Ines began her activism when she was just fifteen, getting involved with a human rights organization in her home city – the only human rights organization in her home city, and one that had never touched on LGBTQ+ issues. They agreed to let her start a series of workshops on LGBTQ+ rights.
‘Did anyone go to your workshops in Novi Pazar?’ I asked.
She lit a cigarette. ‘Honey, it is 2017 and I am still the only public trans person from my hometown; it is 120,000 person big. But there is always a hipster community everywhere and they are willing to listen to everything related to LGBTQ+ rights, even if they’re not LGBTQ+.’
Ines’s main priority at this time was to get as far away from Novi Pazar as possible: ‘My strategy for saving my own life was to study, to be a good student and get a foreign scholarship or internship.’ Ines left Serbia for the first time when she was eighteen after getting a scholarship for undergraduate studies in sociology at the American University in Istanbul, a city where she said virtually everyone assumed trans people were sex workers, and she would be offered money for sex on the bus to classes, ‘even when I was wearing bad clothes like a sweatshirt’. She did her exchange studies in London, and after university landed a paid internship in Stockholm, followed by a master’s in Lund, Sweden, where she was living when I met her, researching the forced sterilization of trans people, and where she said she felt safe. It was also where she met ‘the bodyguard’. She planned to stay there for the immediate future, to do a PhD and to conduct her gender confirmation surgery, although she told me there was a long waiting list. In Sweden, gender confirmation surgery was free (hence the long wait), whereas in Serbia, only 65 per cent was paid for by the state.
The reason Ines left her hometown, and part of the reason she wouldn’t go back, was that she had become a figure of hate in local newspapers. The discrimination she faced as a teenager had led to days of crying in her bedroom, until the only thing she felt she could do was the opposite of hiding away. On one transgender awareness day, she walked down the street alone with a blue, pink and white trans Pride flag. People didn’t really know what it was, but her presence alone garnered the wrong kind of press.
‘The title of the first page of newspapers was “First Tranny Muslim in Serbia” – people react to that. I received death threats.’ It wasn’t usually out-and-out violence she suffered, though, she said: ‘It was more like middle-aged women spitting on me in the street and shouting, “You’re a disgrace to your family, how can you do that, walking in those clothes?” – those types of things.’
‘What do your parents think?’ I asked, Ines’s openness making me feel entirely at ease with her.
‘My parents were not OK from the very beginning, but now I have contact with both of them. My father came to Sweden three months ago and he bought me a dress. He thinks I dress like a slut so he wanted me to wear something a bit more decent. He said, “OK, you can be trans but at least be a lady.”’
As we laughed, I got the sense that Ines’s humour was probably her best weapon. She must have sensed I was thinking this because she stopped laughing and admitted that she had found the incident tough. ‘I’m generally speaking about things in a happy manner because I’m that kind of person, but all of these things are emotional.’ Then she straightened up. ‘Regarding my mother, we just talk via the phone because it’s not safe for me to go to my hometown now. I haven’t been back for two years.’
‘What about Belgrade? Do you feel safe here?’
‘Not really, but I don’t seem to have a problem on the street this time. Maybe because of the boyfriend and the fact he looks like a lumberjack. Communicating with people in the pharmacy or the store, I’m still always so concerned: how should I stand that they do not notice me, what should I do with my voice, those kinds of things. I was in Belgrade a few years ago, when I had come from Turkey. I got off the plane and I was in the airport waiting for my friend. I saw her and I waved and called, “Oh my God! Hi!” and a guy walked straight up to me and punched me in the face. I was bleeding on the floor.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. We were all silent for a moment, to acknowledge how horrific this was.
‘How long have you been with the bodyguard?’ I asked, getting the feeling Ines would prefer a change of topic.
Ines leaned in. ‘Not much. Like three months.’ She grinned: ‘But it is INTENSE.’
