(C) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [1]:
Balkan music fights for LGBT rights: forty years on the frontline
Date: 2021-12 [2]
Before 1977, homosexuality was a real taboo for each and everyone in Yugoslavia. It was hard to find a public person brave enough to speak about it freely in any media and impossible to hear popular music with LGBT-influenced lyrics. The only older song that described a kind of same-sex relationship was the Bollywood style tune “Ramo, Ramo”, recorded in 1974 by traditional Gypsy folk singer Muharem Serbezovski. He was very successful in the local music market but nowhere recognized as a gay icon.
The opinion of the hard-line communist authorities and founders of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was clear. They strongly condemned homosexual act as a bourgeois decadence imported from the West. Male homosexuality was strictly forbidden in Yugoslavia since WW2 by law, with a maximum sentence of one year in prison. A Croatian historian and LGBT activist, Franko Dota, found evidence of about 500 sentences passed over three decades. After the law was reformed in 1977, homosexuality was decriminalized,but only for a part of the Yugoslav federation. The decriminalisation bill was passed in the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and the autonomous province of Vojvodina. However, homosexuality remained illegal in Serbia and Kosovo until 1994, in Macedonia until 1996 and in Bosnia and Herzegovina until 1998. Why have Yugoslav lawmakers decided to establish different policies? The northwest, especially Slovenia with its capital Ljubljana, was more liberal compared to the southeast, deeply rooted in the Balkan perspective and always more conservative. In addition, Yugoslavia made a lot of income from the foreign tourist flow in the 1970s and urgently needed some gay-friendly places in the high-class summer resorts of the Adriatic coast. However, the partial decriminalization didn’t change everyday life, full of ugly homophobia and any outing was still too dangerous to consider.
[END]
[2] Url:
https://www.europavox.com/news/balkan-music-fights-lgbt-right-40-years-frontline/
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