Two years ago, friends and family accepted my decision to return to live in Bulgaria with mixed feelings. There was the fear of inevitable frustrations and disappointments mixed with a semi-hopeful search for any sign of them.

But I wasn't going to take any i-told-you-so's. Still, some second-string personae - The Bleeding Liberal, the Bourgeois Bohemian - kept muscling their way from the wings, threatening to spoil my act of strength, grace and deftness. Common concerns proved unfounded - I found a job easily, I endured the bureaucracy of government institutions and patiently waited on long queues so that when I finally reached the clerk's desk I could be directed to a different queue, I got used to information lines ringing into eternity.

What happened was in many ways worse - normally a person of words, I often found myself at a loss for them, not as formations of sound, but as means to getting my world view across.

One evening, a group of friends - mostly men - had gathered at our house. They were discussing a fellow whom they clearly held in low esteem. At one point, one of our guests said something to the effect of "Forget about this faggot; I don't wanna talk about him" The Bulgarian word pederast (педераст), a slightly derogatory version of homosexual, is often used as a generic insult to heterosexual men, interchangeable with the likes of idiot (идиот, idiot in English) or bokluk (боклук, garbage), though possibly carrying a stronger charge.

Both Bourgeois Bohemian and Bleeding Liberal were astounded; neither of them could tolerate such talk on her table. The first time I asked the person why he was using that word as an insult, he ignored me, stirring Fierce Feminist from her sleep. (It is not uncommon for men and women to have separate conversations in Bulgaria, when sharing a table. Often, women congregate in the kitchen.) So I asked more loudly, which restored silence in the room. And then came the most tortuous moment: I was trying to explain in what seemed to me common-sense terms why using pederast as an insult was wrong (well, i actually stumbled a bit, tempted to spread my arms and say,  "it's wrong because it's wrong, can't you see how obvious it is"- not a very eloquent argument, i know) while a group of young and educated people I called friends looked at me as if I was going off the deep end. They were simply failing to see why I was so worked-up. They had nothing against gays, they said. They even had gay friends, you see.

Last year, when we were launching Month2Come, there was a section titled My Word. The idea was to have prominent public figures talk about contemporary life issues. The first topic was gay marriage. I had recently met Valeria Fol, an eminent Bulgarian academic, widow of the late Alexander Fol, the most respected Thracian studies scholar in Bulgaria, and had talked to her about the magazine. I thought she'd be an interesting person to talk about gay marriage and gave her contact information to the author of the piece.

To my surprise Fol declined to be interviewed, alleging that we had clearly decided to go down the path of the yellow press by picking such a topic of discussion, and that she was going to take no part in our sensationalist exploits. Nevermind gay marriage is the scholarly focus or world-renowned sociologists, archaeologist, law scholars and other academics.

When I returned from a two-week off-the-phone and offline vacation a week ago, the media was still sizzling with commentaries about the Gay Pride Parade, and that was four days after the event took place on June 28. I'm not even sure whether there will be reports on yesterday's military warehouse explosions the day after tomorrow, though a juicy combination of conspiracy theories and Boiko's PR machine might keep the story alive longer.

I've been living in Sofia for longer than two years now, and yet, I was puzzled by the mass hysteria triggered by an event  ( the first of its kind here) that felt like a weekly occurrence in San Francisco's Castro district.

One again, I was worried about being at a loss for words when I read Svetlana Guineva's reportage:
" 'I don't approve of this demonstration. I think it's a bad example for children,' (a woman) said, glancing at her 12-year-old granddaughter Veronika, standing by her side.' I think this (the parade) is an ugly and indecent thing," the little girl remarked. 'But this is Bulgaria, and there are no laws here.'"
The last quote, coming from the mouth of a 12-year-old still echoes in my head. Now that I'm about to give birth to a daughter, I keep looking at girls of all ages, imagining what my daughter would be like. Bleeding Heart Liberal lived in the nurturing bubble of like-minded individuals raising their children in a rainbow-flag shaded environment where tolerance was more or less a given, where there were schools that worked to ease the boy-to-girl transition of the transgendered child of a lesbian couple. Her daughter is likely to grow up in a sea of bigotry, where 12-year-olds correctly pick up on the lawlessness of the state and superimpose that on the right to express your sexual orientation freely, possibly parroting the adults who care for them. So I better get my words back soon.