That night, after dinner, with Emily passed out from tiredness and me wide awake, I decided to go to a drag show that had been organized as part of Pride. When I arrived at the building there were about fifteen police outside – my first taste of the police presence at Pride. I met my friend Masa, who worked at VICE Serbia and had organized my talk. Masa gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘straight ally’, as did her on-off boyfriend. He had once been beaten on the street in Belgrade for sticking up for a friend who was gay. Masa went to Pride every year and was one of the people who laid down flowers in 2009, giving her name to the papers and speaking out on gay rights, despite the attached risks. Now she was helping me by introducing me to LGBTQ+ people and translating for me.
The drag party was like a school disco, with groups of friends awkwardly milling around a big dark empty room waiting for some action. There were people of all ages and gender expressions there – well over a hundred – which gave me a restored faith in the freedom of the Belgrade queer nightlife scene after seeing the police outside. I bumped into Ines and the bodyguard, and we grabbed a drink and stood together. Four drag queens performed in rotation, doing about five or six numbers each. That impressed me; most drag I’d seen in the UK or at DragCon only required one performance per queen. You really had to sing for your supper in Serbia. Ines was there, shaking her head and critiquing some of the performances next to me. ‘Lazy,’ she quipped at one queen. Another did a four-song medley of Lana Del Rey and Lady Gaga, fake-hanging herself on stage at the climax of ‘Marry the Night’, which sobered the crowd a little. A lot of the other performances, Ines informed me, were impersonations of famous old Croatian pop stars; a lot of the jokes were also in Serbian, flying way over my head.
‘She just said an old Croatian saying – something like, “You can take a girl from the village but you can’t take the village from the girl,”’ Ines explained over the music.
‘Ah, we have that one too,’ I shouted back.
By the time a queen in leopard print was miming jacking off to Elvis Presley’s ‘Always on My Mind’, the bodyguard was protesting that he and Ines should leave. He complained that it was his favourite song and that the performer was ‘butchering it’.
With Ines having headed out and Masa flirting with her sort-of boyfriend, I chatted to a young queer called Nicolas and he agreed to show me Grindr on his phone. ‘Look, 90 per cent of guys do not have a picture of their face,’ he pointed out.
‘Why not, is it dangerous?’ I asked, thinking of how male dating apps had been used to entrap young gay men in countries like Russia and Nigeria.
‘It’s not dangerous, it’s just the quality is not great, the emotional quality. Everybody is looking for sex and they are discreet. I don’t like people that are in the closet – because if I’m not in the closet why should you be? I want to meet people who are out so I could try to lead a normal relationship, not be with some guy who wouldn’t associate with me.’
‘Where do you meet people then?’
‘Through friends. Or at gay bars maybe.’
I had been told that there were just four places in the city that held gay parties. The venue we were in for the drag night was one of them, Masa explained, and it also held ‘rainbow parties’, big queer discos where young people, straight or gay, would all be making out with each other. Then there was a club called Pleasure, well known for gay nights, although it wasn’t officially a gay bar.
The next day, I tried to drag Emily to a ‘Gay Balkan EDM’ night at Pleasure, because it sounded so fantastically niche. But we got into two consecutive taxis that refused to take us to the ve
nue, telling us to get out and walk. The third driver – to whom I gave a vague address, not the club name – drove us around the city in a circle three times before suggesting I pay more than I’ve ever paid for a trip in a black cab in London. After a screaming fight – me in English, he in Serbian – Emily paid him off with a quarter of the sum he’d asked for, and we slammed the doors and solemnly walked home. When I told my new Serbian friends how much he’d tried to charge over the next few days, they exploded with laughter. My experience with gay clubbing in Serbia was extremely short-lived. But apparently so were a lot of people’s; Masa told me that more than half of her LGBTQ+ friends had left Serbia for warmer political climates: London, Paris, Chicago.
