapters
of my adolescence, like an artistic blur.
But life offers many opportunities of being accepted.
and in the darkness, arises the light
That is when I began this great journey.
A trip that would change, forever,
the way I see the world.
We meet Paulo,
who tells me that as soon as he was 14,
he decided to accept himself.
To me, homosexuality is like breathing,
it's natural,
I have no prejudice against it.
Once I know who I am,
I have nothing to prove
about who I am or what I do in my private life.
According to him, we should not seek acceptance from others,
but rather within ourselves.
As soon as you accept all this,
everything becomes simpler and clearer,
the way you perceive yourself opens up
and you can express your personality.
Paulo prefers to talk about love rather than homosexuality.
To me, love must be liberating,
I do not conceive love as a possession
I have never conceived it that way.
Nowadays people feel a great need to possess people,
as if they were objects.
That secret relationship of mine that lasted 26 years,
as difficult as it was,
because he was married,
but had that dimension, in the sense
that there was no possession.
I was free to do whatever I wanted,
although I didn't do anything.
because I am faithful to the things I love.
And to love that man, much older than me,
23 years older,
was a great pleasure. That kind of relationship.
It opened me up a little bit more,
made me reflect on what a relationship was.
As I left Paulo, I felt that something
was changing inside me.
I realised that I was trapped in models
unsure whether they really suited me.
That day, I felt a wind of freedom
blowing in my back.
In this adventure, there was a topic
it was high time to discuss.
I'm meeting a former Olympic champion
who has a peculiar destiny.
Sandra tells me about the day, at the Atlanta Olympics,
where she stood on the podium,
When I win the Olympics,
it's the accomplishment of 15 years of work,
two training sessions a day,
where the ultimate goal is unattainable.
And so when you stand on the podium
you're on the top of the world,
it's a dream, you pinch yourself to see if it's real,
You wonder:
Why me? Why am I winning?
when all my competitors are equally strong.
How can I achieve that?
Well, you win and you rise.
At that moment, I have to say I felt completely fulfilled.
but it's also true that I told myself,
with my testosterone at full throttle,
that I had killed a bit the woman inside me
because I had achieved this,
and I had to use that achievement
to finish killing the woman inside me,
to become the man,
as everything was going right for him, at that time.
But that lasted no more that two or three days.
Immediately, it all came flooding back,
the malaise, the questioning,
Are you really sure that everything
is going to be OK?
Transidentity usually starts from childhood.
From childhood, there are things that "don't seem right",
You are not schizophrenic,
you see yourself in the mirror,
In the mirror, it's true that we see a person,
we see a body,
but it's just not the person we'd like to be.
So some people accept it straight away,
experience mixed feelings, including refusal
of what is imposed upon them
and then there are people like me, who nod.
They say "you're a guy", I say "OK, I'm a guy".
The thing is it lives within us,
in fact it keeps coming back,
and you can potentially be in denial,
or at least we try to hide it,
because we are ashamed,
in the 80's no one talked about all this,
when you were a boy, you were a boy and not a girl,
it was just not possible.
But I needed to live those moments of femininity,
so I lived them, I dressed up as a girl, for short periods,
nothing of all this could get out,
I would hide everything,
but it allowed me to survive, without understanding,
why I felt so good doing something that was forbidden.
Despite our very different experiences,
I can relate to the feeling of being ashamed of oneself.
In all the events of life,
you feel 80% satisfied
because there is a small discrepancy.
And that remaining difference, once you've transitioned,
20% is more than enough,
you don't need the remaining 80%,
and that's crazy,
I've put myself in difficult situations,
functional difficulties, starting with the transition,
the surgeries I went through,
I had to rebuild everything around me,
at home, at work,
in all my activities.
It's not easy to rebuild everything when you're 45,
it's not easy.
I wasn't starting from scratch,
because in fact I hadn't lost anything.
I just had to appear before society
from another angle, and make sure it was accepted.
but there was some work to be accepted.
so you don't choose this just for the sake of it.
But deep inside, it's so soothing,
that you feel like you're over the moon.
When I see pictures of the start of my transitioning, I think:
But how did I dare?
But you crave it,
and it's so beautiful when it happens
that you start living freely.
Gender is a topical issue in our society.
Nowadays, when men adopt behaviours perceived
as feminine, and vice versa,
it triggers the most brutal reactions.
This 'gender dictatorship' causes immense suffering.
Yet, 'being a man' or a 'woman',
is just another box, another motorway,
another trap we are caught in.
Now, I am convinced of one thing,
there are connections between sexual orientation,
gender and possibly other things too.
Everything seems to be about freedom,
the freedom of being oneself.
