The women who wanted to marry 22 times
BY READERS DIGEST
14th Sep 2023 Inspire
9 min read
After meeting at a feminist pornography seminar, artist
and LGBTQ+ activist Fleur Pierets and partner Julian Bloom embarked on Project 22, a mission to get married
in every country in which gay marriage was legalised. They intended to
celebrate the places in which LGBTQ+ people could legally consolidate their love to one another, while slyly nodding towards those in which
they can’t
Back in 2017, gay
marriage was legal in only 22 countries. In 2023, that number has risen to 34. That means that
today, there are still 161 countries in which gay people don’t have the same
marital rights as heterosexual couples.
Tragically, after the fourth country Julian was diagnosed
with terminal cancer. She died shortly afterwards. Instead of exhibiting photos from
all their weddings as creative activism like the couple had originally planned,
following the death of her wife, Fleur instead turned to writing, producing her
beautiful memoir Julian, to keep the memory of her alive.
Written originally in Flemish, Julian has been
translated into English by Elisabeth Kahn and will be published by 3TimesRebel
Press September 14, 2023. I had the chance to interview the incredible and
inspiring Fleur Pierets about writing while grieving, the
different versions of her life and relationship with Julian, and
the importance of protest art that is more than just something beautiful to
look at.
Et Alors?
Although Julian is Fleur’s debut memoir, it isn’t her
first writing project. Frustrated by rejections of her writing about
progressive topics like drag versus politics and protest art as “too weird”,
back in 2011 Fleur and Julian decided to Google, “How to make a magazine?” and
launched Et Alors? (“So what?” in English), a queer-focussed, uncensored
and vibrant media platform.
"Ten years ago there wasn’t a lot of information about trans people or queer artists in mainstream media. Nowadays there is a little bit, but at the time Grayson Perry was basically the only queer person actually featured in mainstream art magazines.”
Fleur brings this passion and confidence to her projects 12 years on, explaining about the feminist
opera librettos she’s currently working on—even though she had no idea how to
write a libretto until she looked it up on YouTube!
“It’s just that thing, you know, I’ve never done this before
so I can probably do it”.
Why did you start Project 22?
Fleur Pierets (left) and Julian Bloom (right) in New York. Credit: Dan Saunders
“I do think that people are not necessarily bad or anti
LGBTQ rights, they just don’t know. We wanted a project that would build
bridges. We could easily have made a project that condemned all of the
countries that didn’t allow us to get married, but then it would be so negative
and so much hate and opposition. So we tried a positive approach.
One night I woke up, saying 'I’ve got it!' and I woke
Julian and I said, 'Why don’t we get married in every country where we legally
can?'"
Fleur laughs as she fondly remembers Julian batting her
away, still half-asleep.
She explains that she had this idea after
speaking to some open-minded, heterosexual friends of theirs and
realising that they didn’t know that only 22 countries allowed same-sex
marriage simply because, “it wasn’t on their radar”.
“As a gay person you know these things. I know in which
countries homosexuality is forbidden (67 countries). 12 of them still have
death penalties. As a gay person, I know that because if I want to travel to
those countries I have to behave differently.”
How has your relationship with your sexuality changed?
“Coming out of the closet at 37 is quite a thing. You
rethink your whole concept of identity.”
Fleur laughs about ringing her mum to tell her she was “in
love with a girl”, and her mum’s response, “Were you in the closet?”.
It didn’t feel like I was in
the closet, although obviously I was. Or your sexuality can change overnight!
Then my mother said the funniest thing, she said, 'I should have known. When
you were 14 your childhood room was plastered with posters of Boy George and
the lead singer of Europe…so many men in makeup!' Fleur smiles unashamedly at
the memory.
“That might have been a clue!” she admits.
Later on, when Fleur interviewed Boy George herself for Et Alors, and told him
that she’d been very much in love with him when she was 14 years old, he told
her, 'Look at you evolving, being in love with a man in makeup when you were
14, and now being married to a woman with a beard'.
