Kim (Karen-Christine) Friele, unarguably our country’s best and probably most known known LGBT activist was put to rest today.
Kim was a loud voice in the public discourse. Her repeated focus on the right to love the one you actually love did a lot to make me overcome the homophobia I grew up with and which might have made me a less accepting person than I like to be. She was the first person in our country to enter a domestic partnership with her - later - wife, who was of a totally different political opinion than Kim was (her wife was a parliamentary representative for the Conservative Party, not at all aligned with Kim’s political views). Which again shows that ethics and love trump politics every day.
Kim came out as gay as a young woman, while male homosexuality was punishable by law and female homosexuality even wasn’t considered because female sexuality didn’t exist. Since then, she fought for the right for gays (and subsequently, the rest of the LGBTetc crowd) to be what they are and love the one they love. Her unrelenting focus and her wonderful (and pretty damned convincing) rhetorics made me make a 180 and leave the “standards” I’d grown up with, hopefully making me a more tolerant person.
I miss her and, honestly, I’m in grief today. Over a person I never knew and who only had an indirect effect on my personal life as a cishet white male person. But most probably she made an important contribution to me being able to fully accept my LGBT child when they came out, with no issues (except my personal ones, which I always understood was purely a “me” issue and only mine to handle).