Intersectionality and lgbt activist politics: multiple others in croatia and serbia 1st edition boja
Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia 1st Edition Bojan Bili■
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Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After
In the 70s and 80s of the past century, some of us in the feminist movement started dropping out of heteropatriarchy. One by one, and then in gangs. We began realising that we were on the point zero of the long process of inventing together what our being lesbians was. It was like that in many places in the world, but also with me. My own transformations were framed by two completely different decades: the socialist 1980s and the nationalist 1990s, in Belgrade—a city which was a capital in two different states: in the 1980s in the socialist state of Yugoslavia and in the 1990s in the nationalist Serbia. To give you an idea of the social traps in which women loving women found themselves in those two periods, I will tell a few life stories and try to describe how the historic and political context reflected my desire. We, feminists, have not been saying in vain the famous slogan “the personal is political”—we insist on its truth also because we, lesbians, feel both misogyny and lesbophobia on a daily basis. Our lesbian lovemaking has been at the heart of our politics—opening the door to the new world of pleasure and at the same time urging us to fight in front of the “closed door” of society and its values.
Lesbian Yearning: Yugoslavia in the 1980s
In the early 1980s the feminist movement started to grow in Yugoslavia, and the first wave of young feminist lesbians began to recognise each other, organise, and work together in three capitals—Ljubljana, Zagreb,
vi Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After and Belgrade. At moments it felt like the new world was opening in our search to understand what our lesbian difference was. I’m not a girl/I’m a hatchet … I’m not a fool/I’m a survivor/ … Look at me as if you had never seen a woman before (Grahn, 1971).
At the same time the socialist system in Yugoslavia was making a great leap forward in terms of women’s emancipation: the majority of women were literate in those years, many were workers in the self-management system, abortion was (almost) free and safely done in state hospitals, and state-funded kindergartens, schooling, and medical care also added to the general improvement of the status of women. Every bigger city had a people’s theatre and a people’s cultural centre. Trade unions took care that workers could go on vacation, cleaning women too (usually on the Adriatic sea). However, women of our mothers’ generation hardly had a permission for sexual pleasure, and the social concept of women erotically loving women or men loving men did not exist. Just as the feminist lesbian director Maria Takács (2009) shows in her documentary Secret Years, which brings testimonials of women loving women in state socialist Hungary, social silence was masking the permanent manufacturing of hatred against lesbians and gay men alike.
One of the first good descriptions of this civilisation’s total silence was written in 1976 in the historic first paragraph of Jonathan Ned Katz’s (1976, p. 1) edited book Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA:
We have been the silent minority, the silenced minority—invisible women, invisible men. The alleged enormity of our “sin” justified the denial of our existence, even our physical destruction. Our “crime” was not merely against society, not only against humanity, but “against nature”—we were outlaws against the universe. […] For long we were a people perceived out of time and out of place—socially unsituated, without a history—the mutant progeny of some heterosexual union, freaks … We remained an unknown people, our character defamed.
Not being much aware that lesbian desire was demonised, in 1986 I fell in love with a woman and knew “this is it!”. Like many of us in those years, I thought I was the only lesbian in the town. At that time, we,
Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After vii
women activists in Belgrade, used to meet in the feminist group Women and Society (Žena i društvo), a sister-group of the one in Zagreb with the same name. Very soon I found out that, in fact, in my group there were other comrades cherishing the same hidden love. But these were years of secrecy, in which we lesbians had to become deliberate liars. “A pen must write underground underwater so be it”, simply said Adrienne Rich (1973).