However, the reason for leaving was not always homophobia alone, it was homophobia combined with economics. Adam had told me that he and his boyfriend Boban struggled to find jobs anywhere in Belgrade as out homosexuals. In a country with a youth unemployment rate of 30 per cent, things were tough for all young people, but throw being LGBTQ+ into the mix, alongside no implemented anti-discrimination laws for the workplace, and the decision to emigrate seemed like a no-brainer. For many, staying put was the bigger challenge.
On Sunday morning, I walked across the city early to get to the Pride location. As riot police milled around in groups on street corners, I felt distinctly nervous and, for one of the only times in my life, self-conscious about my sexuality. The closer I got to Pride, the more aware I became that passers-by on the street were staring at me walking intently towards the event. After moving through police barricades (I wasn’t sure of the criteria that allowed me to pass) and undergoing a bag check, I picked up a press pass. Other Pride-goers were wearing pink entry wristbands that they’d applied for ahead of time, although I was confused when they told me that anyone could apply for a wristband. Was it just the fact that they were neon pink that was meant to deter homophobes?
The part of the city we were now in, although central, felt quiet and barren, as if it had been evacuated – at least until I turned a corner and saw the small but growing crowd of people carrying rainbow flags expectantly. It was 11 a.m. and there were about a hundred and fifty people present. A drag queen I recognized from Friday night was dancing to Katy Perry as thirty riot police stood silently in a long, formidable row ten yards away, watching over her.
As the crowd slowly thickened, I stood on some steps and watched Goran buzzing around greeting people. I asked two young women next to me what they were doing there. Malina, a lawyer, said she was there because she wanted a Serbia with better human rights; the other, Zorana, was there to support Malina. They were a couple, both twenty-five, and had been together for two years. They lived together, pretending to the world and to their families that they were just flatmates. Zorana said she hadn’t wanted to come to Pride because she didn’t want someone seeing her on TV. They said this was common, avoiding the cameras. I told them I had felt nervous walking towards where we were and they looked at me sceptically. I assumed they were thinking, ‘Try feeling like that all the time,’ but then Zorana said, ‘Why? You don’t look gay.’
My phone rang and my own girlfriend and lawyer informed me she was at one of the gates. The night before, she’d told me that she’d never been to a Pride parade before. Now, as she joined me on the steps, I pointed out the minor similarities and differences between Belgrade Pride and every other Pride I’d been to. Rainbow flags, shit Katy Perry songs and the cameras were normal. The number of police, the lack of children, the relatively small size of the crowd (now about five hundred people), the fact that no one was drinking, and the absence of any fetish communities were the immediate differences. There were, we were told, a lot of straight people in attendance, as well as many foreign diplomats and activists. I even bumped into Hans from Amsterdam Pride, which made me smile. It was hard to miss him as he was carrying a ten-foot rainbow flag, for which I accused him of dick-swinging. He told us he was there to help educate Serbian organizers on how to try and gain sponsorship.
‘I’ve learned through the years sometimes people need an excuse – not for themselves but for others – so what we’re offering these people from Belgrade companies is they can say to their secretary or colleague or wife, “I was invited by my colleagues from the Netherlands, that’s why I’m thinking of funding Pride,” and they might get away with it.’ It was smart, and had Hans written all over it. Through his eyes, sponsorship would help to scale Belgrade Pride. They currently had a budget of just €50,000, which came from Goran’s organization, the Civil Rights Defenders, the Dutch Embassy and the German Embassy, with no money from the government. ‘The police are obliged by law to be here,’ said Goran, ‘but we are paying security ourselves, which is very expensive.’
Despite the city and state’s lack of contribution, the country’s first ever lesbian prime minister, Ana Brnabić, turned up at the parade to give a speech. She was elected in June 2017 amidst continuing attempts for Serbia to join the EU, and as such seemed to divide opinion among LGBTQ+ people I talked to in Serbia; some said her appointment was a pink-washing, essentially a diversity hire with no real outcome for the community (accusations that Brnabić had publicly called ‘nonsense’), others thought it was a step in the right direction for representation. Either way, here she was, giving a speech on bettering LGBTQ+ inclusion just one year after the EU stated that Serbia had a long way to go in terms of inclusion, not just for LGBTQ+ people but also for Roma citizens and people with disabilities.
