Conclusion: Against the Burdens of the Unspoken

Abstract

From January to June 2019, I occasionally abandoned writing to take part in protests against the increasingly oligarchic regime of Aleksandar Vučić that in ebbs and flows spread across Serbia. Given that the circumstances seemed eerily similar to (and in many respects even worse than) those from the late 1990s, I looked again for the whistle that I used 20 years earlier, when as a high school student, I took to the streets, joining many of those who impatiently awaited the fall of Slobodan Milošević. And while I was taken aback by the extent to which these demonstrations resembled each other, bringing together ideologically disparate and often incompatible threads that could hardly herald any longer period of institutional order, one slogan was strikingly new: “Vučić is a faggot!” (Vučiću, pederu). That the crowd would, among more substantial political demands, intermittently refer to the president of Serbia by calling him a “faggot” pointed, I thought, both to the ever more prominent presence of homosexuality in public life and to the thickness of homophobic layers that more than three decades of activist engagement managed only to graze. Casting my eyes down in embarrassment, I—that hated faggot, an imperceptible intruder—plodded along as I shared the pavement with hundreds of those impoverished, disappointed, and exhausted by the perennial postponement of better futures.