Abstract
Towards the end of the 1980s, Ljubljana, the hub of Yugoslav new social movements, was teeming with energy. After the death of its charismatic lifelong leader Josip Broz Tito, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia slowly became a shell purged of political substance: decades of its intricate experiments with state decentralisation, its ever more vocal critics, and tectonic geopolitical shifts sharpened the rift between official declarations and social reality to breaking points. The Party’s “grip” on the country’s politics, already appreciably weakened, reached its nadir, filling that extraordinary period with peaceniks, punkers, feminists, environmentalists, anti-psychiatry activists, social thinkers, new agers, avant-garde artists, gays, and—a bit more surreptitiously—lesbians.
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Notes
- 1.
Such a period was at least partially enabled by “a crucial generational shift: whereas in 1982, 58 per cent of the members of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia participated in the People’s Liberation Struggle, in 1986 only 24 per cent belonged to the partisan generation” (Spaskovska, as cited in Pulig 2017, online; Spaskovska 2017).
- 2.
Probably the most interesting in this regard was the fortnightly magazine Start, read “by all, from truck drivers to PhD holders” (see more in Golubović 2018).
- 3.
More about the Ljubljana Festival of Gay and Lesbian Film in Kajinić (2016). For example, the opening of the first Magnus Film Festival (24 April 1984) was accompanied by the second issue of the magazine Viks entitled Homosexuality and Culture and edited by a group of gays and lesbians active at ŠKUC. It brought the article “Pink Love under the Red Stars: Homosexuality under Real Socialism” (“Roza ljubezen pod rdečimi zvezdami: homoseksualizem pod realnim socializmom”, in which an anonymous author criticises the status of homosexuality in both Western liberal democracies and socialist countries (Dota 2018)).
- 4.
That a man stops by a feminist organisation with the view of proposing a joint initiative should not be seen as representative of the 1980s subcultural “scene” in Ljubljana in which Aldo Ivančić was more of an exception. In her account of the first Magnus Festival, the journalist Vedrana Grisogono (1984, p. 25) wrote: “Another thing should be mentioned: the homosexual subculture excludes women in every respect; there was no mention of the relationship between homosexuals and women because, it seems, that is not important for them. Women are not an issue for homosexuals, the issue is how to find a male partner”.
- 5.
Nataša Sukič (as cited in Kuhar 2008, online) says that this was not such a big problem for Slovenian feminists: “Certain members of Lilith, however, did have difficulties with including Lilith in ILGA. And those were precisely the women who encountered an inner dilemma, whether they were lesbians or not. During the debate at that time, fear was expressed that the public would set the equation between feminism and lesbianism. Based on this, we concluded that it would be smart to separate things, define them more and send messages separately to the public. Or, if need be, together”. Moreover, Mojca Dobnikar, one of the founders of Lilith, says that lesbians were welcome, but also felt frustrated with certain topics which were not so much of their interest (pregnancy, abortion, parenthood, etc.) (Velikonja and Greif 2012).
- 6.
The International Lesbian Information Service Conference started within ILGA in 1980 with the aim to encourage international lesbian mobilisation. It decided to separate from ILGA before the 1981 Turin ILGA conference and operated until (around) 1998.
- 7.
On 30 October 1987 Mladina published a supplement entitled We Love Women (Ljubimo ženske) which brought two texts that approached (women’s) homosexuality from the anthropological and psychological perspectives: the translation of the Radicalesbians’ manifesto “The Woman Identified Woman”, an analysis of major stereotypes against lesbians, a chapter from the book Our Bodies Ourselves (originally published in 1970), as well as the basic information about Lesbian Lilith, including their contact details.
- 8.
During the discussion in which LL was introduced, Lepa Mlađenović (as cited in Tratnik and Segan 1995, p. 29) stated: “I would like to say a few words as a representative of women from Belgrade. When we saw the supplement in Mladina , which we did not know was being prepared, we were very impressed. Of course, the coming into existence of the first lesbian group in Yugoslavia for us is a historic event which we celebrated … In our Belgrade group 30 per cent are lesbian women … we have not thought about publicly declaring ourselves as a lesbian subgroup or as individuals. What some of us [in Belgrade] dreamed of and wished for was realised by our comrades from Ljubljana and we were really impressed. We do not completely agree with some texts, but that is not important. Here I want, as a representative of Belgrade women, to entirely support LL and highlight the importance of that event”.
