Endorsing Rights, Increasing Visibility: Gay and Lesbian Activism after the Democratic Transition

“In our lesbian group it was difficult to talk about war. Some lesbians thought this was not the place to contaminate with war issues. They wanted at least in the lesbian group to talk about desire. With regard to the totalitarian state, it was forbidden to be a lesbian or to be a pacifist. Because Milosevic’s regime decreed that it was against the government to be homosexual, and that Serbia was not at war. If I asked a cashier in a shop to write me out a receipt to the Anti-War Centre, she would look at me with strange fear, even more if I asked her to write it out to the lesbian group Labris. At that time in the peace movement, only the war and nationalism were issues of discussion – feminism and lesbianism were avoided. In Belgrade the first feminist group was the SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence and there were 20 or more of us. At the beginning of the war, in 1991, everything separated us: nationalism, lesbianism, pacifism. I felt split: in each context I could turn only one side of my face, and everything else was unwanted or dangerous. Only in my flat was I able to believe myself. Lucky to have a room of my own..

…I would remember an essay in off our backs, from many years ago, back in the 1980s, where one lesbian writer from the USA who went for a year to work in Nicaragua came back and said, ‘No I could not talk about my lesbianism in Nicaragua, there is a war going on there, they have some other priorities’. I replayed this sentence in my mind a thousand times; do I agree or not, and what would I say now? Every time I thought ‘No it isn’t right’, I would move on and think maybe it was; people first of all need to be able to live. If I would start with ‘Yes, it’s right’, I would then wonder if it was interiorized homophobia. Then one night in 1995 we had a Labris action in the old part of Belgrade, Dorcol, a few blocks away from my flat. Three men stopped four of us while we were writing lesbian graffiti. They came and attacked us precisely because we were lesbians. Two of them were at the back with hockey sticks and one of them stood in front of me. He watched me, I watched him, and I thought ‘This is a face that demands war. This is a face that kills. This is a face that has been produced as such in recent years, there are weapons of hatred behind him.’ I had never seen him before. He pushed me to the wall, broke my glasses and shouted, ‘You dirty lesbian, I can throw you in this door and kill you – no one would know. Clear off!’ When I asked him who he was, he exclaimed, ‘Don’t you utter your dirty words. The mosque is the place for you.’ Lesbians were dirtying his straight male street, just as Muslims were dirtying his straight Serb street. Gay men were being harassed in their parks, Roma people were being spat upon, women were forever the first victims of their husbands.

It took me some days to recover. After that, it was evident that war implies hatred directed against every difference, against Muslims in Belgrade, then against Roma, Albanians, lesbians – once they were Jews and Communists. And that opposing war means coming out with the logic of supporting all social differences at once. One of the aims of war and pro-fascist ideology is not only separation of people of different nationalities, but the separation of people’s own identities as well. That is how they can control us better. They need to have only two sets to control: ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, to reduce the fullness of our social beings to one.”