Cyprus is an island of many identities, languages, memories and communities. It is also an island still divided by physical barriers and by narratives that too often ask people to choose one side, one identity or one version of belonging.

Queer experience teaches us to question precisely these kinds of rigid boundaries. It reminds us that identity can be layered, that belonging does not have to be exclusive, and that a more peaceful society becomes possible when people are free to live without hiding essential parts of themselves.

For LGBTIQ+ people in Cyprus, peace and equality cannot be treated as separate struggles. A meaningful peace must protect everyone’s dignity, safety and rights—regardless of ethnic background, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics.

Art can help us imagine what that peace might look like.

An island divided, a community connected

The division of Cyprus continues to shape everyday life, particularly in Nicosia, one of Europe’s last divided capitals. Yet queer communities have repeatedly created relationships that cross the island’s political and social boundaries.

Accept LGBTI Cyprus works toward a society in which nobody experiences discrimination because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics. Alongside advocacy and community empowerment, our work creates bridges of communication between LGBTIQ+ people, the wider public and public institutions. ^[1]

Queer Cyprus began in 2008 as the Initiative Against Homophobia, campaigning against discriminatory laws in the northern part of Cyprus. Today, it combines LGBTIQ+ advocacy with feminist, antimilitarist and non-violent principles. Its work includes education, research, exhibitions, cinema, theatre and other cultural activities. ^[2]

Our organisations operate in different contexts, but the experiences of queer people do not stop at checkpoints. Homophobia, transphobia, exclusion and invisibility affect communities across the island. So do the hopes for dignity, recognition, safety and love.

Cooperation across the divide demonstrates that solidarity does not need to wait for a political settlement. It can be practised now.

Pride as a meeting place and an artistic practice

Bicommunal and island-wide Pride initiatives have made this solidarity visible.

United by Pride has brought LGBTQIA+ people and allies from Greek- and Turkish-speaking communities together through simultaneous marches that converge in the Ledra Palace buffer zone. The gathering connects queer liberation with peace, justice, multicultural coexistence and reunification. ^[3]

The symbolism is powerful. A space normally associated with separation becomes a place of encounter. People who are expected to remain on opposite sides walk toward one another instead.

This work has also received international recognition. The United Nations has highlighted how LGBTIQ+ communities in Cyprus contribute to trust-building and social cohesion. UN-supported initiatives have included Pride activities, a queer film festival and a joint conference on LGBTIQ+ rights in health and education hosted in the buffer zone. ^[4]

These actions do not erase the island’s history or resolve every political disagreement. They do, however, create the human relationships without which sustainable peace is impossible.

Pride in Cyprus is also a living artistic practice. The march is only one part of a wider cultural landscape made from handmade banners, illustration, costume, drag, choreography, music, photography, performance and public design. These creative forms allow queer people to take control of how they are represented. Instead of being spoken about by others, communities become visible through images, bodies, voices and symbols of their own making.

Programmes around Cyprus Pride have repeatedly created space for artists, creators, performers and DJs, while Pride activities in the northern part of the island have included collective banner-making, the Dramaqueer exhibition, drag performances and a Queer Art Exhibition organised with the European Mediterranean Art Association. Together, these activities turn Pride into a temporary cultural institution: part street theatre, part exhibition, part concert and part civic classroom. ^[11][12]

This artistic dimension matters because public space is never neutral. A rainbow flag on a familiar street, a drag performance in a city square or a handmade placard crossing a checkpoint changes who can be seen there and what stories the space is able to hold. Pride art does not decorate the political message; it carries that message through colour, sound, movement and collective participation.

Cinema as a shared language

Film festivals and community screenings have created another meeting place for queer communities across Cyprus. Cinema allows audiences to enter lives shaped by different languages, generations, bodies and histories. A screening can begin with a story on screen and continue as a conversation among people who might not otherwise meet.