In the 1980s, while in my thirties, I was politically active in the International Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry. I hitchhiked from one meeting to another in different cities of (Western) Europe where the women’s movement was flourishing. There I found out about a new phenomenon in history: women’s bookstores! Women-made shops for books and coffee were a feminist must in Amsterdam, Athens, Rome, Berlin… The spaces were charming and exactly how I loved them to be: with lazy cats strolling around, tampons hanging in the bathroom, and lesbians on the front desks. These bookstores were shop windows of the big news for us from the East: they made us realise that the women’s movement had already invented lesbians proud to be who they are! With a fire in my body, it was there that I discovered the books by feminist lesbians— they gave me my first chosen baby-milk. So for example, I had to get Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig in its French original, even though I could understand maybe every fifth word, or the book Passionate Politics by Charlotte Bunch because I loved the title! These books had new political visions of lesbian desire—they were road signs, my very first lesbian nest. I choose to cite in this text some of the authors that changed me: you take me love/a sea skeleton/fill me with you/& i become/pregnant with love (Parker, 1974).
In December 1987, the feminists from the feminist group Lilith in Slovenia decided to invite feminists from Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia to the first Yugoslav feminist meeting. About forty activists gathered for this exciting conference. We had two issues named for the first time: violence against women and lesbian love. These two themes were completely new on the socialist “women’s question” agenda. This was also a first encounter among a few out lesbians: Suzana Tratnik, active in organising lesbians in Ljubljana, Sla ana Marković and me from Belgrade, joined by a few more lesbians-to-be. It is there that I first saw a young woman in charge
viii Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After of technical equipment. In fact, it was the first time for all of us to see a charming butch managing microphones and electricity with professional competence. We felt totally new in the same old world. There, among a few passionate feminist lesbians of Yugoslavia, I found my new lesbian nest.
To the conference in Ljubljana, I arrived with my lover from Italy who decided to pay a hotel room. It was the very first time for both of us to enter a hotel and ask for a room for two. We wanted a double bed, a socalled ‘French bed’, but how to ask for it? I was embarrassed and thought it would be easier for her to do it because she was a foreigner. But she was trembling and thought it would be easier for me to do it because we were in my country. I was 33 and I had never slept in a hotel before. In socialist times many would consider hotels a bourgeois invention—workers were not meant to go there. Throughout my childhood, we slept at relatives’ or in private rooms. I did not even know how to ask for “a room for two”, even less when standing by the woman I love. The only images I could think of to help me were those of Hollywood films … Vanessa Redgrave in her full dignified style walking into a hotel lobby. But I did not have her class nor hetero status nor her language style. My mind did not know of any model of two lesbians entering a hotel. What will they ask me? Will they see everything on my face? What will they see on my face? The fear in the body was stirring. My lover was sweating. For those of us/who were imprinted with fear (Lorde, 1978).
The two middle-aged hoteliers, a woman and a man, I still remember them, did not say anything. Later, in the room on the second floor, the two of us were finally alone. We locked the door twice. The fear was throbbing in our bodies; we closed the curtains, lit cigarettes, and drank. Even in our worst times/some part of us/finds each other (Parker, 1974).
How loud could a lesbian couple be in the 1980s in a hotel in Eastern Europe? How many lesbians recognise even to this day the phenomenon of “restricted breath”, preventing any sound of lesbian lust from coming out of the body. How many recognise “swallowed orgasm” so that the silence of desire maintains “the denial of existence”. If no one hears, then it does not exist: not the parents next door nor the neighbours next hall nor the hotel guests behind the wall, if there are any. There was a total absence of representation of lesbian lovemaking in the images of Eastern European societies. Nothing. No traces of a history of women
Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After ix
loving women, no kisses of two women, no erotic touch, not even cultural symbolism of the clitoris. Simone de Beauvoir was asking herself already in the 1970s in her philosophical manner whether women existed at all. What could, then, lesbians expect? Whatever we do together is pure invention/the maps they gave us were out of date by years (Rich, 1978).
The conference was successful and historic in many ways. The issues were identified. The last night we decided to work on conference conclusions. Sitting in a small room on desks and chairs, full of excitement, in sparkling devotion, we were naming themes we wanted to work on: violence against women, women in employment, in politics, in health care … and an extraordinary pronouncing of our wish “to make a lesbian group in every city of the country” (Dobnikar & Pamuković, 2009, p. 16). Yugoslavia had never before seen such a passionate work of feminists. That evening we promised to each other what political responsibilities we would take up.