"Look at you evolving, in love with a man in makeup when you were 14, and now married to a woman with a beard"
The new wave queer icon had been making a reference to
Julian’s drag king persona, Jim, who sported a smart suit and a beard. It was as Jim that Fleur had first met Julian in Amsterdam in 2011.
She confesses that the first time she saw Julian, her first
thought was, 'Is that a man or a woman?” 12 years on, she’s glad that the
language and perception around gender has evolved and changed.
“Now, I would
never think that!” she tells me, shaking her head in dismay at her past self.
“I don’t have those binary thoughts anymore. Now, I would just be like, 'Wow, what an amazing person’”.
How did meeting Julian help you to express your own sexuality and to be able to put that queerness in your work and your art?
Fleur and Julian's wedding in Paris. Credit: Mahdi Aridj Photography
Originally, the married couple had planned to exhibit all 22 wedding photos as a protest art piece. I ask Fleur about whether Julian is a substitute for this exhibition.
“Yes, we had a lot of plans”, she smiles, sadly.
"We didn’t have the money to marry in 22 countries, who does! Julian started counting and we realised if we sold literally
everything we had, we would be able to get married in five countries. If the project didn’t work out, we would have literally nothing. We
took a leap of faith. We were very much in love and thought we could do
anything we wanted.
So we sold
everything and ended up with two suitcases each. That was really all
we had in the world. It was six years ago and I looked at these suitcases and
thought, “Oh my god, I’m 44 and this is all I have’.
When Julian died, I had nothing left. I lost the love of my life and I lost my job because
we were working together. I literally had two suitcases and 150 euros because we spent everything on the weddings. I had to think about what
I wanted to do with my life and how to survive.”
"I literally had two suitcases and £150 euros on my bank account because we spent everything on the weddings"
Rather than
using her qualifications and experience as an art historian, in an act of durable self-discipline Fleur instead found work in a kitchen in Belgium so that
she would have the brain space to write and document her version of
Julian, rather than investing all of her energy into another creative project.
“I was so
very scared that I would lose all my memories of her, so I really needed to
write this book because I needed to write everything down. Most of the time my
eyes were raw from crying; I was grieving like crazy, but while I was doing
this brain numbing work I was thinking about everything I wanted to write and speaking it into this little recorder I carried on me all of the time.
I would come home from work at like 4am and start writing down everything had recorded. It was important because otherwise I would even the lose memories, and
I had already lost everything."
"I couldn’t be anything else" Fleur declares in response to my question about whether marrying Julian had made her an activist. "Because all of a sudden you
become part of a world where there is violence against gay people, where children
commit suicide over their sexual orientation, where there are people who lose
their houses and their jobs over being gay. All of a sudden those are your
friends. It wasn’t really an option to stand on the side-line."
Can someone read Julian and get a sense of who she was?
“I had one review that said, 'It is so honest
that it’s almost perverted'. And I thought, ‘That’s a good review, I like it’."
We laugh about her scandalous honesty and then she is instantly serious once more. "I couldn’t do
anything else, it had to come out. I said to my publisher, ‘If this is just
therapy, tell me. I don’t need to publish therapy. Who would be interested in
that kind of thing?’
I tried to make it into a novel that actually happened. The weird thing is, I never read it
again. The moment the book was finished I gave it to my publisher and I said, 'Have fun with that!'”
Shortly after the book was published, Fleur was asked if she was interested
in writing children’s books about her and Julian’s project 22, in which Julian didn’t
die. This year, Julian also being turned into a movie.
“I wrote Julian
from my memory, so maybe it’s not true. Maybe if she read it, she would say, ‘What?
It happened completely differently’. Julian is my version of what
happened.
Then you have the children’s books in which she doesn’t die. And in
the movie, some places are left out because otherwise there would be too many
locations, so there are actually three versions of my life, which is so weird!
