University of Amsterdam
Graduate School of Social Sciences
MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology
Working Class Queer is Nothing to Be
Reprehension of The Working Class Among Belgrade’s
Gay Men
Student: Nebojša Savić (11410701)
Email: nebojsa.savic@outlook.com
Supervisor: dr. M. Veenis
Second reader: dr. M.P.J. van de Port
Third Reader: dr. R. Spronk
Declaration
I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy [http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
Sincerely, Nebojša Savić
Abstract
This research is focusing on reprehensive attitudes of gay men in Belgrade against affiliation with working class. The homogeneous public image of a gay man as being necessarily middle-class, educated, and creative, combined with disgust of gay community towards Serbian working class, made me wonder about the sources of such an animosity. In order to answer this question, I am exploring socio-historical dimension of community's affiliation with intellectual/artistic and fashion ‘elite’, marking these groups as 'safe havens' in which gay men of Belgrade can achieve considerable social agency, while staying out of their borders makes one exposed to an unfriendly social climate. Without their protective surroundings, gay men are left powerless in facing violence from the conservative surroundings, and neglect from the state institutions. Issues of fear regarding working class affiliation come to be elucidated through the pressing power of need for the middle-class disposition. The concept of ‘implicit social knowledge’ helps to explain alienating effects of the urban, cosmopolitan, middle-class disposition, as well as fear of being invisible and powerless in volatile conditions of Serbia’s socio-political and economic reality.
Contents
Acknowledgements...6
Introduction...7
Retko te viđam sa devojkama (I Rarely See You with Girls)...12
‘Go West’ – theorizing status, urbanity and cosmopolitan position of Belgrade’s gay men...23
Until discos do us part: gay clubs in Belgrade and class division...35
Domain of ‘Pleasure’...37
Disco Stress – ‘Mikser House’ and Judgement...43
Fear and loathing...47
Conclusion...57
Son: Dad, I need to tell you something… I’m gay. Father: Is that so?
Son: Yes, I’m afraid.
Father: OK. Do you own designer clothes? Son: No.
Father: Do you drive a Porsche? Son: No…
Dad: Do you have a nice apartment in the center of Belgrade? Son: No!
Dad: Then, sonny boy, you are not gay, you’re just a plain old faggot!
- Anonymous joke
Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so, when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.
Acknowledgements
Writing this thesis would not have been possible without the selfless help of some amazing people. Firstly, I need to express my deepest thanks to Marieke Brand, without whose help in navigating troublesome paths of administration I probably would not be attending this study program at all. My gratitude also goes to all people that have participated in this research, for taking time to contribute to my work, and for believing in a better future of LGBTIQ population in Serbia. I also would like to thank my dear supervisor Milena Veenis, for her continuous support and strong critique of my writing; for pushing me to go further and question everything that I used to find self-evident. Also, this thesis would definitely not be possible without an invaluable input from Mattijs van de Port, both through his theoretical contribution and his timely advice. My thanks also go to my beloved partner Henk Haaima, for his selfless love and continuous support, for believing in me and making me realize the true extent of my capabilities, and to my dear sister Dijana Mitrović-Longinović for her tireless efforts in proofreading this thesis.
Lastly, my special thanks go to Ildiko Erdei – teacher, mentor and a relentless source of inspiration – for firing up my interest in anthropology, for her genuine moral and professional support, for continuing to inspire new generations of young anthropologist in Belgrade, and for being a true friend.
Introduction
Gay men of Belgrade have been the central subject of my anthropological (and intimate) interest since I have started connecting the pieces and realizing what drives my desire as a researcher. As someone who is considered to be an ‘insider’ within the investigated group, one of the most important starting points would be to engage in a reflexive examination of my own position in the research. From its beginnings in 1980s, reflexive anthropology has urged researchers to remain conscious that our texts produce a certain academic rhetoric which possesses the potential to exercise hegemony over lived experience through writing ethnography (Clifford, 1986: 2). Therefore, there is no denying that my own subjectivity has a strong influence on the analytical framework. Nevertheless, I have never considered my position as an insider to be a hindrance; it rather added a strong reflective undercurrent to my work. I was my own ‘gatekeeper’ to all parts of Belgrade’s gay population, sometimes more successful than the others, and in return this navigation through Belgrade’s gay scene has revealed a lot about myself, particularly about my own position within the researched group.
Since I have moved to Belgrade in 2008, I have been almost entirely surrounded by young intellectuals, artists, musicians, and all other kinds of creative individuals, most of them gay. I met them through other friends, fellow students at the Faculty of Philosophy, or in a gay club, and at the time, it seemed to me that all of the gay youth in Serbia shared the same hopes and dreams for making great achievements and leaving a significant impact on the World. These young people helped shape my worldview and navigate my (often thorny) path through gay life in Serbia’s capitol. They always considered themselves to be progressive, fashionable and consumer-conscious, or almost everything that one comes to expect from people with middle class background. A curious fact was that their economical background varied immensely. They were mostly poor students, bartenders, and sales advisors, but those titles never went alone when they needed to define themselves, for they have always represented themselves as students/future intellectuals, bartenders/photographers or sales advisors/stylists and fashion designers. We always talked about our favorite artists, where to buy nice clothes, what should we wear and how, what food are we going to prepare, which movies are we going to watch, what makes a good movie director… In short, lifestyle mattered, even if we rarely had money for new clothes, sometimes not even for decent meals, and not to mention that all music and movies were pirated materials. It wasn’t until my encounter with professor Ildiko Erdei, and through her, with economical anthropology and anthropology of material culture
that situation became clear to me, and made me wonder why was it so important for us to maintain these ‘cool’ lifestyles, as if our bare lives depended upon them.
From this perspective, even before I decided to come out with my sexual orientation at the age of eighteen, I had a strong urge to make some significant changes regarding my looks and lifestyle. Though I didn’t have a strong connection with the gay community at the time (given that I lived in a very small town, thoughts of getting into a same-sex relationship carried a great risk), I intuitively felt that my excessive weight and acne prone skin will not be tolerated within the community frame, as it was already the case in the wider social context. At least my internet contacts with gay population seemed to suggest so. After six months of long exhaustive acne treatment and some severe diet changes, I managed to accomplish the look that I thought a young gay person should possess. There followed a change of hairstyle, change of wardrobe (reflected in choice of much tighter clothes, such as skinny fit trousers and t-shirts that follow the body line etc.). These changes were met by an enthusiastic response from people around me. After that, I began to realize just how important the relationship between the fashion style and sexual preferences is, given that many members of the gay community felt at liberty to assume my stance on dominance or submissiveness in sexual relations entirely based on what I wore, what I ate, and what I have listened to.
