Paola Revenioti. Photo: Paola Revenioti/Facebook.
Paola Revenioti, a renowned 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 pioneers of the Greek LGBTQ+ movement, died on Wednesday evening at Sismanolio Hospital in Athens.
“We say goodbye to her with deep sadness, love and gratitude for the impact she had on our lives and on every trans and queer person who came into contact with her, her work and her public appearances,” her friend, journalist Danae Maragoudaki, wrote in a Facebook post.
“Thanks to her, we can breathe more freely. We will always talk about the legacy she left us,” Maraudaki added.
Revenioti worked as a sex worker from a young age, later organizing protests against the social exclusion of transgender people, state repression and police violence, and also fought for LGBTQ+ equality.
In the 1980s, breaking the taboos of the time, she published a magazine Craximo (Drag and drop). VICE Greece called it one of the most radical publications on “homosexual speech.” Its pages featured articles by foreign and Greek intellectuals and spoke openly about HIV. His half-naked photographs of male bodies shocked the public of the time.
Greek LGBTQ+ Free Press Antivirus log reported that Revenioti was the main organizer of the first Pride parades in Athens in the 1980s.
Revenioti has also worked on documentaries and directed one about Kaliard, a secret dialect of homosexuals in Greece that was widely used from the 1940s to the early 1970s, as well as Picrodaphne (Oleanders), about the lives of three trans women in Athens in the 1970s, in which they tell stories of the state and police violence they faced, their rights, and how they celebrated life and love.
Revenioti became the first Greek trans woman to run for political office in the 1990 general elections for the Ecological Alternatives party. She stood for the left-wing MeRA25 party in the 2019 and 2023 parliamentary elections, as well as the 2024 European Parliament elections.