Later we realised that many of us have carried out the promises we made that night. For example, in that year, the first lesbian group was formed in Slovenia, Lilith Lesbians (Lezbični Lilit). After that, in 1989, feminist lesbians in Zagreb formed Lila Initiative (Lila inicijativa). Lesbians in Belgrade started ad hoc lesbian discussions inside the feminist group Women and Society (Žena i društvo). Lesbian issues were discussed in the next three annual Yugoslav feminist encounters.
Summarising my account of the multiple others of the 1980s, I could say that the Yugoslav feminist movement gave me the light to intervene in the world that we interpreted as a compulsory heterosexual institution. A world where I started to feel that I do not belong any more, but come from, and must find my way. “Look at me as if you have never seen a woman before” (Grahn, 1978). Our new feminist lesbian self also meant that some of us were already Other to our families: I, Woman must be/the child of myself (Parker, 1974).
But, on the streets of my town nothing of my multiple other identities was to be recognised—I was spotted mainly as a hetero girl, a possible target of sexual harassment, which as a feminist lesbian I needed to be ready for. Sometimes I walked with a knife in my pocket, sometimes with a screwdriver … later I got a real tear gas spray. All of which gave me courage, but did not always help me against male violence. I’m not a good lay/I’m a straight razor (Grahn, 1971).
Which Side Are You On: War Divisions in the 1990s
Year 1990 was crucial and different. When the Berlin Wall fell down, (November 1989) new enthusiasm emerged in all of Eastern Europe, with many political initiatives starting also in Yugoslavia. Alternative culture and local rock groups were everywhere. Some feminists were already working on telephone helplines for the battered women, others organised women’s summer camps (Slovenia), many were discussing women in politics, and groups known as Women’s Lobby (Ženski lobi) were formed in Zagreb and Belgrade. Activists were busy writing, translating, publishing in student papers and journals, and going out into the streets with petitions and feminist demands. In that year, the lesbians and gay men in Belgrade began to organise around a group called Arkadija. In Ljubljana, the 8th Gay and Lesbian Film Festival was already taking place. Feminism was spreading in Yugoslavia, we were travelling to meet each other, to discuss and insist on sisterhood.
But in 1991, the war broke out. Nationalism swept our streets, entered families and institutions like a typhoon, and conflicts over “What’s your nationality?” and “Which side of the war are you on?” divided people, including the activists of women’s groups. We had to stop Yugoslav feminist encounters. Soon there were no trains or buses between Zagreb and Belgrade or Sarajevo; the borders closed down, telephone lines too. The news announced the first men were killed on the front. And my life changed completely.
Anti-war centres opened in Belgrade and Zagreb. We feminists, already in a high wave of activism, founded Women in Black Against War (Žene u crnom protiv rata) in 1991 to protest against the Serbian criminal regime, as well as Autonomous Women’s Centre (Autonomni ženski centar) in 1993 to work with women survivors of war and violence. Lesbians met regularly, and by the end of the Bosnian war, some of us were ready; by the end of 1995, we created a lesbian group, Labris, in Belgrade.
In the 1990s, all identity discussions forced us into one theme— nationalism. There was no ground to take up lesbian and gay rights in the new human rights centres; they were all concentrated around war, refugees, and opposing nationalist ideology. At the same time, in our
Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After xi
women’s groups, if we tried to talk about the war, activists reacted with full emotions, and it seemed that everything separated us: nationalism, war, and also pacifism.