Finally, after all these changes and a relatively successful integration within the gay scene of Belgrade, the mutually constitutive relationship between looks, sexual orientation and places of social interaction was becoming more and more apparent. To be more precise, I actively began to internalize those “rules”. As these processes extensively occupied my anthropological interest, I have dedicated my bachelor thesis to consumer practices of gay men in Belgrade. The research focused on bilateral construction of gay identity and consumer practices in the context of Belgrade’s gay scene. The emphasis has been placed on the issue of auto-ethnography, and the insider positions within the studied group. The aim of this work was to demonstrate the contingency of the usual association between gay and consumer identity. However, the contingent nature of the relationship between gayness on one hand, and creativity and consumer practices on the other, proved to be overshadowed by dominant images of middle-class, educated, creative gay men in a wider social context, allowing the internal hierarchical structure and a diversity of identity models within community to remain blurred (Erdei, Savić, 2014). This meant that all other socio-cultural groups of gay men, but particularly low-educated working class, were persistently overlooked, sometimes to the point of denying them a right to call themselves gay, just like the introductory joke suggested. However, a phenomenon which is complicating this picture is a growing acceptance of the cultural
practices that are mostly associated with working class, such as Turbo Folk music. Middle class creatives and intellectuals within Belgrade’s gay scene visit gay clubs which provide this type of entertainment more frequently than before, even though Turbo Folk music is often regarded to as a tainted element of a conservative nationalistic period in the 1990s.
Looking at the overall socio-cultural context, LGBTIQ population in Serbia experiences a high level of discrimination on daily basis. Concrete manifestations of human rights violations take a variety of forms, and although there may have been rather slow improvement over the years, the situation is still far from bearable. In a survey conducted by the Gay-Straight Alliance on the level of discrimination against gay people, and the overall respect of human rights in 2010, there are 67% of the citizens who believe homosexuality is a disease, that the government should systematically suppress it, and the same percentage of citizens considers violence against LGBTIQ people legitimate.1 On the other hand, there are
formal policy-wise improvements that were proposed in order to alleviate disadvantaged position of gay population: the first clear public condemnations by the state regarding violence against LGBTIQ people were announced after the failed Pride Parade of 2009, as well as regarding the riots that occurred during the first successful Pride Parade of 2010 in Belgrade. In accordance with the views of the government regarding violence, the Law against Discrimination has been created. But an official formal condemnation by the state certainly does not change the fact that 67% of the population continues to stigmatize LGBTIQ people.
Physical and verbal abuse in public spaces, as well as within family, is present to an even greater extent, as shown by the GSA research. The first successful Pride Parade of 2010 remained the only one until 2014. Failure to hold parades in 2011, 2012, and 2013 was attributed to the state leadership, which in all three cases estimated unfavorable conditions for maintaining the security of the events, prohibiting all other meetings scheduled as a protest of ultra-right organizations and soccer fan groups against the Pride.2 Discriminatory violence is
not only confined to events surrounding Gay Pride – it can happen anywhere and anytime, and it can be provoked by the slightest of details, such as the way one walks, holds a cigarette, or styles his hair. The discriminatory context in Serbian society is extremely important for the study of any aspect of the cultural practices within the gay community, because it provides an
1 Data taken from the presentation of research: GSA/Gay Straight Alliance (with CeSID), 2011. Prejudices
Exposed: homophobia in Serbia 2010. Research and analysis of public opinion, attitudes and discrimination
against LGBT people in the workplace: Belgrade. A complete presentation of the research is available on the website www.gsa.org.rs.
2 Source:
important insight into the ways in which community negotiates its existence in the face of intolerance, how that reflects on its social position, and how this social climate affects the very formation of their social practices.
Fascinated by these findings, I was not entirely sure from which angle I would further approach this issue until an incident which occurred at Belgrade Gay Pride in 2015. Namely, Marija Perković from the organization “Women in Black” took the Pride’s stage, and in her speech proclaimed that capitalism is the enemy of us all, and that LGBTIQ movement should unite with workers’ unions and empathize with the struggle of the working class. 3 This created
discontent among many of the marchers around me, also ridicule from a few of them, but my attention was especially captured by a group of young gay volunteers who showed clear disgust over this idea, booing and whistling, while one of them said: "Ewe, I am so pissed! I am not a worker, what is this idiot saying?!” As someone who deeply cares about social justice and equality, I was rather saddened, shocked, and angry at the situation I was witnessing. How comes that members of a social group which is itself in a rather precarious position, heavily struggling with exclusion and inequality in Serbian society, exercise such blatant exclusion? However, this scene made me interrogate why the idea of working-class identity is causing such a discomfort in these young men, and what is the influence of this identity stance to the more socially and culturally marginal parts of the gay population?
In order to answer this question, in the first chapter, I will turn to socio-historical context of Belgrade’s gay life. This will be a descriptive historical layout concerning memories of social activities associated with gay community that my interlocutors could recall, focusing on prominent groups within Belgrade’s gay scene that have been formed in times of Socialist Yugoslavia, and in the period after its breakup in 1990s, respectively. The aim of this chapter is to present that belonging to these social groups, even in the times when homosexuality was criminalized, could provide for a relatively open gay life in Yugoslavia, and subsequently in Serbia. Why this was the case will be the focus of the second chapter. There, I will turn to theoretical discussions of social status and class perception in Serbian society, and what are its eventual effects on perception and representation of status within Belgrade’s gay population. I will try to present the importance of possessing a middle-class background in Serbia by focusing on tensions between attempts to be recognized as a part of Western European cultural
3 It is very important to mention that the organization ‘Women in Black’, an antimilitarist peace organization,
has been formed in Belgrade in 1991, at the dawn of civil war in Yugoslavia, helping gay men both in the context of war resistance and prevention of their eventual mobilization, as well as in affirming their rights on freedom of sexuality. I have gathered this information during a talk with a previous member of the organization.
