I have never liked being defined by a single part of myself.
I am a man.
I have loved men. I have lived through relationships, fear, freedom and judgement that also belong to the history of gay people. But I do not consider my sexuality a category capable of explaining everything I am.
People need to give names to things.
Sometimes those names help us recognise ourselves, find a community and feel less alone.
At other times, they become boxes.
I do not want to deny what I am, but neither do I want to be reduced to a label.
That is why I am not interested in presenting gay life as a lifestyle made of clubs, parties, fashion and colourful images.
I am interested in everything that surrounds people’s lives.
The way a city can welcome you and, at the same time, make you feel unsafe.
The humiliations endured in silence.
The relationships kept hidden.
The families that accepted and those that rejected.
The people who risked their work, their homes, their reputations and sometimes their lives simply to exist without lying.
I am interested in the tragedies a city would rather forget.
The victims.
The lives brushed by violence.
And those who had the courage to show their faces when doing so did not guarantee applause, but could attract hatred.
Pride also comes from this history.
I do not feel close to it when it becomes only a festival of colour, costumes and commercial brands looking for a reassuring photograph.
But I do not forget what it represents.
A celebration matters when it preserves memory.
The freedom to dance in the street exists because, before us, someone was arrested, beaten, blackmailed or killed for trying to live openly.
Joy does not erase sacrifice.
It should remember it.
I do not want to shout with pride simply to prove that I exist.
I want to be able to exist without having to justify myself.
And I want to tell the stories of those who made this freedom possible, without turning them into slogans and without using pain as decoration.
Not to decide which country is better or worse.
Not to accuse one nation and absolve another.
I want to observe how cities, laws and people change: London, Italy, Europe and the places where freedom is promised, tolerated, defended or still denied.
Laws can change before people’s eyes do. Sometimes people’s eyes change before the law. No country holds a perfect answer, and no achievement is permanent.
Andrea Morel does not write about a category.
He writes about human beings, memory and hard-won freedom.
To remember that progress is not a gift we simply received.
It is a road opened by someone who often paid the price before us.