« Now my friend could write to Malena Ivarsson »

The Weekly Review in the 90s was a wild, wild land. Between the fashion sets with anorectic models and the in-depth reports on what really is suitable for a girl to drink, there were sex and cohabitation sites where ordinary people had to enter and ask about everything possible.

I loved the anonymity that was all of these submissions’ signature. It could be about how, as a bisexual, you could survive in a narrow -minded small town or how to meet others who are also interested in BDSM without risking being out at work, but whatever it was, the sender was always faceless and the expert’s answer soothing. This is no wonder and you are completely normal. Do this …

I read those pages over and over again and the world got bigger. Even in Alingsås there were people who liked to get it in the ass, but you never got to know who they were and also not that they lived in Alingsås. As a reader, I was struck by the power of what did not stand. When a person is to summarize himself a little quickly and just mentions the most important, type of age, gender, the size of the city where you live and your interests, the opportunities suddenly become endless.
Exactly everything can still happen, which is the opposite of the feeling you get when you talk to someone you know well.

I’ve been thinking A lot on those submitter pages lately, especially when I talked to my friend from the country. He has recently been recently moved from his safe life as a established family father, and everything I thought I know about him, even everything he himself thought he knows, has been put to an end.

It’s fucking strong. It’s moving. It is educational. What if he was always this person, was it just that no one listened to him?

He is almost like a newborn. He has been given a new language. He uses words and emojis that I have never seen him before, he experiences feelings that he did not think were possible. It is interesting to stand there, a little side by side and see him stumble out into the world. The existence that no one would previously come up with the idea of ​​questioning is history. Now everything can happen. Now he could write a letter to Malena Ivarsson.

His transformation becomes so much more dramatic because he is a man from the Swedish countryside, born at a time when guys did not read the Weekly Review, even less cried in public. Now that I see him trying to formulate his feelings about what he has lost and what he may never want, with a language he was never encouraged to use, yes, what should I say? It’s fucking strong. It’s moving. It is educational. What if he was always this person, was it just that no one listened to him? No one was his Malena Ivarsson?

I think Mark the same development in other men of his age, with a similar background. Social media has enabled them to express themselves in writing and to create new contacts with people. Instagram is a blank paper for warm -country coasters and it makes me so hopeful. To see my neighbor in the country describe his love for a man he has come to know that he has bought a car from him, and see their friendship deepens on travel and by actually talking to each other, it makes me so happy. And not so much surprised.

Because that’s it. What people think they know about us is as claustrophobic as living in a small town where no trains stop.

Read more articles by Hanna Hellquist:
« Being close to a rhino is a religious experience »
« Unless Ines stopped to shit on the Avenue, we would have been dead »
« After the bullying in high school, my friend wanted to be invisible »