constellation, and dealing with the ‘Balkan’ stigma. By doing so, I am hoping to provide a contextual background for the representation of social class and status that I have encountered in the field, in order to gain better understanding of possible causes of the reprehensive attitudes towards working class. After explaining the importance of middle-class position and causes for reprehension of working class in the second chapter, in the third chapter I will compare my observations on status and style performance in Belgrade gay clubs, and how it reflects wider social and cultural tensions. This chapter will show that the open reprehension is confronted with a somewhat more hidden phenomenon, which shows that working class-ness also has a strong power of attraction, in a particular form of its popular culture: Turbo Folk music. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I will be outlining key insights about the underlying motivation behind reprehension of working class within the studied group. By relying on the concept of “implicit social knowledge” (Taussig, 1987), I will argue that the apparent strong affiliation of gay people in Belgrade with ‘creative’ and intellectual socio-cultural groups, and their reprehensive attitudes towards working class come to be elucidated through their common undercurrent – fear of being invisible and powerless in volatile conditions of Serbia’s socio-political and economic reality. Within this context, making yourself a part of a prominent middle-class group provides a comforting sense of protection, should social climate bring sudden and unfavorable changes for Belgrade’s gay men. At the same time, holding a middle-class cosmopolitan disposition is experienced, to a certain extent, as alienating: it often requires a separation from experiences and habits that do no align with this subject position.
Retko te viđam sa devojkama (I Rarely See You with Girls)
4Through my previous experiences, both as a researcher and as a gay Belgradian, I can safely state that the greatest part of gay social scene plays out in the center of Serbia's capitol. Indeed, the whole area around Republic Square, and Savamala district in particular, is deemed to be suitable for a quiet play out of the gay social scene: most of the cafes and clubs where the LGBTIQ population gathers are located in the area. Savamala district hosts one of the most frequented gay party venues, ‘Mikser House’,5 as well as several cultural institutions, such as
galleries and exhibition halls, but also the “hip” cafes; all of which are gladly visited by gay men, alongside other members of intellectual and artistic crowd. Central part of the city is often considered to be a safe area for the LGBTIQ population, however it is also a place where most of the homophobic attacks happen, during busy Friday and Saturday nights.
At this point, I am returning to my previously studied group of gay men who place themselves into the middle-class category and who are actively participating in the public life of Belgrade in an attempt to understand why is it exactly the middle class, educated, urban identity so substantial when it comes to the subject group in question. Importance of being ‘seen’ at hip places, in company of ‘cool’ or important people, and wearing unique and striking clothes all sound like a cliché characteristics of urban social groups that strive for prominence, however they have proved to be highly relevant in my previous research, especially for younger gay men, who were mostly living in a rather meager economic situation at the time. This has been neatly captured by one of my previous interlocutors:
My opinion is that gays have always had money, I do not know why is that. Somehow it seems to me that they really do, maybe it's a deception… Because the people with whom I hang out do not really have a lot of money, but they take care of themselves - they have good hairstyle, good looks, they drink quality wine when they go out or something, but it’s because they save money, and like to spend it on something worthwhile. As you know, gays are consumers,
4 This is a title of a hit song from 1981, performed by a New Wave post-punk Yugoslavian band ‘Idoli’. It has
been one of the first gay-themed songs in Yugoslavia. Artist allegedly sings it as a warning to his friend that rumors will spread, for he is never seen with girls, but only in a company of nice guys.
5 Right before my fieldwork was completed at the end of March, Mikser House management decided to move its
premises later in the year, which means that organizers of gay parties that took place here are from now on left without one of the most prominent party venues in the city. How this will affect the future of Belgrade’s gay nightlife remains to be seen.
impulsive purchases are a common thing, and it is supposed to be an indicator that they have money.
NS: Do you think that investments in self-image are of big importance?
- Yes, definitely... Although I experienced that people think I'm ‘posh’, just because I went to
Fashion Week. I think I went there with my friends, and only because I was able to some of you might think – oh, you are one of those who go to Fashion Weeks... But yes, status symbols are certain self-branding too... (Regarding the presence of economic differences) I remember that one of my friends who used to work in the club ‘Apartman’ (one of Belgrade's gay clubs, N.S.) said ‘Gay clubbing is the best type of clubbing in Belgrade - firstly, most gay men drink a lot, and then, they leave the best tips!’ But I can count on one hand the number of times I had a drink at the club, because according to my abilities, when I go out, I usually meet with my friends first, we have a drink in the park, and then dance inside (Erdei, Savić, 2014).
Therefore, it is important to investigate why is the successful, creative, middle class ‘mode’ of living considered as the only livable one. Bearing this in mind, strong focus has to be put on the most prominent members of Belgrade’s gay scene, such as designers, PR managers, artists and intellectuals within the community.6 Those that I had a chance to talk to
in the field often referred to these people as the ‘gay elite’, sometimes seriously and the other times with a sarcastic undertone in their voice. Some gay man evidently had more security within their positions. I have actually heard about some of them even during my childhood, as they were rather present in the public sphere. They were TV presents, celebrity stylists, directors of theater festivals, etc. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon a first clue about the socio-historical dimension of ‘gay elite’ in Belgrade that I decided to rethink its importance and potential influence on the present predicament of the gay scene - an ethnographic account that claimed that even in the times of former Yugoslavia, when homosexuality has been punishable by law and while the police raids were quite regular in the public spaces (such as public toilets), where those who did not belong to the elite circle went in search of potential sexual encounters,
6 Here I am using the term community rather loosely, as there is no consensus among LGBTIQ activists in
Belgrade whether the community actually exists. According to my own experience throughout the years, activists have failed to create unity and solidarity within the population, or as my activist interlocutor Pete remarked: “No such thing as a gay community exists in Belgrade, at least not in terms of Amsterdam’s or New York’s community. Here, we only have fragmented community, where everyone hates each other and no one can unite even over the smallest of common goals.” For this reason, I prefer to use the term gay scene, which has been frequently used by the people that I have met in the field.
“gay cultural elite” was never disturbed by the authorities (Spasić, 1990). But why was this the case?
