Lyle told me afterwards that he hadn’t just dealt with the stigma of coming out as gay and a sex worker, but coming out as HIV positive as well, something he’d decided to do recently in a YouTube video. He had got into sex work when he was still at school and working in a supermarket for €3.50 an hour. At the same time, he was discovering the excitement of travelling on his own, as well as his sexuality – rites of passage for any teenager. ‘I was earning less money and spending more,’ he recalled, ‘and I remembered this one time that I’d been in a chatbox online when I was younger and guys were offering me money for sex. I would say no because I was afraid of STDs, or afraid that they would kidnap me or something, but now I was older, eighteen, I thought I should give it a try, and when I did, I really liked it. I expected that I had to take my clothes off, have sex, get my money and then leave, but my first time couldn’t have been more different. My client was even more nervous than I was. He shared his life story. How he had been struggling with his homosexuality in rural Belgium for decades and how this was one of the few ways for him to be able to experience intimacy.’
The decision to become an activist came more easily than the decision to be a sex worker for Lyle. Despite being born in the Netherlands, Lyle moved with his parents to Belgium for ten years, where he joined the Belgian Green Party when he was just fifteen. He later got involved with high school politics, eventually chairing the student union at eighteen. ‘While I had that position I started doing sex work, and I was enjoying what I was doing, giving nice moments to my clients,’ he remembered, ‘but I couldn’t speak honestly about it. I had to cover it up, and I found that uncomfortable.’ Around this time, Lyle’s parents had begun to figure out what he was doing. ‘My mum, she is a sensitive woman. I was working late hours and had weird excuses for how I earned the money I all of a sudden had. She put it all together and it hurt her initially, but she always told me she loved me and never made me try to change my mind or stop.’ Lyle said his mum’s open attitude helped him to make a decision: in the summer holidays, after a year of being president of his student union, he wrote a blog post in which he came out as a gay sex worker. He said the news became a big story in Belgium, and particularly in Bilzen, the sleepy town he was living in. ‘I was seen as this good student with good grades and involved in politics, and then this person turned out to be a sex worker,’ Lyle explained.
He eventually decided to relocate to Amsterdam because he’d visited it with his mum and seen all of the cultures, the freedom, the LGBTQ+ people. ‘It was so different from where I came from – I came from a small countryside city where diversity was not the norm. In Amsterdam I fitted in right away.’ Continuing his sex work, Lyle quickly became involved with launching PROUD Netherlands, a union for sex workers, and even acted as their spokesperson for a while. The PROUD office, which sat beneath the stunning eight-hundred-year-old church Oude Kerk, was where I’d interviewed Hella and her friend the previous year, and now, as we boarded our Pride P&G292 sex worker boat, we were handed red umbrellas with the word PROUD printed onto them. The red umbrella was the union’s logo – a symbol of shelter, but also inclusion – and the idea was that we’d open the umbrellas and spin them around at some point during ‘Lady Marmalade’, to do a bit of PR for the PROUD brand, which supported its members through crises like extortion from brothel owners, police harassment and having next to no workers’ rights, as I had found out on my last trip.
The boat set off at around midday, and the moment it started moving I became extremely conscious of the fact that I wouldn’t be able to get off for four hours. As we entered a kind of queue where the boats were lining up to start the actual parade, we practised the dance routine one last time without Sharon, who had left for another appointment. We poured glasses of box wine and filled our stomachs with catered sandwiches. I didn’t ask anybody what kind of sex work they did, but no one minded telling me as I chatted to them. Some of the guys worked in boys’ clubs – closed establishments where punters could come in, have a drink and take a guy upstairs, they explained – others were window prostitutes. There was a girl who did webcam sex, a straight porn actor, and Lyle was an escort who went to his clients directly. He later told me he’d seldom been in a space full of sex workers in such diverse areas; often they were segregated along class lines. The boat itself was decorated like a window brothel, or at least that was the idea – along each side there were windows which were, inconveniently, too tall to pass under the canal bridges, meaning we had to collapse them every time we went through one or else the boat would be destroyed. As we approached the first bridge, the crowds along the water were beginning to thicken: families waving rainbow flags, drinking from plastic cups. Some onlookers stared, others didn’t, and I couldn’t decide which I found more offensive.
We assumed our positions.
‘Where’s all my soul sistas? / Lemme hear ya’ll flow, sistas.’
We glided through the waterways seamlessly, but the routine was a mess. No one could remember what Sharon had taught us, and the more we drank the more disbanded we became. The sun was glaring down on the entire event, and as we sweated through the nineteenth chorus the crowds seemed to be giving us an A for effort. People were cheering, throwing flowers, raising their glasses to us. And if they weren’t, we didn’t care because we were too drunk on warm box wine and adrenaline and pride. I wasn’t a sex worker but I still felt emancipated as a queer person, openly dancing in front of all those people, and my face hurt from laughing as Foxy and Hella rubbed their fingers together and pretended to solicit from the boat, poking fun at the ridiculousness of the song playing.