- 9.
The Mladina supplement Pogledi that brought a series of texts about lesbian activism was at the time edited by Marcel Štefančič. All lesbian contributors used their names only, without revealing their surnames. As Nataša Sukič (as cited in Kuhar 2008, online) remembers: “I was finally confronted with this question by Nataša Velikonja in the second phase of Lilith’s work, when she became editor of lesbian and gay studies in the Journal for Critical Science (Časopis za kritiko znanosti). She told me it would be time to finally sign my name. Only then did it become clear to me that it was completely absurd to do all this activism, and at the same time to hide with pseudonyms”.
- 10.
- 11.
The invitation to Enschede, participation in the gatherings of ILGA and ILIS, as well as cooperation with COC Amsterdam (operating since 1946) were a “sign of the growing integration of the Yugoslav feminist and lesbian movement into a globalising movement” (Lóránd 2018, p. 180).
- 12.
For a comparative analysis of hippie and punk subcultures in Slovenia, see Tomc (2010).
- 13.
At the time of the Ljubljana meeting, only Slovenian legislation recognised marital rape as a criminal offence (since 1977).
- 14.
These are the terms used by feminist activists themselves and they are here translated literally.
- 15.
The statement also highlighted that the participants opposed any sort of “demographic policies” (populaciona politika) and were instead in favour of the establishment of women’s health centres so that all women could have access to their reproductive rights and decide whether they are interested in giving birth. As we will see below, the “demographic policies” of procreation would, only a few years after the Ljubljana statement, become one of the major spheres of concern of the ethno-nationalist regimes in Croatia and Serbia.
- 16.
This lecture was first given on 6 May 1987 at the Student Cultural Centre (Studentski kulturni centar) in Belgrade, where the above-mentioned group Woman and Society had its meetings. An extract of the lecture is available here: http://gay-serbia.com/teorija/2006/06-09-24-uvod-u-lezbijsku-knjizevnost/index.jsp?aid=2463
- 17.
Due to a lack of proper space, however, the activists later squatted premises that belonged to the city of Zagreb. In order to secure housing, they registered their organisation under the name Women’s Help Now (Ženska pomoć sada). In the end of 1990, this organisation established the first shelter in Eastern Europe for women and children victims of domestic violence. The shelter was legalised only in December 2000 and it still operates today (Miškovska Kajevska 2017).
- 18.
Even 25 years later, some of the earliest lesbian activists were still reluctant to talk about their engagement. When Antonela Marušić (2014a, b) tried to contact them for her historical overview of Croatian lesbian activism, they did not agree to an interview or to their names and surnames being published.
- 19.
The coordinator of Lila Initiative, Nataša (as cited in Dobrović and Bosanac 2007, p. 216), says that this brochure was sent to the “love magazines” as a response to those ads in which women were looking for women. After this, both letters and new potential members started coming from provincial areas of Croatia (Split, Kutina, Varaždin, Vukovar, etc.).
- 20.
The only person who appeared in public (only with her name) was Nataša, the coordinator of the group, who gave an interview to the journalist Mirela Kruhak in 1989. Kruhak asks Nataša: “Do you yourself have a lesbian experience?”, to which Nataša replies “Yes, one, it happened a lot of time ago, but it strongly influenced my life” (document available in I.L., 2014).
- 21.
This is a deliberate non-standard spelling of the word women, used mostly by radical feminists to draw attention to the oppression of women and avoid the ending “-men”.
- 22.
At the time of their meeting, Marija was a 41-year-old, recently divorced, woman with three children. She worked as a typist for the Croatian daily Vjesnik.
- 23.
In an interview she gave in 1996 to Rene Bakalović (1996, p. 20) Marija says: “When I for the first time loudly stated ‘I am lesbian’, the audience greeted me with ovations. It was at a public forum organised by feminists Slavenka Drakulić, Rada Iveković and others. There was also an actress from Belgrade Rada Đuričin who read excerpts from Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Zagreb newspapers did not want to write about this, but those in Belgrade did. In their issue dedicated to 8 March, they published a big interview with me. After that I received 70 letters”.