For that reason, I decided to take a closer look into the historical context of Belgrade’s ‘gay elite’, so I have reached out to my old acquaintance Lex, who is rather informed about the topography and history of gay social life in Belgrade. First of all, he arrived at the conclusion that we cannot speak about ‘gay scene’ in Belgrade, even in the broadest terms, before the 1970s. The most common occasions when people would actually meet their partners were during ‘cruising’ – going around public areas where you’ve heard gay people appear, and then looking for a potential partner. According to what both of us have heard from people around the town, this has been a dominant social practice of gay men in Belgrade during the 1950s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, as well as the ‘90s, only to experience a sharp decline in the 2000s due to the rise of high speed internet and proliferation of dating websites. The year of 2009 brought first dating mobile apps, which left the previous cruising spots almost deserted.7 One of the most
frequented cruising spots was men’s toilet on Belgrade Bus Station. On the way to my hometown, I stopped there for a moment in order to see if there were still any traces of cruising present. Nowadays, only the inside of aluminum doors in toilet stalls bear witness to the cruising history, being covered in personal ads written with red and black markers, such as, “Hung dominant top, looking for a submissive bottom”, “Obedient slave looking for a master”, or “Looking for a serious guy to start a relationship”, etc., all followed by phone numbers. Most of the numbers were actually landlines, which suggest that these messages predate even the use of mobile phones. However, according to my friends from BGD Checkpoint organization, who used to educate in safe sex practices and hand out free condoms in public spaces, they would still encounter a few people looking for partners in public toilets and parks. They have noticed that these are mostly elderly men, living on socio-economic margin, who are not that familiar with the use of internet (or cannot even afford it), some of them actually being married, hoping to satisfy their sexual needs through random encounters. Practice of cruising also brings the danger of violence, as an attempt to show affection in the direction of a wrong person can cost ‘cruisers’ sever physical injuries.
Taking these stories into account, I have drawn a conclusion that there must have been a group of intellectual ‘elite’ who organized home parties and who were mostly left at peace, while the ones who had only public space cruising at their disposal were left to suffer merciless
7 The global dating app for gay, bisexual, and curious men called Grindr was launched in 2009, forever
changing the experience of online dating for gay communities all over the world. Source: https://www.grindr.com/about/. Viewed on: 22nd May 2017.
police raids. Lex and I decided that it would have been the best to turn to the only person we know who actually lived and experienced gay life in socialist Belgrade: Val. I have met Val when I started visiting gay clubs in Belgrade back in 2008, and people introduced him to me as a living gay legend of Belgrade. I decided to set up a meeting with him and hear his story, which I include here in its entirety:
Homosexuality was a criminal offense in the Criminal Code of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Therefore, no one could openly declare themselves as homosexual. For gay intellectuals, it was frequently known that they were homosexual, but those were mostly rumors. Well-known gay intellectuals were recognized in their areas of expertise, but were often secretly ridiculed and somewhat tacitly it was assumed that they cannot make any serious advance in the political hierarchy. Only after the death of Josip Broz Tito, standards were loosened for social and political promotion of gay intellectuals. For example, a playwright and a longtime art director of BITEF theater got a chance as a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia to participate in the Communist Party Congress in the 1980s. From the rostrum of the Congress, he boldly stated, for the first time in Yugoslavian history, that people of other sexual orientations should be decriminalized.
Otherwise, the social climate was in line with the official socialist policy that favors the working man and his family in what was considered to be the only form of family: husband and wife with children. Everything else was not regarded as acceptable nor tolerated in any public appearance, namely any expression of sexual orientation towards the same sex. If a public figure was caught in an awkward position of expressing same-sex affection, or “seduction”, he would often be physically abused, frequently by other fellow citizens, however, the authorities would rather encourage such harassment than punish it. Also, if a public figure was found at the gay cruising spots, such as public toilets on the bus and railway stations, or cruising at the well-known cruising spots, they were physically harassed and attacked, which they never dared to report to the police… but either way, they would not be protected by them.
As I mentioned, known homosexuals at the time, who were also recognized by the public were Jovan Ćirilov, playwright and art director of the BITEF theater, and his longtime partner, who was a doctor and an award-winning poet. Jovan as a well-known personality was not subjected to torture, not even by the police… He was protected to such an extent that they were not allowed to show disgust or any signs of violence against Ćirilov, however, they turned to his
partner, who has often suffered provocations and even physical clashes because of his sexuality and sightings with Ćirilov.
Other well-known couple in the era of the seventies and eighties was Dragoslav Srejović, our most famous archaeologist and the man who discovered the oldest Neolithic settlement in Europe, Lepenski Vir, and his partner. He was a very prominent public figure, and was tolerated and respected in scientific circles, but often condemned in the street. His partner was at that time a student and later a professor at the Faculty of Geology, and today, he is a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts. In long-term relationship with professor Srejović, he was more withdrawn due to his robust masculine look, and less exposed to attacks because he was perceived less as a homosexual, but he also had trouble in the streets, and also experienced refusal of the police to protect him.
In addition to these very prominent figures, there were also less well-known intellectuals who were gay. A number of prominent doctors and clinic chiefs were afraid to emphasize their sexuality, so they got married and created their families, although their true nature was homosexual, and they maintained sexual relationships with men throughout their lives. They were less exposed to harassment, but there were cases when someone was not satisfied with the treatment and then publicly denounced homosexual doctors, saying that they are perverted and therefore cannot treat people. Such cases were covered up because they were respectable people, but essentially, they were not protected by the police, which often sided with the perpetrators, or in some cases even joined the unpunished violence against gay intellectuals, swearing at them, throwing insults, and sometimes even punches.
Most prominent gay intellectuals could not visit public cruising places safely, because they were frequented by petty criminals who were mugging them, taking valuable possessions, while going unpunished, plus they would often beat them. Such prominent intellectuals have often gathered in homes and home sit-ins where they had to pay for other gay guys to be brought there, because they would be in danger of being seen in the public spaces. These sit-ins were eventually profiled according to the specific preferences and desires, especially for certain television directors and people known to the general public. Such gatherings were named "salons". So, you could hear ‘I went to the salon of this or the salon of that guy’, where parties or masquerades were also organized. These would be eventually uncovered, especially by neighbors and then even though they caused no trouble, they often reported ‘disturbance of
public peace and order’ so police would come and harass them verbally. They interrupted them by saying: ‘What are you doing here? What are these gatherings with no girls, is this some faggotry?’, or similar statements.