For
example, in the movie script, Spain (where Julian and Fleur lived for three years) was left out. When I read
the English translation of Julian, it was like, ‘Oh my god! Yes! We lived in
Spain!’ I had forgotten because there are so many versions.
I think the book
is the most authentic version of what happened, but obviously it is written in
a blur of grief and in some kind of eagerness to keep as much of her with me as
I could."
Do you read the translation differently to the original?
Fleur Pierets (left) and Julian Bloom (right) at their wedding in Antwerp. Credit: Wim Van Cappellen
“I don’t know,”
she answers ponderously. “It’s been a while since the book I first published,
and I’m now working on my third novel, and another children’s book is coming
out…”
“I’m kind of
in a rush,” she shares. “I always feel like I don’t have enough time. I have so
much to say and so much to do and Julian died when she was 40. You can
literally die today, so the most important question in my life is, 'What am I
going to do with the time I have left?'
So I don’t do bad relationships, both
with lovers and with friends. I don’t do toxic people. I don’t do negative
people. I don’t do stuff that I don’t like.
When I reread the book in English, first I must say that the
translation is so beautiful, and literary and creamy…and
obviously there is a lot of activism in the book and giving LGBTQ+ people space
at the table. Obviously, my thoughts have expanded and have become more
elaborate and more nuanced on different topics, but the base is still the same.
And I really loved reading that because it means, I don’t know…”
She trails
off, looking into the distance momentarily before bringing her gaze back to the
screen and finding her answer, “That I really know what I stand for.”
You’ve said that you’re first and foremost an activist, and an artist and a creator afterwards. Do you have any other activist projects planned?
“Yes," she sighs. "I’ve got a lot of plans, how much time do
you have?”
“As I grow older, and I understand more about the world, or
don’t understand anything of the world anymore, art for the beauty of art doesn’t
move me anymore. When I look at art I want it to be a piece of protest. Not necessarily giving the answers, but asking the
right questions. I feel that my heart goes to this kind of writing, art and
performances.
Keith Haring, for example, is one of the most
famous people in protest art because when he was making art there were lots of
people dying from aids in America, but the government refused to talk about it,
to hand out condoms and to talk about how you could get it. They refused to educate people.
Keith Haring started with his graffiti to
educate people on the streets and that for me is the most amazing thing. That for me is art, that’s what art does, that’s what art
needs to do in my opinion. I’m always thinking about how to get that
message across.”
What was your favourite wedding ceremony?
Fleur Pierets (left) and Julian Bloom (right) at their wedding in New York. Credit: Heather Sten 2016
“Oh…they
were all so…weird!
I think I loved New York best. We wanted to get married in
New York first because the Dutch and Belgian mentality is like, 'Be normal. Don’t do crazy things. Don’t be too loud. Be modest'.
When we started
talking to people about this project in Belgium and Holland, they were like, 'Oh, really? It’s not going to work though, right?'
We actually needed to
start in a country where there was so much energy; when we went to New
York and we told people there, they were like, 'Oh my god, this is crazy, this
is amazing!' It empowered us so much that we wanted to make it the first city
in which we got married.”
Then we had Amsterdam which was very special for Julian
because, from a very early age, she knew that she was a lesbian, but at that
time, same sex marriage wasn’t legal in the Netherlands. So she knew that she
wouldn’t have what other people had because she fell in love with girls. It
was nice that that idea that she’d had over time, as a girl, changed as she
grew up, and she was able to get married."
"She knew that she wouldn’t have what other people had because she fell in love with girls"
To finish, I ask Fleur if there’s anything else she’d like
in the article. Humbly, she suggests that it would be nice if there was
something about the book and the translation and, unbelievably, thanks me for my
time, as I’m left utterly in awe of this unstoppable force of a woman, an artist, and mostly importantly, an
activist.
Julian. By Fleur Pierets, published by 3TimesRebel Press. Credit: Anna Zanetti
Julian, by Fleur Pierets (and translated by Elisabeth Khan) is published by 3TimesRebel Press
Banner credit: Femke Van Hettema
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