A quarter-century after Serbia’s first LGBTQ+ Pride march was violently disrupted, its organisers look back on its legacy – and at what has changed for the community since 2001.
This year’s Belgrade Pride Parade is scheduled to take place on Saturday, 25 years after the first attempt to hold a march for LGBTQ+ rights in the Serbian capital was disrupted by violence.
To mark the anniversary, this year’s Pride carries the same slogan as the first: “There is space for all of us.”
In 2001, just dozens attended that first march. Belgrade Pride has since grown into a much larger event, attracting hundreds of people.
But while the authorities now ensure the security of the event, organising Pride remains difficult in a society where tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community is still limited.
A quarter-century after that first “Bloody Pride”, as many recall it, many of the same issues still face the LGBTQ+ community, even if the situation today looks far better than back then, activists involved in organising Pride from 2001 onwards told BIRN, as they prepared to march again.
‘A revolutionary act’
Viva La Vida – Agata Milan Djuric. Photo: Vladimir Opsenica, courtesy of Agata Milan Djuric.
“I’m getting ready and somehow have this ‘surreal’ feeling; as if it is unreal that something like that will happen now in Serbia, in Belgrade, for the first time in history,” Agata Milan Djuric recalls feeling on June 30, 2001, the day of the first Belgrade Pride.
“I feel great excitement, great fear. I was even supposed to open Pride as the first drag queen, Viva La Diva,” she adds.
Djuric is one of the pioneers of the LGBTQ+ movement in Serbia and one of the original Pride organisers.
“I was planning on singingI Will Survive,one of the queer anthems, andOver the Rainbowby Judy Garland,” she says.
The event was supposed to start with a gathering at the Republic Square in the city centre and continue at the Student Cultural Centre, with two discussion panels about LGBTQ+ people in Serbian society.
“It was supposed to be a celebration of love and inclusiveness and celebrating human diversity,” she continues.
“However, that event unfortunately turned into brutal violence. It actually, in one day, gave a cross-section of the depth of violence in which LGBT people lived daily in the then context and at that time.”
Hordes of young thugs descended on Republic Square and attacked the activists and anyone else looking like they could be queer.
Over 40 people were injured as the attackers chased, punched and kicked the Pride participants. The authorities were accused of failing to protect people from various neo-fascist organisations that had pre-announced attacks with public threats and declarations before the event started.
“There was [the extreme right-wing group] Obraz, they had thatproclamationabout various groups of people that were ‘enemies’, LGBT people among others; there was also ‘Blood and Honour’, ‘1389’ and other [far-right] organisations,” Djuric remembers.
“As the date of our Pride approached, the threats increased and the whole city was plastered with various posters – threats that ‘We are waiting for you’. But we naively thought that we would really have the support of the state,” she adds.
Coming after the ousting of Serbia’s nationalist strongman leader Slobodan Milosevic the previous year and the installation of a new, democratically oriented government, there was a mood of optimism among the activists.
“We were simply carried away and inspired by the change [in government], because many of us were anti-regime activists, peace activists, anti-war activists, and we had great trust in the leaders of the then government in terms of their values and that somehow there would be a change in the overall political climate in society,” Djuric says.
The Pride organisers received advice from human rights organisations and various others who warned that it was “not the right time”. Djuric says they thought that advice was “absurd, because it is always the right time for everyone’s rights”.
They informed the authorities about what they planned – to some bemusement. “We went to the police to talk about the event four times, and it was like some movie scene; when we would go to the police, they would look at us like some exotic creatures who now want some kind of celebration.”
As Djuric notes, the regime had changed but many of the old security officials from Milosevic’s system remained in place. “We simply have to bear in mind that, despite the change of government, the entire structure of the state apparatus did not change,” she acknowledges, now.
“It was obviously assessed that the event was high-risk, and that threats were coming from varioushe then representatives of the government, and we did not expect that violence would await us to such an extent.”