A number of athletes were also gay and thus when people started talking about a very reputable football player who was seen with men, he had to get married urgently and to withdraw from public sightings with other homosexuals. In sports, it was generally a huge secret, and some things that were happening between teammates were kept as a top secret, but it sometimes also served as basis for a mutual blackmail. If it came out in public, police together with the administration of the club insisted that such athletes should be married off as soon as possible, in order to avoid spoiling the reputation of the sport and the generally accepted propaganda of sport as the healthiest lifestyle for a healthy development of personality, where free expression of sexuality other than heterosexual was not allowed.
One of the safer ways of communication between gay intellectuals and other gay men were some of the public cafes and restaurants. Those were rather famous spots: Pastry café of Hotel Moskva, café Kazbek across SKC,8 or café Manjež, and others. These were the meeting spots
for intellectuals and gays from the lower social strata, even very poor, usually Roma, where they got to know each other, although sometimes it happened that these poorer guys robbed intellectuals, physically harass them, or blackmail them with threats to reach their families or employers, and that they will tell everyone that they were with them and what they were doing, which also went unpunished, followed by ridicule from the police. So, the intellectuals were often forced to pay for blackmail, and as public figures they were often racketeered. These criminal acts among gays were possible because of the illegality of their sexuality, thus everything was forced to secrecy and concealment. Therefore, a large number of homosexuals, especially the poorer ones, had to lead double lives for the sake of survival, and had no real understanding of their own sexuality. So even though they themselves were homosexuals, they were prone to publicly slander other intellectuals as homosexuals, to humiliate and insult them, in spite of the fact that their position was the same. A number of convicted gays, after their return from prison, cooperated with the police and made connection with prominent gay intellectuals, and then by the order of the police and party authority, if it was necessary, they
would blackmail them with public outings, threatening to tell everyone who they really are, if they do not do something which is required of them.
While listening to the story, I noted a few conflicting parts. On the one hand, Val suggested that gay intellectuals were in such an undesirable position that any true agency was completely taken away from them. It seemed that the repression was coming from all sides: society, political establishment, state authorities, professional rivals, and even other gays themselves. On the other hand, he acknowledged that they were usually well respected in their area of expertise, and that sometimes they did enjoy some level of institutional protection. So, I drew Val’s attention to this contradiction and asked him for a clarification:
Oh, they certainly did have influence. They would gather for Sunday lunches together with their boys and then discussions would ensue, sometimes over putting their lovers in coveted career positions. So, there was favoritism. One of them would provide his lover with a job as a medical doctor, even though he would go to work every tenth day, and then take sick leaves whenever he could. So, there was some nepotism on the basis of influence, but there was also sexual exploitation. They all went through some kind of ‘sexual treatment’. It wasn’t forced, or mandatory, but it was expected. You could be intellectual, working for a library or very important for some research, but if you were not publically acknowledged, you were not that protected and you did not have a ‘clique’ behind you.
This was more in line with other stories that Lex and I have heard. While acknowledging the fact that system and the society were never completely opened and accepting of everyone, cultural and economic capital did seem to provide gay men with a certain amount of social agency. Mostly, it allowed a more significant proximity to the ‘intellectual clique’, and that in turn increased one’s chances of acquiring some security in an unfriendly environment. Why were people with intellectual and art background relatively protected and allowed to express their sexuality, I will investigate in more details in the following chapter.
Even though most of my older acquaintances remember the ‘80s fondly, as time when New Wave and alternative culture were flourishing in Belgrade, bringing with itself a dash of hope for a more progressive society, the 1990s, on the other hand, certainly failed everyone’s expectations. Yugoslavia was falling apart in flames and agony of a civil war, and the social climate took a sharp turn from what was deemed to be progressive socialism to conservative,
patriarchal nationalism that raged over all ex-Yugoslav republics. Even though issues of LGBTIQ population would inevitably fade into the background amidst such circumstances, later constitutional changes in 1994 have finally decriminalized homosexual acts. But as the nation succumbed to the nationalist propaganda under the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the 1990s, the focus was mainly on the conflicts that ravaged the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, and the question of gay population was largely ignored in Serbia.
In what many perceived to be the darkest chapter of Serbia’s modern history, as a sort of a paradox, entertainment media were the industry on the rise during the ‘90s. While the official media distributers, like the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS, previously known as Radio Television of Belgrade) openly supported the political establishment at the time, but also held its ground with political and educational contents, entertainment-oriented media (such as RTV Pink) produced another kind of program for the general audiences – a newly developed fusion of musical entertainment and nationalist propaganda, shrouded in the concept of popular folk music (Kronja, 2004). As Snježana Milivojević explains, reflecting on this situation: “Media contents consolidate the mythological background of a community by producing metaphors which are to be used in the domain of the popular. For a totalitarian power the colonization of media space is the most effective shortcut to everyday life” (2002). Through the destruction of alternative media (mainly via financial and technological sabotage) and influence it exercised over the entertaining television programs, Serbian government sought ways to keep a status quo regarding the political situation in the country, all along feeding its population with a carefully concealed nationalist propaganda (Gordy, 2001). In short, many understood this as a need of the regime for its own sparkly soundtrack, encompassed in a specific genre: Turbo Folk music, which fought its way from the cultural margin in the 1980s to an almost absolute dominance of the entertainment in the 1990s.
While throughout this period the question of LGBTIQ rights remains largely ignored, parallel to the intellectual elite fading into the background, entertainment media (predominantly RTV Pink) develops peculiar local aesthetic forms, which were marked by homoerotic imagery, and sudden rise of local TV stars whose (latent) sexual orientation was an open secret. 9 Those TV personas were engaged with various forms of fashion industry, PR
management, design, music, photography, and all the things ‘artsy’ – they acted as trusted consultants in the newly emerging entertainment business. In return, the positions they held
9 The company started broadcasting in 1994, focusing on the commercial entertaining content, featuring musical
provided space for different modes of agency within power relations, that is, the power positions through which those members of gay community could acquire both social and economic capital. How did this occur in such an unfavorable social climate is not entirely clear, but it is my opinion that it has been made possible precisely through the depoliticized10 image
of RTV Pink, where everyday turmoil and suffering that were permeating reality of the region gave way to entertainment for the masses. Nevertheless, just as in the case of intellectual gay elite in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, these circumstances led to the higher percentage of gay people involved in the aforementioned professions. As far as Lex and I could remember, the same ‘crowd’ founded the Belgrade Fashion Week back in 1996, making it the first event of its type in Eastern Europe.11 Such circumstances have clearly initiated development of power positions
in the broader society that guaranteed a level of acceptance within the otherwise highly discriminatory social context.