In the 1990s, I worked as a counsellor with women survivors of war. Autonomous Women’s Centre was at the heart of the flux of women refugees as well as those with the pain of sexual violence and husbands’ abuse. Offering emotional support for war survivors was crucial and we were well organised, but here and there I realised that something was wrong again. Working with victims of war meant that the patriarchal order of ethics had to cut through me again: I had to understand that the phenomenon of victims of war was imprinted with moral purity, innocence, and righteousness (Helms, 2013), in front of which I had to hide my lesbian life that was still seen as “an immoral outlaw against nature”. I did not know how to fuse these two phenomena together—my (“immoral”) lesbian desire and my work with (“morally pure”) women war victims—neither in my body nor in the language, so I could not pronounce these two terms in one sentence. It was as if in the public space lesbians were forbidden to have a profession of any kind. There were only few of us out lesbians in Belgrade who were defending our professions. Fighting with hatred meant that the hateful language would enter our bodies and sometimes haunt us in daylight and in our dreams. We exposed in public our most precious intimate core to acknowledge that lesbians were, in fact, also professionals. They cannot force silence into our mouths; we take lovers into our mouths (Nestle, 1998).
Feminists were deeply involved in the anti-war activities. Some of us were preparing packages for women living in no-electricity, no-water, noheating Sarajevo with warm dedication, searching the shops to get only the particular food items that were allowed to be packed. But, in those days I wrote about yet another dilemma:
I would write solidarity letters which I put in the packages sent to an unknown woman in Sarajevo who lived under the siege, thinking whether one day she would be embarrassed if she saw the lesbian who had written her letters in front of her door? Would she be disappointed with me? Would she regret that she ever received words of friendship from a lesbian? (Mla enović, 2012, p. 132)
The hatred in wartime comes from everywhere, family, neighbours, citizens in the public transport … also from media—but for the antiwar activists news from the war zone is a daily must. For lesbians there is another dimension to hatred, and that is our own interiorised lesbophobia. In fact the biggest dilemma was in my own love bed, and, in 1997, I wrote:
At times, I would be making love to a woman and the transistor radio would announce the latest news from the front line. The only news to listen to about the war were broadcasts from Prague or Paris. I would be in bed and not know what I should do, should I get up from the warm embrace, turn off the radio and continue? I am a lesbian, I am of Serbian name, how can I turn off the radio? Human beings, my neighbours are being slaughtered in my name and I must know about that. If I do not turn off the radio, there is no more lovemaking today, only my despair at the terrible news from Bosnia and Herzegovina; I would light another cigarette and make another coffee for both of us. (Mla enović, 2012, p. 132)
Many years later we found few testimonies of lesbians in the warzones from Guatemala, Lebanon, Palestine, and other places that tell us of similar internal conflicts of how the identity of the anti-war activist is difficult to settle together with the desire for loving women. We know that some lesbians also choose to leave the warzones altogether and some to go straight to the military. For many, the erotics dwelled inside the imprisoned selves. If you were my home/I would be your garden (Dykewomon, 1995/2015).
Summarising my account of multiple others of the 1990s, I can say that the feminist anti-war politics and lesbian activism intensified my feelings of not belonging to the nationalist criminal state of which I was a citizen nor belonging to the ethnic nationality that my name de facto reveals. In those days, we, radical activists in Serbia, were creating acts of resistance against “daily fascism”, elaborating feminist knowledge that opposed the construction of “ethnic” or “national”. We talked, discussed, acted, marched on the streets. And still, the special joy of activism was again in encountering comrades—the feminist lesbians from beyond the closed borders and those from around the world. Letters, gifts, phone calls from, how I sometimes say, my Amazon friends developed the soil of homeness
Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After xiii
in precarious times. My lesbian nest became the solidarity of my lesbian diaspora. To remind you, “diaspora” refers to a people scattered from their homeland to places across the globe who spread their culture as they go. This definition can in fact apply to each and every one of us feminist lesbians in wartime—scattered from the lesbian land—the homeland we never had, we live in diaspora in our own birthplaces. One of those was my feminist lesbian comrade Čarna Ćosić from Novi Sad, who never felt at home in her hometown near Belgrade. She self-defined as an outcast and died young, like many lesbians who took fighting hatred seriously, to the bottom of their bones. Before she died, she wrote:
My name is I will take off every boot that oppresses me (Ćosić, 2008).
