Interview with Fleur Pierets, artist, activist, and author of 'Julian': A story of the women who wanted to marry 22 times
After falling in love with a woman at 37 years old, artist and LGBTQ+ activist Fleur Pierets and her partner Julian Bloom began Project 22, a mission to get married in every country in which gay marriage was legalised. The intention was to celebrate the places in which LGBTQ+ people could vow their love to one another through a legally recognised union, while slyly nodding towards those in which they can’t.
Back in 2017, there were only 22 countries in which gay marriage was legal. In 2023, that number has risen to 34, but 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 only four countries, Julian was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died shortly after. 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, in order to keep her memories of Julian—and their relationship—alive.
Written originally in Flemish, Julian has now been translated into English by Elisabeth Kahn and was published by 3TimesRebel Press on September 14, 2023. I had the chance to talk to the incredible and inspiring Fleur Pierets about her process of writing while grieving, the different versions of her life and relationship with Julian that now exist, and the importance of protest art that is more than just something beautiful to look at.
Why did you start Project 22?
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.
It’s obvious that Fleur continues to bring this passion and this confidence to her projects 12 years on, as she tells me 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”.
“It was just the two of us. I was doing the writing and she (Julian) was doing all the layout and putting everything online. It was also the time…
She pauses a moment and pinches the space next to her, as if visually counting the years that have passed, and plucking the dates out of the air next to her on screen.
“It was 10 years ago, yes, so at that moment there wasn’t a lot of information about trans people or queer artists in mainstream media, so nowadays there is a little bit, but at the time there was Grayson Perry, the only person actually featured in mainstream art magazines.”
Anyone who recognises Grayson Perry will know that while fabulous, this was obviously not enough.
Soon afterwards, the Et Alors readership reached 750,000 globally and Fleur and Julian wanted to make use of their responsibility and their voice.
“I do think that people are not necessarily bad or anti LGBTQ rights, they just don’t know. So 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 thought no, let’s do a positive approach and raise awareness like that.
One night I woke up, saying “I’ve got it!”, and I woke Julian up and 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 goes on to explain that she had had this idea after they had spoken to some open-minded, heterosexual, friends of theirs and realised 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 also 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?”.
“I said, ‘I don’t think so’. 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 got the opportunity to interview 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”.
Boy George had been making a reference to Julian’s drag king persona Jim, complete with a “masculine” suit and a beard. It was as Jim that Fleur had first met Julian at a feminist pornography lecture in Amsterdam in 2011.
She confesses that the first time she saw Julian, her first thought was, “is that a man or a woman”, but 12 years on, she’s glad that the language and perception around gender has evolved and changed. “Now, I would never think that!”
She shakes her head, as if shocked at her own 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?
I mention the couple’s plan to put all 22 photos of the weddings together at the end into some sort of activist art exhibition which would have been fantastic. I am again astounded by Fleur’s positivity and resilience as she smiles sadly and says, laughing slightly as she does so, “Yes, we had a lot of plans”.
I ask her if Julian (the book) is a substitute for that exhibition and a celebration of her late spouse. Or rather, I try to say something along these lines in such a roundabout way that can only be described as throwing words at the poor Belgian woman through the screen as I scramble through vocabulary to ask Fleur about the process of writing and the reason behind the book.
“I’m not a native speaker” (Fleur says, in perfect English) and goes on to apologise for any mistakes she may make trying to follow what I say. Luckily, she laughs at my “throwing words” comment and goes on to talk, far more eloquently, about how she and Julian planned to carry out Project 22.
“The thing was, we didn’t have the money to marry in 22 countries, who does! Julian loved excel sheets so she started counting and we realised if we sold literally everything we had, we would be able to get married in five countries. But we realised 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.
We sold everything we had and ended up with two suitcases each and 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 she 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 on my bank account because we spent everything on the weddings. I had to think about what I wanted to do with my life and how to survive.”
Rather than using her qualifications and experience as an art historian, in an incredible act of self-discipline Fleur instead found work in a kitchen in Belgium so that she would have the brain space to write again 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. So I started to work in kitchens in Belgium. Most of the time I was working backstage because 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 down and speaking it into this little recorder I carried on me all of the time.
When I came home from work it was like 4am and I started writing down everything I had on my recorded. It was important because otherwise I would even the lose memories and I had already lost everything.