- 24.
Marija (as cited in Olga 1982, p. 18) wrote to Olga: “We are a socialist country and that is fine. But this primitive society in which I live has forgotten that I too, as well as other lesbians, build this socialism”. During their Zagreb meeting, Olga and Marija tried to establish an “ongoing support group” with a few other lesbian women who turned out to be “overwhelmed with the fear of consequences of coming out or even affiliating with open lesbians” (Olga 1982, p. 13), so the initiative never materialised. In 1996, Marija Buretić-Bogović (1996) published a book Violets and a Whip: Confession of a Woman Interested in Women (Ljubičice i bič: Ispovijed žene sklone ženama) in which she wrote about the pleasures and the difficulties of her lesbian experience. Possibly due to Marija’s disappointment with the way in which women and lesbians were treated during the Yugoslav socialism and given the atmosphere in which it was published, the book also exposes Marija’s “nationalist rigidity” and her approval of Ustaša ideology (Janković 2013, online).
- 25.
- 26.
The programme also had a “philosopher on duty” (dežurna filozofkinja). The permissive atmosphere of the 1980s is visible from the first listeners’ question: “when will communism break down?” (kad će propast komunizam) (Toni Marošević as cited in Hrvatska televizija 2013, online).
- 27.
The changes of the broader political landscape of Eastern Europe stimulated by the fall of the Berlin Wall also had their resonances in the weakening Yugoslavia. In the words of Sonja Drljević (as cited in Dobnikar and Pamuković 2009, p. 75): “Everyone’s expecting capitalism in which everyone will be a capitalist. I’ve never seen such a country. Certainly women will be second-class citizens. How bad will it get if this equality is so bad now under Communists, who are at least in principle committed to women’s rights?”
- 28.
In the case of Serbia, the problem was exacerbated by the birth rate disparities between Vojvodina and Central Serbia, on the one hand, and Kosovo, on the other. The question of imbalance in population reproduction was raised by the Serbian regime towards the end of the 1980s as the government pointed to very low birth rates in its northern province (1.8 per cent) and very high in its southern province (Kosovo), with its Albanian majority. The Serbian demographer and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Miloš Macura (as cited in Shiffman et al. 2002) raised public awareness about the issue in an article published in Politika: “The [Albanian] birth rate must be limited for the benefit of women, the family, and the local community in Kosovo, and the interests of relations in Serbia and Yugoslavia. I say this because, unfortunately, the contrast between high and low birth rates is beginning to make an impact on the political and ethnic levels, not only because of the emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo, but also because the great demographic pressures are beginning to extinguish the Serbian and Montenegrin population [there]”.
- 29.
A political organisation called Women’s Party (Ženska stranka) already existed in the Serbian/Yugoslav political context. The first one was founded in 1927 and operated until January 1929 (Božinović 1996).
- 30.
For example, a diverging opinion was voiced by the Belgrade Women’s Lobby (Beogradski ženski loby, as cited in Mlađenović and Hughes 2001, p. 255), an ad hoc initiative launched by some members of the SOS Helpline: “We ask that the units of the Federal Army unconditionally withdraw to their barracks. The youth did not go to serve in the military in order to impede the separation of any ethnic group from Yugoslavia. A Yugoslavia maintained by force is useless to everyone”.
- 31.
However, lesbianity does not appear in the letter sent by the Student Cultural Centre to various “work organisations” (companies) in Belgrade inviting them to financially support the event of “huge social importance” (document available in Dobnikar and Pamuković 2009, p. 56).
- 32.
The Ten-Day War was an armed conflict between the Slovenian Territorial Defence and the Yugoslav People’s Army that took place between 27 June 1991 and 7 July 1991, marking the beginning of the Yugoslav wars.
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Bilić, B. (2020). Coming Out: Announcing Lesbianity in Yugoslavia. In: Trauma, Violence, and Lesbian Agency in Croatia and Serbia . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22960-3_2
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