Lepa Mlađenović Belgrade
References
Ćosić, Č. (2008). Lutkice za devojčice. Novi Sad: Novosadska lezbejska organizacija NLO.
Dobnikar, M., & Pamuković, N. (2009). Jaz, ti, one … za nas: Dokumenti jugoslovanskih feminističnih srečanj 1987–1991. Ljubljana and Zagreb: Društvo Vita Activa and Centar za žene žrtve rata ROSA.
Dykewomon, E. (1995). Nothing will be as sweet as the taste. London: Onlywomen Press.
Dykewomon, E. (2015). What can I ask: New and selected poems 1975–2014. Berkeley, CA: Sinister Wisdom and New York, NY: A Midsummer Night's Press.
Grahn, J. (1971). Edward the Dyke and other poems. Oakland, CA: Women’s Press Collective.
Helms, E. (2013). Innocence and victimhood: Gender, nation, and women’s activism in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Katz, J. N. (Ed.). (1976). Gay American history: Lesbians and gay men in the USA. New York: Harper & Row.
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Lorde, A. (1978). The black unicorn: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lepa Mlađenović, L. (2012). Notes of a feminist lesbian in anti-war initiatives. In B. Bilić & V. Janković (Eds.), Resisting the evil: [Post-]Yugoslav anti-war contention (pp. 127–136). Baden Baden: Nomos.
Nestle, J. (1998). A fragile union: New and selected writings. San Francisco: Cleis Press.
Parker, P. (1974). Child of myself. Oakland, CA: Women’s Press Collective.
Rich, A. (1973). Diving into the wreck: Poems 1971–1972. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Rich, A. (1978). The dream of a common language: Poems, 1974–1977. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Takács, M. (2009). Secret years. Budapest, Hungary: János Vészi Production.
Acknowledgements
This is a second volume to come out of our workshop on post-Yugoslav LGBT activism, which took place at the Central European University in Budapest in March 2015. We are happy that the way in which this book was conceived and produced embodies the principles of solidarity that it tries to encourage. Our objective was to create a platform on which—in these challenging times—our friends, colleagues, and co-citizens could voice their concerns and find recognition and support. We thank our authors for the unwavering commitment to improving the quality of their contributions. Also, we are particularly grateful to our friend and colleague Paul Stubbs, who has been with us from the very beginning of this project and who so meticulously read and commented on all of the chapters. Paul’s interventions brought light there where we had encountered imprecision and confusion. We would also like to acknowledge Eric Gordy, Gert Hekma, Nicole Butterfield, Olja Družić Ljubotina, Sébastien Chauvin, Alison Sluiter, and our Palgrave editors Harriet Barker and Amelia Derkatsch for the various ways in which they helped us with this book. Once again, this cooperation may have been possible, but certainly would not have been so smooth and pleasant had it not been for the generous financial assistance of the EU Research Executive Agency (REA) and its and its Marie Curie Fellowship programme.
LGBT Activist Politics and Intersectionality in Croatia and Serbia: An Introduction 1
Bojan Bilić and Sanja Kajinić
Part I Widening the Community
The (In)Visible T: Trans Activism in Croatia (2004–2014) 33
Amir Hodžić, J. Poštić, and Arian Kajtezović
Against Bisexual Erasure: The Beginnings of Bi Activism in Serbia 55
Radica Hura
Uncovering an A: Asexuality and Asexual Activism in Croatia and Serbia 77
Milica Batričević and Andrej Cvetić
Queer Beograd Collective: Beyond Single-Issue Activism in Serbia and the Post-Yugoslav Space 105
Bojan Bilić and Irene Dioli
Nowhere at Home: Homelessness, Non-Heterosexuality, and LGBT Activism in Croatia 129
Antonela Marušić and Bojan Bilić
Normalisation, Discipline, and Conflict: Intersections of LGBT Rights and Workers’ Rights in Serbia 155
Irene Dioli
Towards a More Inclusive Pride? Representing Multiple Discriminations in the Belgrade Pride Parade 171
Marija Radoman
White Angels Zagreb: Combating Homophobia as “Rural Primitivism” 191 Andrew Hodges
Queer Struggles and the Left in Serbia and Croatia: An Afterword
Dušan Maljković
Notes on the Contributors
Milica Batričević is completing her BA in Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. She has attended programmes in Women Studies (Centre for Women Studies, Belgrade) and Queer Studies (Centre for Queer Studies, Belgrade). Her areas of interest include gender and queer theory, alternative psychiatry, and documentary filmmaking. Over the last two years she has made short films bridging sociology and activism.