Santi, the boy in the middle,
he's the one who's going to help me in the next weeks
to continue the project.
With Alina, we're going to explore other ways to love someone,
that are different to the socially-accepted ones.
I've been polyamorous for about 6 or 7 years now,
and at around the same time I realised I was bisexual.
Can you imagine? Bisexual and polyamorous!
'Utter promiscuity'!
The whole thing was truly a discovery,
explore the way to connect, to feel,
to live, to love, all that at the same time,
it was incredible, like "Wow", mind-blowing.
The girl I'm dating right now
is also dating other people,
she has a sexual and emotional relationship
with that person,
and for me, that's totally OK,
I mean it's great, that she can share with another person,
and that she can enjoy the sweet feelings
we experience together,
with one more person.
It's a beautiful thing.
By the way, she's beautiful.
I think it would be very selfish,
if she was just for me, which isn't the point anyway,
she isn't 'mine',
she just shares moments with me.
I don't tend to be jealous, but it can happen
from time to time, and when it does,
I handle it, I work through it,
I ask myself: "what's wrong with me?"
I work it out and it goes away.
I mean, I get rid of my jealousy.
I gave so much importance
to what other people thought,
But Alina shows me that life can be lighter,
that we can break free from prejudice,
explore the world and ourselves.
'You can't leave Argentina without visiting Bariloche,
it's impossible!'
At the foot of the Andes, I'm meeting Andrés,
who tells me about a subject
that affects millions of people across the world.
Two years ago - almost three,
something very interesting happened to me.
Other than the fact I was gay,
I was diagnosed HIV positive,
the world fell apart.
But I was ignorant, that's all.
Today, it's a virus,
and it's good not to be afraid of it,
and face the world that way,
because one day I woke up and said:
"If I have to be the face and voice of those
who say nothing out of fear of prejudice,
then I'll be that person."
My parents found out a few months ago,
and I was surprised by my mother's reaction,
they're old now,
but she's a woman who uses social media,
and I was surprised by her reaction,
calm and accepting.
Not my dad, though. My dad's a dinosaur,
he got sick and he got the flu.
I think it made me a better person
I used to be very prejudiced.
I once met a guy
and when he shared his HIV status,
I said "bye, I don't want anything with you",
And well, the twists and turns of life,
it was my turn.
My HIV status taught me
I musn't discriminate,
make fun of other people,
let's avoid prejudice against overweight people,
making fun of "effeminate" gay men,
well, basically, all that.
To those who find out
they are HIV positive at the hospital:
remember you are not alone,
and there will always be people
who will understand you,
we need to normalise it,
it's a virus, that's all.
Don't be afraid.
Your worst enemy is your mind.
As I travel, I discover many positive stories,
such as Guido's, a student in political science,
from Italy, and that I meet in Spain.
I understand the sense of pride in families
but you can't put aside your own happiness
out of fear or prejudice of a parent,
because even if I respect a parent,
or love them,
I can't sacrifice my life,
my happiness, my freedom,
out of fear.
I understand that sometimes,
it's very risky, so risky,
to come out.
but I think it's a risk you have to take,
you must understand how to do it,
but you have to jump in,
because you can't live a closed life,
because it would be a life of pain.
My coming out has really given me
the possibility to stretch my wings, to come out,
I was willing to risk everything.
I knew my family would accept it anyway,
but even otherwise,
I would have followed my way,
with or without my friends and family,
because it's important to live a peaceful life,
and to be happy,
because I can't imagine myself
being 40 years old,
and suffering because I've locked myself up.
Not everyone will like you
for who you are,
and that's for sure.
Beyond the clichés about men and women
what really matters is to feel good,
to feel in peace with your mind,
the way we were brought up,
the perception of our environment,
the society we live in.
By wanting to look like someone else,
to copy a model,
you eventually miss out on yourself,
and life goes by very quickly...
It's now time to go back to Bermuda,
where it all began.
You know, I could live a better life,
than all the discrimination that I face here.
but I am a Bermudian,
I love Bermuda,
I love everything about Bermuda,
I am proud of my country
I have worked a considerable amount of years
as an activist, as a union activist,
I don't want to have to leave my country,
to live my best life.
Today is the 31st of August 2019,
and this day is about to make history
Welcome to Bermuda's first ever Pride!
Thanks for coming up!
Thanks to all our volunteers!
I walked off the beaten tracks,
and discovered a world inside of our own,
a world that is tough but full of hope
where there remains much to learn,
where voices rise to heal broken lives
and to celebrate the diversity of humanity.
Living Our Lives is also the fruit of conversations with over 60 volunteers
in Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, Valencia, Barcelona, Toulouse, Biarritz, Porto, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Bariloche.