‘The government is here for all citizens and will secure the respect of rights for all citizens,’ Brnabić announced to the crowd. ‘We want to send a signal that diversity makes our society stronger, that together we can do more.’
A week before, Brnabić had also appeared at a Pride conference on hate speech, and expanded on her reasons for attending the parade: ‘As a citizen, I want to live in a society where the Pride parade is news only at the level of information related to the closure of streets for traffic. Where that event is significant to those who are organizing it, along with citizens who want to participate in it. Without tensions several months before and after. As prime minister, I have the obligation and duty to say that this state and its institutions decisively stand beside their citizens, equally protecting their rights – regardless of whether they belong to the majority or are members of minority groups by birth, orientation or personal decision.’
Her choice of the terms ‘obligation and duty’ seemed telling, almost as if there was a disconnect between the state-sponsored equality that she was asked to talk about and the kind of equality she actually wanted. The Mayor of Belgrade between 2008 and 2013, Dragan Đilas, once told the city that homosexuality was best left in private, and ‘should be kept behind four walls’. And there was more. Interestingly, almost every single LGBTQ+ person I talked to in Serbia about the government endorsing Pride had the same thing to say on the topic, a conspiracy theory of sorts: they believed that the government puppeteered the very people who attacked Pride.
‘There was seven thousand hooligans in 2010: football hooligans, extremists, Neo-Nazis,’ Goran told me. ‘Seven thousand,’ he repeated. ‘Then, in 2014, zero. Those hooligans still live somewhere here, they haven’t left . . . how do you explain that we have not even a stone [thrown] on Pride? They are still around us, but someone tells them to stay at home now. Who? I don’t know,’ he concluded with a sarcastic shrug.
We started to march. Some of the thousand-strong crowd of people held banners emblazoned with the official Pride slogan Za Promenu, meaning ‘For Change’, and danced to the music blaring out of the sole truck. At one point confetti was blasted onto us from a high window somewhere. It felt celebratory, bar the fact that no one was watching except for maybe three elderly women who had failed to be evacuated from the area, and who stood on their doorsteps, faces gnarled into frowns while they shook their heads disapprovingly. At one point, a counter-protester appeared, shouting things at us, but he was promptly swept up and away
by the riot police like a leaf in a gust of wind.
After half an hour’s marching, we congregated at the end point of Pride, Belgrade’s Republic Square. At least 60 per cent of the crowd chose to go home at this point, stuffing rainbow flags into bags and removing Pride badges as they dispersed. Hans came onto the small stage and gave a speech, pointing out how rare it was for a country’s prime minister to attend Pride, before asking everyone to hold hands with a stranger in solidarity. After about another half hour of celebrations, which involved more speeches and more drag, it started to drizzle. I watched from a cafe in the square as the last stragglers – including Masa – danced in the rain before moving off too.
It was at this point that other strange groups started to appear. There was a religious group, who held photos of Russian Orthodox emperors and cast holy water onto the ground to cleanse the streets after Pride. Then came a ‘pro-family group’ of about twenty people with banners reading ‘Serbian Home Never Sodom’ and ‘Stop Faggotization’. From their meagre numbers, these groups seemed to be in a minority. The police couldn’t do anything about a bit of non-violent, indirect hate speech, said Goran, as there was freedom of assembly in the square. But a week before Pride, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church had compared homosexuality to incest. Clearly there was a divide between the state, endorsing Pride publicly by permitting Brnabić to attend, and the Church, who vehemently opposed Pride. Then there were just the regular Serbian citizens who wished Pride would go away, to make life easier for everyone.
On the doorstep of our Airbnb, dampened from the rain, we ran into one of these people, our host.
Queer Intentions Page 14