Queer Cyprus has helped bring this approach to different parts of the island through QueerFest Cyprus, a festival combining cinema with performance, music, video, discussions and workshops. Its programme included screenings in Arabahmet and Famagusta, selections on queer memory and disability, and a special collection of short films from Cyprus. By treating film as activism, documentation and artistic expression, the festival gave underrepresented lives both a screen and an audience. ^[13]

Queer Wave has further developed Cyprus’s LGBTQIA+ film culture. Its 2022 edition moved across venues in Limassol, Nicosia, the Ledra Palace area and northern Nicosia, combining international films with discussions, exhibitions, performances and social gatherings. Accept LGBTI Cyprus and Queer Cyprus were both among the organisations supporting the festival, illustrating how cinema can form part of an island-wide network of solidarity. ^[14]

Accept LGBTI Cyprus and Queer Cyprus also used film directly as a bicommunal gathering point during the 2024 Cyprus Pride programme. Their jointly organised United by Colours: Short Films & Sangria Night screened Summer Place and Buffer Zone at the Goethe-Institut Cyprus, followed by discussion about the island’s LGBTQIA+ communities, the organisations’ cooperation and their future plans. The event demonstrates what a screening can achieve beyond entertainment: it can preserve queer stories, make cooperation visible and create a hospitable setting for discussing the island’s shared future. ^[15]

Art makes different futures visible

Peacebuilding is often discussed through negotiations, institutions and legal frameworks. These are essential, but peace is also cultural and emotional. People need opportunities to listen, remember, grieve, create and imagine together.

Art offers such opportunities.

Research into Nicosia’s queer art subculture shows how artists and curators have used formal and informal spaces to challenge heteronormativity, acknowledge queer lives and respond to the realities of a conflict-affected city. Queer artistic practice has become part of the wider cultural transformation of Nicosia, moving between galleries, backstreets, workshops, performances and community spaces. ^[5]

The Queer Reconciliation Project offers a particularly meaningful example. Led by Queer Cyprus and artist Nurtane Karagil, the project uses workshops, murals, campaigns and the mapping of queer narratives to promote peace, understanding, gender equality and LGBTIQ+ rights. It also brings attention to Famagusta’s queer history, ensuring that queer lives are included in the island’s collective memory. ^[6]

Art can communicate experiences that political language often leaves out. A mural can transform a wall from a symbol of exclusion into a public invitation. A performance can make an invisible history present. An exhibition can bring people into the same room before they agree on everything. A personal story can help someone recognise a shared fear, hope or longing.

Art does not require us to simplify our differences. It allows us to encounter them.

Rainbow Rhythms: an exhibition of art, identity and lived experience

The recent Rainbow Rhythms exhibition brings these ideas into practice.

Rainbow Rhythms connects visual art with inclusive Emotional, Relationship and Sexuality Education—ERSE. The project works with queer artists and their personal stories to encourage more open, informed and inclusive conversations about sexual orientation, gender identity, relationships and belonging. ^[7]

The exhibition is not simply a presentation of individual artworks. It creates a space in which queer people become narrators of their own experiences. Instead of being discussed only through legal debates, statistics or stereotypes, queer lives are encountered through colour, form, memory, emotion and creative expression.

This matters in Cyprus, where many LGBTIQ+ people have learned to negotiate visibility carefully. Art can provide a language for experiences that may otherwise be difficult or unsafe to express directly. It can help audiences approach unfamiliar perspectives through curiosity rather than fear.

Rainbow Rhythms also demonstrates how exhibitions can function as educational and peacebuilding spaces. By bringing together artists, young people, youth workers, educators, parents and wider communities, the project encourages dialogue across differences in age, background and identity.

The project’s approach is especially relevant to a divided island. Personal stories can resist the idea that any community is culturally uniform. Queer experiences exist across Cyprus and within every linguistic, religious and ethnic community. Recognising this shared diversity can weaken the rigid categories that sustain both heteronormativity and division.

The exhibition therefore asks more than “What does this artwork represent?” It invites us to consider:

• Whose experiences are included in our collective memory?
• Who is able to speak publicly and who is expected to remain invisible?
• How can education create space for different identities and relationships?
• What might we discover when we listen to stories from beyond our familiar communities?
• What would a peaceful Cyprus look like if queer people were included in imagining it?

The exhibition and its stories remain accessible through the Rainbow Rhythms Digital Exhibition, allowing audiences across Cyprus and beyond to engage with the artists’ work online. ^[8]

By preserving and sharing these artworks digitally, Rainbow Rhythms extends the exhibition beyond a single venue or moment. It becomes an ongoing resource for dialogue, youth education and community reflection.