Bojan Bilić is Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Slavonic and East European Studies from the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Andrej Cvetić is a student of Sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. His interests are mainly in the domain of social theory and social philosophy, historical sociology, and queer theory with a focus on asexuality. Besides academic activities, Andrej participates in leftist initiatives in Belgrade, Serbia.
Irene Dioli works as a researcher and translator for the University of Bologna and Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso in Rovereto, Italy. Fields of interest include labour, queer studies, and cultural studies. She earned her PhD from the University of Bologna and has published essays and chapters on the film industry and queer culture in the former Yugoslavia.
Andrew Hodges is a NEWFELPRO/Marie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore in Zagreb, Croatia, completing a postdoctoral research project in linguistic anthropology. For his doctoral research, he completed an ESRC-funded PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, working with students and researchers in Belgrade, Serbia, and Zagreb, Croatia, analysing their experiences of post-socialist “transition” and economic crisis.
Amir Hodžić holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and an MA in Gender and Culture Studies from the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. For the past eighteen years, Amir has been involved in research, education, and activism related to sex/gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and LGBTIQ issues. Amir works with and for various local, regional, and international stakeholders.
Radica Hura is the first Serbian activist for bisexual human rights. Active for several years, she has participated in many street actions and protests while also being involved in numerous institutional projects. She is especially interested in fighting stigmatisation and marginalisation within the LGBT community. Radica is currently trying to establish the bisexual community in Serbia (and in the wider post-Yugoslav space). She is the founder of the page The Bisexuals of Serbia and the organiser of the international bisexual persons visibility day (Bi Visibility Day) during the 2013 and 2014 Belgrade Pride Week.
Sanja Kajinić is working as MIREES academic tutor and lecturer at the University of Bologna, School of Political Sciences, Forlì Campus. She received her PhD from the Gender Studies Department of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests focus on feminist approaches to visual culture, social movement theory, and analysis of intersections of culture and politics.
Arian Kajtezović has been working on advancing trans rights in Croatia since the founding of Trans Aid in February 2012. Trans Aid is an organisation primarily focusing on the rights of trans, inter, and gender variant persons, and Arian is involved in most aspects of its work. Arian has been a member of the Steering Committee of Transgender Europe (TGEU) since 2013, becoming the Secretary in 2014. Arian is also part of the Coordinating Team of Trans Network Balkan and has served on the Advisory Committee of FRIDA—The Young Feminist Fund.
Dušan Maljković is a Belgrade-based publicist, translator, and long-term LGBT activist. He studied philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University
of Belgrade, and worked for a variety of both radio and print media outlets. Since 2010, he has been the editor of the journal for queer theory and culture QT and the coordinator of the Belgrade Centre for Queer Studies. In 2002, he received the Heimdahl Award for his radio programme Gayming, aired on Radio Beograd 202. He is also recipient of the Grizzly Bear Award given by the Lesbian and Gay Cultural Network for the organisation of the first Belgrade Pride Parade.
Antonela Marušić holds a BA in Croatian Language and Literature. Since 1998, she has been working as a journalist and editor of various Croatian dailies and weeklies as well as in non-profit media, covering the areas of culture, music, television, and human rights. As a freelance journalist she is currently contributing articles to a variety of portals: Vox Feminae, CroL, Kulturpunkt, Stav, Arteist, and Bilten. Antonela is a member of the Croatian Writers’ Association.