By the time we had heard Lil’ Kim’s voice for what must have been the fortieth time, the boat had descended into a sort of Bacchanalian orgy – most of the boys had taken their shirts off and were kissing. I too had taken my shirt off to reveal my bra, and didn’t really think about it until later when my Dutch aunt sent me a clip from the TV coverage with a message saying: ‘Is this you?’
The boat was strewn with empty cups and fag butts and clothing. Everybody was embracing. Ricardo and I swapped numbers so that we could stay in touch. It felt as if something magical had happened, but we’d probably need a few days to process just what that was.
I called Lyle later in the week to ask him how he thought it had gone. He said he was happy with the amount the Pride organization mentioned our boat in the media, something he took to be a sign of their support for the project. Having gauged the crowds’ reactions after the fact, he felt that we’d surprised a few people by being there, another good thing ‘because that’s when change happens, when the people with the least familiarity of sex work see you’. And most importantly, being there with his community, being open, had changed something for him on a personal level.
‘You saw it yourself – everyone was cheering and happy and there wasn’t that much difference between our boat and all the other boats on show to the world. We’re part of that LGBT community just as anyone else, doing a job just as anyone else,’ he said excitedly, explaining how the day proved that, even in Amsterdam, for all its progressiveness, Pride was vitally necessary for certain groups of people, and how even for him, the most out and proud sex worker there was, it gave him an unprecedented feeling of self-worth.
‘The canal parade is a moment of Pride and to have sex work there, portrayed like that, as something that is joyous?’ he concluded. ‘That’s just something you never see.’
I travelled to Belgrade with Emily in mid-September. In England, summer was bowing out. Belgrade, like Amsterdam, promised thirty-degree heat, a much more appealing prospect than a Berlin-style washout. Less promising was the idea of having hundreds of protesters shout ‘death to homosexuals’ at us, as had happened at Serbian Pride in 2010, part of the reason Belgrade Pride is still cordoned off from the rest of the city by armed police. I looked at Emily sleeping angelically next to me on the plane and worried about her safety. I thought about how she wasn’t out to her parents,
meaning that if anything did happen to her, I would have to explain somehow why she was: 1) in Belgrade, 2) in Belgrade with me, and 3) at Belgrade Pride. My neuroticism could only mean one thing: that I was completely falling in love with her.
In 2017, a study revealed that 59 per cent of people in Serbia think that homosexuality is a disease, so it was easy to understand why Pride hadn’t been as big there as it had been in Berlin and Amsterdam. LGBTQ+ activists thought that after the fall of the war criminal President Slobodan Miloševi´c’s regime in 2000, things in the country might become more liberal and Pride more accepted. But the 2001 event, the country’s first Pride, was attacked by various right-wing groups.
According to Goran Mileti´c, probably the most well-known voice in Belgrade on LGBTQ+ rights, a gay Serbian activist and Director for Europe at the Swedish not-for-profit organization Civil Rights Defenders (who now co-fund Belgrade Pride), there was just no desire to have a Pride in 2002 after the 2001 attack, and the Serbian government banned the event anyway. Though activists thought about organizing another Pride in 2003, they were deterred by the shooting of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić by a member of the Serbian mafia. As Goran put it: ‘If you see there is a force that can kill the prime minister, what can you as gay or lesbian expect?’
2003 to 2009 became a period of fighting for legal wins, as far as the LGBTQ+ community in Serbia were concerned. In 2005, they didn’t get a Pride, but they did get a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, and another in higher education (although this law has never actually successfully been used in court). In 2009, there was what Goran described as a ‘huge scandal’ when an umbrella anti-discrimination law was withdrawn by the government just hours before its adoption, at the behest of some Serbian Orthodox priests. ‘The Church is that powerful, and the only reason for the withdrawal of law is sexual orientation,’ Goran explained. ‘But for the first time, we got some kind of sympathy from the public about it, and some media were on our side. For twenty-five days, there was a huge campaign, and eventually parliament adopted the law. We thought, “Aha! We have some sympathy, this is the time to try Pride again.”’ Once again, however, the government banned Pride (by changing the location to an area that would have been unsafe, according to activists). A small number of Serbs held their own Prides in the spirit of funerals, laying down flowers in political protest, as you would if someone had died, as if mourning the broken promise of democracy.
When Pride did eventually happen, in 2010, the security level was understandably high. Thousands of police were deployed to protect the parade-goers. ‘Hooligans’, as they say in Belgrade, moved to the police front lines and threw petrol bombs, rocks and bottles – mostly at police, as they couldn’t get near the parade. Frustrated by this, the mob then proceeded to vandalize the city in a statement to the authorities that Pride should not be permitted. They torched cars and trashed government buildings. The government tried to pass this off as general hooliganism, with the Mayor of Belgrade, Dragan Đilas, telling the press at the time: ‘What’s going on now has nothing to do with the Pride parade. Unfortunately there are always people who will use every opportunity to destroy their own city. Fortunately no lives were lost – this is the most important thing.’ Around forty police were injured and sixty people arrested.
‘I was in the media team, monitoring fascist forums and websites, where people were brainstorming how they wanted to attack the Pride,’ Aleksandar, one of the volunteers in 2010, told me. ‘They were planning what kind of weapons to use, where they wanted to store rocks to slingshot. At the Pride we were so disconnected from what was happening, we didn’t know anything, but the city was burning. The police interrupted the party before it even started, saying they have to evacuate us.’
