Well-known LGBTQ+ activist and visual artist who gave a voice and visibility to trans people in a time of repression has died of cancer in Athens.
BIRN
Paola Revenioti. Photo: Paola Revenioti/Facebook.
Paola Revenioti, a well-known LGBTQ+ activist and visual artist – and the first Greek trans woman to run for political office – has died after a long battle with cancer at the age of 68, it was announced on Thursday.
Revenioti, one of the pioneering figures of the Greek LGBTQ+ movement, passed away on Wednesday night at Sismanoglio Hospital, Athens.
“We bid her farewell with deep sadness, love, and gratitude for the impact she left on our lives and on every trans and queer person who came into contact with her, her work, and her public discourse,” her friend, the journalist Danai Maragoudaki, wrote in a Facebook post.
“We breathe more freely thanks to her. We will always talk about the legacy she leaves us collectively,” Maragoudaki added.
Revenioti worked as a sex worker from a young age, later organising protests against the social exclusion of trans people and state repression and police violence, and fighting for LGBTQ+ equality.
In the 1980s, breaking the taboos of the time, she published a magazine, Kraximo [Dragging]. VICE Greece called it one of the most radical publications of “homosexual expression”. Its pages hosted articles by foreign and Greek intellectuals and spoke openly about HIV. Its semi-nude photos of male bodies shocked the public of the time.
The Greek LGBTQ+ free-press outlet Antivirus Magazine reported that Revenioti was the main organiser of the first Pride events in Athens in the 1980s.
Revenioti also worked on documentaries and made one about Kaliarda, the secret dialect of homosexuals in Greece, which was used extensively from the 1940s until the early-1970s, as well as Pikrodafnes [Oleanders], about the lives of three trans women in Athens in the 1970s, in which they tell stories about the state and police violence that they faced, about their rights, and about how they celebrated life and love.
Revenioti became the first Greek trans woman to run for political office in the 1990 general election, with the Ecological Alternatives party. She ran with the left-wing MeRA25 party in the 2019 and 2023 parliamentary elections, as well as in the 2024 European parliamentary election.