Lepa Mlađenović is a feminist lesbian activist and counsellor for women with trauma of male violence and lesbians in Belgrade, Serbia. From the beginning of the Yugoslav wars, she was active in the feminist anti-war and anti-fascist group Women in Black. She was co-founder of Arkadija, Lesbian and Gay Group (1990–1997), and of the lesbian human rights organisation Labris (1995). From 1993 to 2010, she worked as a counsellor and coordinator of the counselling team at the Belgradebased Autonomous Women’s Centre (1993–2010). Lepa has written numerous essays on male violence, the feminist response to war, and the lesbian condition.
Jay Poštić holds a BA in Psychology and Women’s Studies from the University of Reno, Nevada, and an MA in Sociology from the San Diego State University. For the past twelve years, Jay has been involved in queer feminist organising, education, and advocacy related to sex/gender, gender identity and gender expression, and LGBTIQ rights. Jay is involved with several organisations— Zagreb Pride, Women’s Room, and Trans Aid.
Marija Radoman holds a BA in Sociology from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Until 2011, she worked at the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. From 2010, she has been a PhD student in the Department of Sociology, University of Belgrade, where she also worked as a research assistant for the courses on Social Demography and Gender Studies. Marija has participated in numerous conferences and research projects and published in the areas of gender and sexuality.
LGBT Activist Politics and Intersectionality in Croatia and Serbia: An Introduction
Bojan Bilić and Sanja Kajinić
On 30 June 2001, I (Sanja) participated in the first Belgrade Pride—the event which went down in the post-Yugoslav activist history as the “massacre parade”. Several hundreds of opponents, including football hooligans, right wingers, and religious activists, attacked around 30 Pride participants and then continued to demolish the city (Bilić, 2016a; Kajinić, 2003). A day before the anguished and loud scenes in the capital of Serbia, I arrived with an activist friend from a tranquil port city of Rijeka, Croatia, where we had just registered the lesbian organisation LORI.1 Our direct-action, community-oriented initiative was fuelling my optimism and in that short
1 LORI (Lezbijska organizacija Rijeka/Lesbian Organisation Rijeka) was founded in October 2000 with the aim of encouraging public acceptance of non-heterosexual sexualities. Since its establishment, it has operated as an information centre by organising presentations and discussions as well as a range of educational and creative workshops for empowering the LGBT community. More recently it has also been offering psycho-social support.
B. Bilić, S. Kajinić (eds.), Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59031-2_1
1
2 B. Bili ć and S. Kajini ć
season Rijeka felt like a San Francisco of Istria. Getting off the train to wander around the bustling streets of Belgrade, we had no premonition about what was waiting for us on the following day—an incident that would become emblematic of the magnitude of post-Yugoslav homophobia. The amount of violence and patriarchal hatred that was released onto the central Republic Square, which we only temporarily wanted to claim and share with others, made a wound that the LGBT movement in the region keeps healing even 15 years after it happened.2
On the day of the parade, before the main group of women from Labris3 arrived to the intended starting place of the march, I witnessed a terrifying beating up of a young punk bystander. While trying to push the attackers away from him, I got slapped by a bearded man who was wearing Serbian nationalist symbols and looking like someone who came from the very distant past. The next moment I remember, I was walking with two friends towards the Slavija Square hoping to reach the safety of the Labris office, where other Pride participants were also returning. The three of us had to walk through the group of attackers on the same sidewalk with them, in the same street, only heading in the opposite direction. I think that we managed to escape an attack and were not recognised as lesbian or bisexual women because my friend was in a wheelchair. At times, her then-girlfriend was pushing the wheelchair, at times, I was, and we were frozen up with fear as we literally rubbed shoulders with angry young men who were screaming homophobic and nationalist slogans. We remained safe because in the heteronormative imagination, a disabled woman is not instantly recognisable as a
2 For a better understanding of LGBT-related activist dynamics in the post-Yugoslav region, it is important to note that decriminalisation of homosexuality in the various republics preceded or was not directly associated with any direct activist/non-institutional engagement. Rather, decriminalisation occurred as a result of the routine revision of the penal code and not due to wider human rights claims. In socialist Yugoslavia, homosexuality was decriminalised in the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro, as well as in Vojvodina, an autonomous province in the Republic of Serbia, as early as 1977. The second wave of decriminalisation took place in 1994 in the rest of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia (Ljevak, 2016).