On the day, however, few police were on the streets to keep the marchers safe. Reinforcements only came when the thugs started attacking those few officers who were present. Some refused to protect the marchers even then: “We won’t protect faggots and lesbians,” Djuric remembers one saying.
When the participants were attacked, she remained in Republic Square, “even though there were a few situations in which I probably might have been killed, or at least seriously physically injured. I, as the organiser, was responsible for telling all the people we recognised as or thought were LGBTQ: ‘Go home.’”
Now, she says, that first Pride has huge historical importance: “From a historical perspective, I absolutely consider it a revolutionary act.”
Women’s movement was key ally
Participants hold a banner reading ‘Smile if you’re gay’, during the Belgrade Pride Parade march in Belgrade, Serbia, 07 September 2024. Photo: EPA/ANDREJ CUKIC.
Homosexuality was illegal in Serbia when it was part of Socialist Yugoslasm grew slowly
“Our greatest allies were women activists; that is, activists for women’s rights, women’s organisations … Without the women’s movement, the LGBTIQ movement would have developed more slowly,” recalls Djuric.
But by the time of first Pride, only a few rights organisations were willing to support the event.
“There were some human rights organisations that were very established, but which absolutely didn’t support the holding of Pride, or condemn the violence that happened – and that actually testifies to the depth, really the enormous depth of prejudice against LGBT people that existed and prevailed at that time, because simply no one wanted, or rather most did not want, to be labeled – I have to put it this way – as a ‘faggot’ organization,” Djuric explains.
The few that supported them were with them all the way, however.
“Later [after the attack] I went to the SKC [Student Cultural Centre], when a lawyer from the Humanitarian Law Centre came up with a baby in her arms, and she said: ‘No, no, let’s go, we will not give up and simply surrender. Let’s hold the discussion panel,’” she says.
“And that was really such a touching scene as she managed to break through all that crowd of hooligans on the streets of Belgrade and get to the SKC, which was extremely difficult, with a baby in her arms, and she said: ‘Let’s hold the second part of the programme’ – but that was really impossible.”
After that first Pride, Djuric organised a press conference at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, an alternative cultural institution, again under great risk.
She recalls that only about ten well-known public figures came to publicly condemn the violence.
“It was really sad to see how small the number of intellectuals, artists and human rights activists showed up,” she says.
“I call it selective humanism. They probably would have appeared and publicly condemned the violence if it had been against some other group, but given the level of prejudice that existed then, and the stigmatisation and pathologisation of LGBT people, they didn’t dare to do such a thing.”
‘Pride was a catalyst’
Anti-LGBTQ+ protesters are escorted by security ahead of the EuroPride event in Belgrade, September 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC.
“If that first Pride hadn’t happened, probably the later Prides wouldn’t have been held,” Djuric says.
“It was a revolutionary act that drew the attention of both the domestic and world public to the position of LGBT people and our degree of disenfranchisement. And not only the disenfranchisement, but in what conditions, what violent conditions, LGBT people live in this country.
“Pride was a catalyst for many processes that would influence the development of LGBT rights in Serbia. It was actually a turning point that accelerated and was a catalyst for various other processes of improving the position and rights of LGBT people in Serbia,” she says.
After 2001, another Pride was not held until 2010. Since then, it has been held almost every year, but under tight security and in a restricted area to discourage potential attackers.
But it has always been fragile and subject to the whims of the authorities. In 2022, Belgrade was supposed to host Europride, a pan-European international event dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights. However, due to political pressure and instability, after days of tension, the state banned the event, although some of it did take place in the end, in a limited form.
Another of the Pride organisers, Goran Miletic, an LGBTQ+ activist and founder of the Balkans Forward Foundation, which works to empower marginalised communities, says he sees the event as a litmus test for human rights in Serbia.
“If rights are respected for one small community, there is greater hope that they will be respected for all citizens. Unfortunately, both back then and throughout these past 25 years, citizens have always put more trust in the narrative pushed by various authorities through state-controlled media, namely that the LGBT community is demanding some kind of special treatment or luxury, and that everyone will be better off if members of this community remain unequal,” says Miletic.