But to answer your question, did it make me an activist to be with her…”
In all honesty, I’d been so enraptured by Fleur’s humorous retelling of her coming out experience and warming laughter at the irony of her romantic inclinations, interspersed with the ubiquitous tragedy of Julian’s passing, I’d forgotten I’d even asked this question.
“I couldn’t be anything else. Because all of a sudden you become part of a world where there is violence against gays, 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, so it wasn’t really an option to stand on the side-line.
In terms of the memories you had and included in the book, can someone read it and get a sense of Julian and who she was, or are there a lot of things that you’ve kept to yourself because they’re too personal to share?
Fleur nods to show she understands my question, taking a moment to collect her thoughts as she takes several attempts to talk about the memories she’s poured into writing ‘Julian’, before she responds,
“I had one review in Belgium that said it is so honest that it’s almost perverted”. ‘And I thought, “that’s a good review, I like it”.
Because I literally couldn’t do anything else, it had to come out. And 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 kind of tried to make it into a novel but a novel that actually happened. When I look back it’s more a novel than a memoir. 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”.
A few weeks after the book was published, Fleur was approached by MOMA to see if she was interested in writing children’s books about her and Julian’s project 22, in which Julian didn’t die.
Don’t worry, I’m making a circle, she insists next, drawing the shape with her finger so I know she’s coming back to the question I asked about her personal memories of Julian. I reassure her laughingly that I completely trust her process and she continues.
“Circling back to your question, now the book is turned into a movie. Which means, circling back now…”
At this point not only am I thinking that I would read absolutely anything written by a woman who can keep track of this many storylines, but I’m also so engrossed by her storytelling that I’d forgotten what question I asked in the first place. Luckily, Fleur keeps us on track.
“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 was left out.”
Fleur drops in casually that she and Julian had lived there for three years.
“So 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.
I ask if she had read it differently in the translation to the original version and if she were to write it again now, whether her memories and opinions of things that happened had changed.
“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…”
It’s true, one need only skim through Fleur’s website to see the colossal number of projects she’s working on, and I don’t mind telling her how incredible I find the number of plates she’s spinning to be. If a plan to get married in 22 countries was a lot, she really has not stopped since then.
“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.”
She again moves her hands as she mentions all of these things, throwing the words not at me, as I had done with her, but away as if to show how little regard she has for these things which do not serve her. I think we could all take a lesson from Fleur.
“I have the feeling that I’ve been through too much to just “have a life” and not really a meaning. But when I reread the book in English, first I must say that the translation is so beautiful, and literary and creamy…”—a raving review for the English language if I ever heard one.
“And obviously there is a lot of activism in the book and giving LGBT 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.”
In terms of your activism, you’ve said that you’re first and foremost an activist, and an artist and a creator afterwards. Would you say that your focus on LGBTQ+ rights are intrinsic to your art? Do you have any other activist projects planned?
“Yes, she sighs. I’ve got a lot of plans, how much time do you have?”
I for one wish we could talk all day, but alas, our interview is drawing to a close and Fleur has just enough time to tell me about her plans for the future and what art means for her.
“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, a piece asking social questions. 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 Herring, for example, 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 what happened and how you could get it. They refused to educate people. Ketih herring started with his graffiti to educate people on the streets and that for me is the most amazing thing. If you look for example at what Nan Golding did…”
We spend the next minute or so raving about the recent documentary that came out earlier this year, All the beauty and the bloodshed, about photographer Nan Golding and her rampant campaign against big pharma companies in the US who had propagated and perpetuated the opiate crisis, costing the lives of millions of Americans who had been in desperate need of help and medication.
“Oh my god, my heart!” Fleur exclaims, both of us simultaneously holding our hands to our chests to show the heart-breaking, aw-inspiring effect that Nan’s work had had on us, and to express our amazement at how she had successfully managed to tear down one of the biggest pharma names in America through creative protest.
“That for me is art, that’s what art does, that’s what art needs to do in my opinion. It’s holding a sign in the street and talking to people about what’s on that sign. I’m always thinking about how to get that message across.”
Finally, as our interview is coming to an end, I ask her about her favourite wedding ceremony.
Rather than describing the marriage ceremonies she got to hold with Julian as beautiful, or magical, or any of the other words we’d usually associate with weddings, I laugh in surprise as Fleur says instead, “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”. So, 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? So, we actually needed to start in a country where there was so much energy because 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. 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.
To finish, I ask Fleur if there’s anything else she’d like in the article. Humbly, she suggests that 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 and an activist.
Julian, was published by 3TimesRebelPress on September 14th 2023.
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