All Pride events were cancelled by the government in 2011 and 2012, until 2013, when a guerrilla Pride was planned. Organizer Adam Puskar explained that, after the official ban when the prime minister made the statement on prime time news that he would not stand for Pride, a group of LGBTQ+ people and their friends went to the main office building of the government, inviting left-wing media to report. ‘In that moment a police cordon surrounded us, so anyone who wants to join the celebration, they cannot come. Police say they will arrest all of us ’cause we are doing something against the law.
‘We tell them we are not marching on the day of the ban, as the official ban was for tomorrow, so we use a hole in the law and march,’ Adam told me over Skype, before I arrived in Serbia. ‘A lot of the media called this Stonewall for Eastern Europe, because we don’t want to be funny, smiling people on the streets; we want to send a political message that we exist, that we won’t have pressure on us any more.’
By 2014, under Prime Minister Aleksandar Vuić – a former nationalist who had pivoted to become the main champion for Serbia’s bid to join the EU – Pride was finally permitted. The night before, protesters gathered in Belgrade’s main square, demanding the protection of family values and the banning of Pride. In a VICE Serbia video, they can be seen sharing sentiments like, ‘Pride is a stab in the heart with the Serbian flag.’ But Pride went ahead, though Vuić himself was conspicuously absent, despite endorsing the event. About 1,000 people showed up to join the parade, among 7,000 armed police, according to Goran. Despite a few anti-gay protesters, there were no incidents. It was the same for the 2015 and 2016 parades, which Goran claimed had 6,300 and then 4,500 police in attendance. The Pride we were attending was set to have the lowest police turnout ever – with 2,000 officers. I wasn’t sure if that made us, the people going to Pride, more or less safe.
As the plane touched down in Belgrade, I kissed Emily to wake her up. ‘You can’t do that here,’ she said, opening her eyes. I was confused for a second and then remembered where I was.
‘Legislation and the things you have on paper in Serbia might seem wonderful and amazing but the reality is totally different,’ Adam had warned me, although I didn’t think it did look that amazing. ‘There is no implementation of all those things. There is one picture in the media and another in real life. You will see.’
Belgrade is a delightful city. It has the relaxed atmosphere of European cafe culture with none of the pomp of Paris or Rome or Berlin. It’s slightly dilapidated – some of the buildings are still bombed out from the Yugoslav Wars of the nineties – and you can smoke in restaurants, which is so popular that the no-smoking areas often have the only empty tables, where no one is eating. There are few tourists and people are incredibly friendly, like our Airbnb host who greeted us with Turkish coffee and illustrated an old map of the city with sights we might be interested in. We pretended the reason for the trip was just a cultural visit. Two gal pals on a city break.
The Pride Belgrade calendar had a few events listed for each day of the week-long festivities: panel discussions on living with HIV, film screenings of camp classics like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. After putting our stuff down, we decided to check them out, and headed to a venue called KC Grad, a bar down by the Sava river that held monthly RuPaul’s Drag Race screenings (yes, even in Serbia) and other queer cultural events that might not find a home elsewhere in the city. I was supposed to be doing a talk for VICE Serbia on gender neutrality (a concept one Serb described as ‘first-world problems’ in the ensuing Q&A) but my main reason for being there was to catch Ines, a trans rights activist who I hoped could tell me about life for LGBTQ+ people in Serbia.
In person, Ines was formidable. She was dressed in long, black lace Gothic clothing, with a dramatic side fringe. She was with her boyfriend, a big masc Swedish man whom she jokingly described as ‘her bodyguard’. As we sat down to talk she brushed aside my precursory line of questioning – ‘So are you from Belgrade originally?’ – with, ‘First, let’s talk about intersectionality.’
The idea of the meeting was for Ines to give me some background on the state of affairs for trans people in the country, but I would learn hers was a very unique experience. Ines was from th
e southern part of Serbia, a city called Novi Pazar, which was the only Muslim-majority town in the country, in the region of Sandžak: ‘That means I have a specific religious and ethnic background – my parents are belonging to an ethnic minority in Serbia called Bosniaks, which are a Muslim ethnic group on the territory of Balkan countries,’ she explained. This brought specific dynamics when it came to being trans, she said. Her local community, when she was growing up, was highly conservative with a lot of religious fundamentalist groups. ‘If you google my hometown you will see the political rhetoric of independence, because they do not want to be a part of an orthodox country.’
According to Ines, her childhood was ‘just terrible’, as was probably to be expected. ‘I have always known that I am a trans woman, although in childhood you do not have that identity category of “I am trans”,’ she began. ‘I just knew that I am a girl. I liked everything that a little girl is supposed to like. It can be influenced by the media or whatever – what is femininity and what is not is a different conversation – but in elementary school it was difficult to express myself. When I was in first grade I would always take a towel to school and put it on my head and pretend that is my hair! The other pupils would tease me and my parents were really angry, like, “If you take that fucking towel once again!” But I was only being myself.’
Queer Intentions Page 13