These events have been extensively captured by the documentary series called Sav
Taj Folk (All That Folk) (2004), produced by B92. During the 1990s this broadcasting
company was one of the rare alternative medias that acted subversively towards the regime of Slobodan Milošević, and therefore it suffered severe prosecution of the authorities.12 After
2000, it starts to develop its commercial success, and the aforementioned documentary has served as a severe critique of media and entertainment industry of 1990s, symbolically embodied in the phenomenon of Turbo Folk music. As Van de Port briefly describes it “… this turbo-folk is shamelessly commercial mass production. Both the text, music and visual presentation are an amalgam of West and East, of traditional and modern, of domestic and foreign” (1998: 57). Nevertheless, this music genre had a rather prominent spot in the everyday lives of Serbian citizens, for it was almost inescapable. Looking at the childhood years of my generation, I can remember that this was the dominant mode of music entertainment at weddings, birthdays and other family celebrations, which also marks this music as an inevitable part of our intimate memories. As such, this music has been a veritable sore spot for many prominent Serbian intellectuals who have been featured as key commentators in the series.
10 Although political commentators and the creators of the documentary ‘Sav Taj Folk’ (see page 20) highlight
RTV Pink’s desire to remain apolitical, they acknowledge the fact that Pink’s CEO was in a close relationship with the regime, and that the program contents indirectly supported Milošević’s government. Many believed that the absence of informative program has been used by Pink’s officials as an alibi for alleged neutrality, but in fact it had a purpose to tranquilize unhappy masses by keeping them away from political and economic reality. Source:
http://www.b92.net/video/videos.php?nav_category=1106&yyyy=2010&mm=03&dd=31&nav_id=421674. Viewed on 24th May 2017.
11 Source: http://belgradefashionweek.com/index.php/about/. Viewed on 24th May 2017. 12https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B92. Viewed on 15th May 2017.
They have seen it as an aberration of traditional culture with a strong oriental influence. Nevertheless, the inspiration that was coming from gay esthetics, which has been used to transform once quaint folk chanteuses into local superstar divas, was duly noted.13 They have
also described it as a primary music choice of the ‘unwashed masses’, namely, the working-class, which was supposed to reference low education level of its fans, that were thus allegedly embodying retrograde forces of Serbia’s society.
While leading stylists and photographers designated in the series as the primary creators of Turbo Folk’s visual identity have not been publically marked as gay, other members of Belgrade’s gay population were quite aware of their sexual orientation. Even I remember hearing as a child these people frequently qualified as faggots (pederi in Serbian), even though I was not aware of what it actually meant, and my mother had some tough job explaining it to me. As ‘cruising spots’ and ‘private gay parties’ went out of fashion in the ‘90s, according to Lex, an uneventful gay social life has been stirred up by the opening of the first gay club (Club X, or a “Dump”, as some of the interlocutors called it) in 1997. And the previously mentioned ‘fashion gurus’ were often spotted there, as Lex recalls it. Very much in the spirit of the time, this club introduced Turbo Folk music as part of its regular repertoire, and the media/fashion gay elite which participated in Turbo Folk’s massive popularization were there to celebrate the moment.14 Considering the fact that gay clubs took a leading role in organizing gay social life
in Belgrade, the issue of music taste within the gay scene became ever more so important. As following chapters will reveal, the connection between Belgrade’s gay population and Turbo Folk music is rather complex one, and the analysis of this relationship will significantly contribute towards the key argument.
In order to see if the fashion/media clique could be considered the new power group that formed during the 1990s within the gay scene, I reached out to Pete. At the time, I was not sure if this has been solely my interpretation of the events that took place in the 1990s, but the fact that these people are still active and famous in their fields of expertise did suggest that I might be onto something. “Are you out of your mind asking that?! They’re here even today and
they hold the whole fashion industry in Belgrade” – said Pete, almost shocked that I even asked.
He punctuated it without further restraints – “If a young gay designer wants to succeed here,
he definitely needs to suck one of those cocks.” The context sounds oddly familiar to that one
13https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G_g2tSyvfI. Sav Taj Folk, Episode 04: Hoću s tobom da đuskam (I
want to dance with you). Viewed on 15th May 2017.
14 I will provide more details about the importance of Turbo Folk music for the contemporary gay night life of
of the gay intellectuals in the socialist Yugoslavia. However, Sav Taj Folk has presented the estheticized Turbo Folk as a tainted element of Serbia’s dark past in the ‘90s, and therefore the media/fashion gay elite could not easily escape its stigma, as it was highly involved in its overall image creation. But all these issues aside, it is clear at this point that Belgrade’s gay scene has been dominated by two favorable manners of being a gay man: an intellectual or a creative professional. Both seem to require an adequate amount of social capital, represented in good relations with people in positions of power, and cultural capital, represented by adequate level of education or expertise. Lacking any of these two indicated that a gay man was in danger of being outside of the gay social scene, making him susceptible for violence that could occur during random searches for a partner, or ridicule and abuse by police authorities (which would continue to be the case right until implementation of the Law Against Discrimination in 2010). Thus, a middle-class position seems to be implied as the only possible one for a gay person to prevail in these social circumstances.
Fall of Milošević in 2000 brought forth new directions through which Serbian society needed to build its path towards European Union, and towards progressive Western cultural values in a broader sense, hence tainted elements of the past certainly did not fit into the new picture. I believe that this situation had a significant influence on how gay identity would come to be perceived in Serbian society, and how it came to the situation that intellectuals and creatives within the gay population exercised higher levels of social agency within a highly intolerant social context. All of this will be discussed in the following chapter.