Queer rights belong in the peace process

Queer people are not an optional addition to Cyprus’s future. We are already part of every community on the island.

This is why LGBTIQ+ perspectives must be included in peacebuilding and reunification discussions. In its submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review process, Queer Cyprus specifically recommended that the leaders of both communities and the Technical Committee on Gender Equality mainstream LGBTIQ+ perspectives in the peace process. ^[9]

A reunified Cyprus should not reproduce the exclusions of the past within a new political structure. It must offer meaningful equality and protection to queer people and rainbow families throughout the island.

Important gaps remain. ILGA-Europe continues to recommend marriage equality, legal gender recognition based on self-determination and stronger protection of intersex children in the Republic of Cyprus. For the northern part of the island, it highlights the need for legal recognition of same-sex partnerships and a fair legal gender-recognition framework. ^[10]

These questions are directly connected to peace. A settlement concerned with citizenship, movement, family life and equal access to services must consider how queer couples, trans people and rainbow families will be recognised across communities and jurisdictions.

Peace cannot be complete while some people remain legally or socially invisible.

Building the Cyprus we want to inhabit

Queer solidarity offers Cyprus a valuable lesson: unity does not require uniformity.

We can belong to different linguistic, cultural and religious communities while defending one another’s freedom. We can carry different memories while refusing hatred. We can recognise pain without allowing it to determine every future relationship.

Through Rainbow Rhythms, art and inclusive Emotional, Relationship and Sexuality Education provide tools for this work. They help young people examine identity, relationships, power, consent, prejudice and belonging. They create space for personal stories and encourage dialogue where silence has previously prevailed. ^[7][8]

For Accept LGBTI Cyprus, the struggle for LGBTIQ+ equality is inseparable from the struggle for a peaceful, democratic and inclusive island.

A reunified Cyprus must be a place where every person can cross not only physical checkpoints, but also the boundaries created by fear, prejudice and inherited division. Queer artists, activists and communities are already showing us how to begin.

They create together.

They march toward one another.

They insist that peace must include everyone.

References

1. Accept LGBTI Cyprus. “Accept LGBTI Cyprus.” https://accept.cy/
2. Queer Cyprus Association. “What is Queer Cyprus?” https://www.queercyprus.org/en/about-queer-cyprus/
3. Queer Collective CY. “United by Pride 2025.” https://queercollective.cy/united-by-pride-2025/
4. United Nations. “How LGBTIQ+ Communities Are Bridging Divides in Cyprus and Kosovo.” https://www.un.org/en/delegate/how-lgbtiq-communities-are-bridging-divides-cyprus-and-kosovo
5. Zackheos, Marilena, and Nicos Philippou. “Nicosia’s Queer Art Subculture: Outside and Inside Formal Institutions.” In Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders, 2018. https://pure.unic.ac.cy/en/publications/nicosias-queer-art-subculture-outside-and-inside-formal-instituti/
6. Queer Cyprus Association. “Queer Reconciliation Project.” https://www.queercyprus.org/en/queer-reconciliation-project/
7. Rainbow Rhythms. “Project.” https://rainbow-rhythms.eu/project/
8. Rainbow Rhythms. “Digital Exhibition Database.” https://rainbow-rhythms.eu/digital-exhibition-database/
9. Queer Cyprus Association. “Statement on the UPR Pre-session on the Republic of Cyprus.” 2024. https://upr-info.org/sites/default/files/country-document/2024-02/Queer_Cyprus_Association_statement.pdf
10. ILGA-Europe. “Rainbow Map: Cyprus.” https://rainbowmap.ilga-europe.org/countries/cyprus/
11. Accept LGBTI Cyprus. “Pride 2025 Programme.” Official programme
12. Queer Cyprus Association. “Cyprus Pride March – Out and Proud 2019.” 6 May 2019. Pride arts programme
13. Queer Cyprus Association. “QueerFest Film Festival Cyprus.” Festival programme
14. Queer Cyprus Association. “The Full Programme of Queer Wave 2022.” 27 November 2022. Queer Wave programme
15. Accept LGBTI Cyprus. “Cyprus Pride Festival 2024 Program.” United by Colours screening