He believes that in terms of upholding rights, Serbia has not advanced very far since 2001. “International standards and laws apply only if there is the political will to fully implement them – which sometimes means they will be enforced, and sometimes not,” he says.
He also says the fact that no one was held accountable for the violence in 2001 and that attacks still seem permitted on trans people, political dissidents and journalists “shows us that we lack a consensus on basic societal values” in Serbia.
Since that first Pride, Serbia has had a lesbian prime minister, Ana Brnabic, although she was criticised for not standing up for LGBTQ+ rights while in office. She is now parliamentary speaker.
Miletic believes the authorities in the EU candidate state are only putting on a show of allowing Pride to take place to demonstrate their “tolerance”.
“They view Pride and the LGBT community as something to play around with, pushing the narrative that it is something ‘EU and Western’, along with the idea that whenever they do something for this community, they are actually doing a favour for Western countries,” he says.
He cites the abrupt shelving of the draft Law on Same-Sex Unions in 2022, at the same time as EuroPride was banned, as an example of how the government treats the community when it is politically expedient.
Is there ‘space for all’?
Agata Milan Djuric. Photo: Vladimir Opsenica, courtesy of Agata Milan Djuric
Twenty-five years on from the first Pride in Belgrade, Serbia’s LGBTQ+ community still faces violence and discrimination and Miletic argues that “there is no indication that this or any future government will make a drastic shift toward genuinely promoting equality”.
But there have been improvements, Djuric acknowledges. Some progress has been achieved through legislative reforms and wide-ranging educational initiatives across the judiciary, healthcare system and local government.
Major legal milestones include amending laws to protect sexual orientation and gender identity since the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Law in 2009, as well as securing mandatory health insurance coverage for 65 per cent of medical transition costs for transgender individuals. Some 17 laws were changed during this period.
However, implementation has been slow. “We also have those reactionary, retrograde processes when it comes to LGBTQ rights,women’s rights and minority rights in general,” Djuric notes.
A quarter-century on, the Pride activists’ fight for their rights continues.
Referring to the slogan of the 2001 and 2026 events,“There is space for all of us”,Djuric concludes:“Of course there is space for all of us on this planet and that is something that is a continuous struggle that must be fought – something we must fight for constantly, our entire lives.”
Change of culture
Besides being known for her activism, Agata Milan Djuric was Serbia’s first drag queen, going by the name Viva La Diva.
Today, drag queens are part of mainstream culture in some parts of the world. In Serbia’s capital, parties and events happen on a monthly if not weekly bases. Some drag queens like Alexis Plastic have become TikTok sensations.
Harem Girls, a group of drag queens, even competed in Serbia’s Eurovision song competition on national broadcaster two times in a row.
“Drag for me is research, research in different fields, and when it comes to the field of gender expression, some theorists consider it one of the biggest taboos, which is that a biological man steps out of the gender role assigned to him, and in that sense drag is. Every drag performance is in a way a revolutionary act, because it undermines one premise of patriarchy. So drag for me has always been a political act,” Djuric says.
Twenty-five years ago, few spaces were open to this type of performance art. “My first performance was at a Women’s Studies group [at Belgrade University],” remembers Djuric.
“I once said that I felt lonely for a long time, however, when other drag queens started to appear, I considered them all my daughters. And I am endlessly glad that space opened up because it is actually part of queer culture. It has always been and we have existed in all cultures, throughout history.”
She believes the popular rise of drag culture is one indicator that the situation has become better in Serbia for LGBTQ+ people – “in terms of that breakthrough in the media, sensitising the whole society that queer culture exists, that queer people exist with our specific artistic forms and so on – that in that way the whole of society is somehow sensitised and it no longer represents such a taboo as it was during the 1990s and so on”.
Source: balkaninsight.com