‘Go West’ – Theorizing Status, Urbanity, and Cosmopolitan
Position of Belgrade’s Gay Men
I would to like to start this chapter reflecting on status and class issues among Belgrade’s gay scene from a fieldwork journal entry, written during my previous research. At the time, I was working as a coat checker in one of Belgrade’s gay clubs. This position provided me with a detailed insight into the status representation of club’s visitors on four accounts: what types of clothes they were leaving at the coat check, their relationship towards the clothing, how they were treated inside the club, and finally, time and manner of their arrival/departure. Here follows a description of one average night in the club:
It is another Friday night in ‘Apartman’.15 At the entrance, security argues with few young
visitors who probably do not have enough money to enter. Shortly thereafter, an appearance of a renowned designer from Belgrade: security and the girl that charges entrance let him in with no questions asked, while young men are still standing outside. I have already been told that the designer was not to be charged for his coat check. The designer joins a group of his friends gathered around the bar, who had more or less similar treatment at the entrance. A bit further away, one can observe the largest group of visitors gathered at the podium in front of the DJ, while a few sit scattered in different rooms, some of whom have fallen asleep under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or fatigue.
A coat check becomes a kind of multi-service platform: information desk, the confessional for cheated lovers and those who cheat, psychological, and above all, fashion counseling - visitors who are not rushing to get their feet on the podium take some time to chat with me about the atmosphere, other visitors, but also about their fashion choices for the night. It would not be enough to say that cloths left at the coat-check are divers: from jackets and sweaters purchased at low prices in China boutiques, flea market in Pančevo, to prêt-à-porter clothes of famous designer brands and custom made coats from the fashion studios of local designers. Brand H&M deserves a special mention - I noticed that it was present in almost all groups of visitors. Considering that up until recently it was not available in Serbia, the visitors stated that the garments of this brand were mainly purchased in Western Europe at affordable prices. But my
guess is that the high ranking of this brand comes precisely from its physical inaccessibility, while the financial affordability remained ignored. This can be substantiated by the fact that, after the announcement of the arrival of H&M in Serbia, the enthusiasm of visitors has dropped significantly. That fact made the brand more desirable, as it indicated ability to travel as well. All in all, it seemed important to make a statement and wear something that not a lot of people would be able to obtain, whether it was a unique piece of clothing, something not available in Serbia, or a very bold combination of materials that others would not dare to wear. It was curious to notice that some of the visitors carried large bags with clothes that they would change into upon leaving the club. When asked why that was it needed, they would usually respond ‘for safety reasons’, because homophobes would easily recognize them as being gay on the street, and that might cause trouble. I remember one young man saying with sadness in his voice: ‘I really don’t get it, this is how average men dress in the west, why is this a problem? I am really not fit for this place…’
Clothing that is highly ranked among visitors – custom made in the studio of some prominent designer or from industrial lines of larger, internationally renowned designer brands is mainly associated with a group that I will conditionally call the ‘club elite’. This group is comprised of local designers on the rise, renowned models, stylists, magazine editors, and fashion agency owners. Those guests are often friends with the owners and managers of the club, and the coat check is generally free of charge for them. It is easy to notice that the said ‘elite’ of the gay community is associated to a larger extent with the world of fashion, so it's not surprising that many visitors need to perform ranking of individual styles, as well as to be constantly aware of their body, clothes, style, fashion accessories, etc.
Not only in terms of clothes, but also in terms of time management, certain status differences may be observed. Many of the visitors have shared my observation that some of the basic indicators of status can be detected through the arrival and departure time to and from the club. Parties last from 23:00 to 05:00 - younger visitors (high school and university students) arrive early and leave right before the end of the party, unless they plan to visit some other place that evening. Members of the described elite spend the least time in the club. They generally come in around 01:30, leaving the club between 02:30 and 03:00.
... Around 3 am, the designer described at the beginning of this entry and his friends take their clothes, mostly consisting of “custom–made” coats or a famous designer brand, after which
they call a cab. A number of visitors follow them, planning to visit some other club before the closing, and most of them stay. They try to dance, or they let the weariness to take over, placing themselves on one of the chairs, waiting for one thing they wouldn’t like to admit to - the first day line of the public transportation, because ticket controls do not start early and it is possible to freeload in a bus. At 5AM the party ends, and security wakes up some younger visitors who were asleep in the armchairs and makes them leave the club.
This fieldwork record brings up several points which need to be addressed in more detail in order to lay down a basis for the theoretical aspect of this research and tackle some of the following themes: understanding class differentiation in the contemporary Serbia, and how it accentuates importance of the status performance in predominantly gay public spaces; also, how dichotomizations of urban versus rural, and local versus cosmopolitan are highlighted as key ingredients of class differentiations.
I will primarily address the notion of class as an analytical category, especially in regard to the socio-economical context of Serbian society. This rough overview of changes in class relations in the past forty years should provide a broader background for the local specifics of class understanding. Sociologist Mladen Lazić proposes four theoretical frameworks for a socio-historical analysis of the class: global context of the production of social practices, socio-historical context, specific historical context in which a particular society is reproduced, and a framework of individual’s everyday life within a specific social group or class (2011: 29). It is the last theoretical framework that I would primarily like to engage within my research. Lazić highlights that on this analytical plain, borders between classes appear to be provisional and porous, while the class structure is presented as a plexus of continuous hierarchies which are only partially overlapping, and within which an individual can occupy different hierarchical positions, in regard to different resources at his disposal (family status, earnings, education, political power, reputation or social, economic, or cultural capital) (Ibid.: 34). As I will show later, this framework provides for certain forms of capital (such as cultural capital) to have almost an autonomous role in one’s definition of class belonging.
It is important to take into consideration the context of, so called, post-socialist transition in Yugoslavia/Serbia, in order to understand its current class configuration. Lazić distinguishes three important socio-historical frameworks in regard to that historical reality: inequalities in late socialism, period of blocked transformation (period of Milošević’s rule, from 1989 until 2000) and the stabilization of new class relations (after the fall of Milošević in
October 2000). The period of late socialism in Yugoslavia was marked by a policy of self-management companies, with more autonomy over the self-management (necessary for the quasi-market economy), and led to domination of certain companies over others when it came to access to the resources, growth of income and the economic standard among employees, but also the differentiation in income between management, specialists, and workers (Ibid.: 150). The period of blocked transformation has been marked by a crisis that came after the breakdown of Socialism and the distinctive prolongation of its breakdown in Serbia. This era was characterized by the transformation of monopoly over social reproduction into the political and economic domination within the new plural political order, in the conditions of mass nationalistic mobilization and civil war (Ibid.: 151). Finally, the period of accelerated privatization of the former public economic sector, after the fall of Milošević’s regime, has been marked by stabilization of the class relations and decline of general poverty. However, a big portion of the citizens is still in a very meager material position, while inequality has increased (Ibid: 153).
Even a glance at the socio-historical developments within class structure in Serbia provided by Lazić, makes it clear that during the period of transition, not a lot has changed in the predicament of Serbia’s citizens, except for the growing inequality. Now, it is crucial to investigate how citizens of Serbia are currently defining middle class, which in the context of this research is the most relevant, and more importantly, what it means to be middle class, and what sustains its central importance. Also, it is important to see how class differentiations align with other modes of social positioning, especially along the lines of urban/rural dichotomy. Ethnographic studies that deal with citizens’ understanding of social status and class differentiation provide a comprehensive explanation. In the study on discourse of social stratification in contemporary Serbia, Ivana Spasić noted that most of her interlocutors define the class position according to the material criteria, and they mostly position themselves within the middle class, marking that this category usually depends on finances, social and family connections, or in layman’s terms: having more money than those who have nothing, but still having less than the elite (Spasić, 2013: 45). Social connections, or the social capital has been primarily marked as the substitution for other types of capital, especially cultural. Cultural capital, on the other hand, has won a special place within the status distinction. Some of her interlocutors have, while talking about their status, made clear distinction between two types of criteria: the material one (due to its visible quality, but mostly marked illegitimate by interlocutors, as the educational accomplishments should be posed as the main criteria of one’s
social status) and cultural/educational (considered as a legitimate marker of one’s social position) (Ibid.: 48).
At the same time, the notion of urbanity comes up as the important symbolical resource, and a form of distinction. It is, as Spasić notes, an important pillar of discursive identity strategies. Among the interlocutors, the notion of urbanity has been brought up spontaneously, while giving answers to other questions: this marks the notion of urbanity symbolically important in mapping out the social space, and positioning oneself within it (Ibid.: 67-8). “The very term Urban is strongly marked in Serbian language, carrying distinctive cultural and social implications,” observes Spasić. Another term for urbanity (urbanost), she notes, is ‘asphalt’, as ‘coming from asphalt’ means being born in the city, preferably to ‘urban’ parents, and being involved with some of the non-agricultural professions, preferably for several generations. She also reminds us on the opposition, mentioned by the historian Dubravka Stojanović, between urban and rural as deeply situated within the reality of Serbian society, representing the opposition between amorphous and unplanned ‘oriental’ and progressive and efficacious ‘West’ (Ibid.: 70). In other terms, ‘asphalt’ and ‘cobble’16 are
strong allies in fight against the ‘peasant mud’. Here, mud bears a strong image of backwardness, lack of urban progress and infrastructure, as well as hardship of a peasant’s life. Not only that it refers to the physical state of the surroundings, but also a habitus attached to it, which is usually characterized by inability to adapt to fast-paced changes of urbanity. What is more important, the term urbanity plays an important role in strategies which people use while attempting to neutrally describe the state of Serbian society, but through its use, they also performatively form the desired position in that social setting (Ibid.: 72).
However, the dominance of the ‘urban model’ is not entirely the product of post-socialist transition. In his study of the concept of civilization in a Serbian town, Mattijs van de Port noticed that right after the World War II, Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Party expressed the desire for rapid modernization of Yugoslavia, in which context, the agriculture was a ‘loser’ and the rural population was a symbol of mentality and lifestyle that the Socialist Yugoslavia needed to leave behind (1998: 46). Industry was on the high rise, and Yugoslavia, not quite fitting into the picture of the Soviet Bloc to which it officially turned its back, needed to establish its modernized image and position in the post-war World. In short, mud gave way to asphalt as a symbol of a modernized nation, but with a rather democratized face, since
16 In Serbian, asfalt and kaldrma (cobble) are both used to mark the city life, with kaldrma being a more archaic
modernization, education, and progress were supposed to be more accessible to a wider range of Yugoslavia’s inhabitants. What he found within the context of his research of Novi Sad and its inhabitants’ aspirations for a distinguished, ‘cultured’ and civilized life, he summarized in the phrase fini ljudi (nice people). In their attempt to position themselves as the progressive and civilized part of the society, they also reached out for the dichotomization of Occident versus Orient, Tito’s Yugoslavia versus Soviet Eastern Bloc… In short, they aligned themselves with the city, Europe, and Austro-Hungarian legacy, while denouncing the village, Balkans and the Orient, and the dominant imagery of Soviet-style socialism (Ibid.: 41). Reflecting at my own upbringing and the culture codes that my parents attempted to implement to my brother and me, I cannot do anything but confirm that every factor mentioned here perfectly applied to our family. My brother and I were the first generation to be born in the city, nevertheless it was made perfectly clear to us that, if we want to succeed in life, we need to focus on the education and ‘self-improvement’, otherwise, the ‘peasant’s pick’ and the village chores were always mentioned as a threat of a dark destiny awaiting us, should we fail to become ‘proper citizens’.
In this process of positioning the nation within the discursive framework of progress and civilizational status, it is impossible to avoid the dichotomization issues that are stemming from ethnic and national conflicts that have been plaguing the region over the course of the twentieth century. This issue is highly relevant for this study because of the deeply rooted gender models through which the national belonging in Balkan cultures comes to be understood. Namely, the symbolic bearer of the nation is always a man, and it is understood that he is a heterosexual: a father, a protector, and a safeguard of nation’s reproduction (Žarkov, 2007). On the other hand, woman is seen as a symbolic representation of territory – a passive object which needs to be conquered and protected, and its importance lies with the physical means of nation’s reproduction, and together with a gay man, it is perceived as ‘the other’ from the masculine perspective (Ibid.: 162-165).17 Within such rigid understanding of gender roles
in the national context, a figure of a homosexual man becomes a rather disruptive element. I have often recognized a clear intent to exclude gay (and generally queer) identities from the national context, i.e. local belonging. I still remember passing by an ultra-nationalist protest and bumping into a huge banner saying “Faggots, leave and go to Brussels!”18 Considering the
17 In addition, Serbia is in a rather undesirable position when it comes to the domestic violence: statistics say
that every second women in Serbia experiences some form of domestic violence throughout her life. Source:
http://www.blic.rs/vesti/drustvo/potresna-statistika-svaka-druga-zena-u-srbiji-ima-iskustvo-sa-nasiljem-u-porodici/dw40jzj. Viewed on: 07th June 2017.