3 Labris (Organizacija za lezbejska ljudska prava/Organisation for lesbian human rights) is a lesbian and feminist activist organisation founded in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1995. Its mission is to support lesbian and non-heterosexual women in Serbia, decrease homophobia, improve LGBT-related legislature, and promote transregional activist co-operation. See Mlađenović (this volume) and Hura (this volume).
sexual being and even less as someone who could possibly transgress the norms and be an “enemy of the nation”—lesbian, bisexual, queer. The at-the-same-time exhilarating and nauseating feeling of this counterwalk is paired in my memory with the acute awareness of the extent to which one’s social location, that nexus formed by diverse structural and identitarian dimensions, bears upon one’s chances of survival. My friend’s disability, together with her sexuality and her nationality, costructured her particular experience of that day in a way that I shared just for a fleeting, eye-opening moment. It was her disability that protected us by rendering us invisible through ascriptions of asexuality or “compulsory” heterosexuality (Rich, 1986).4
This hetero-patriarchal misperception that was part of the violent Belgrade episode was my formative encounter with the meaning of intersectionality. All of a sudden my participation in the Belgrade Pride translated pages of intersectional readings into practice and brought home to me how the interdependent and mutually constitutive aspects of our sexuality, gender, ethnicity, ability, or health5 sway our trajectories and determine our experiences. In this regard, our volume represents an attempt to engage in a textual interrogation and reconstruction of that embodied walk. It points our attention to others who, just like the three of us, might have remained invisible and marginalised not only by the wider society, but also by those among whom they hoped to find understanding and support. By explicitly intertwining intersectionality and LGBT activism in the highly complex political space of
4 It is becoming increasingly recognised that there are important affinities between queerness and disability. Yekani, Michaelis, and Dietze (2010) argue that as political and epistemological perspectives, these two are intertwined in their resistance towards psychiatric power and the regimes of normalisation and medicalisation of the body. Moreover, Raab (as cited in Yekani et al., 2010) introduces the concept of “confiscated gender/sexuality” to capture the process through which disabled people’s immediate environment often denies them gender and sexual belonging. That is why the way in which “disabled people negotiate their sexuality implies a certain queer relationality to heteronormative regimes. They enter non-normative, transgressive relationships that, on the one hand, react to the regular asexualisation and ascription of ‘genderlessness’ as well as constant devaluation of their sexual needs by the mainstream and, on the other hand, radically challenge dichotomies such as private/public or love/sexuality which refer to the interrelation of sexuality and ability” (Yekani et al., 2010, p. 87). See also Ben-Moshe and Magana (2014). For an interview with a woman from Serbia who is lesbian and in a wheelchair, see Labris (2014).
5 As there is a huge lack of sociological attention paid to that issue in the post-Yugoslav context, we would like to point to Dimitrov’s (2014) text about HIV/AIDS and homosexuality in Serbia.
4 B. Bili ć and S. Kajini ć
contemporary Serbia and Croatia, we do not only look for a language that uncovers experiential facets of multiple oppressions and voices the fear and frustration that accompany exclusionary practices. We also seek to amalgamate currently disparate strands of activist engagement and reinvigorate the critical potential of intersectionality to generate the basis of non-oppressive coalitional politics. Acknowledging and writing about intersecting discriminations and asymmetrical power distributions that shape gender expressions and sexual identifications is particularly relevant in the impoverished post-Yugoslav space, where the aggressive ascendency of neoliberal capitalism in the wake of the constantly delegitimised socialist project increasingly masks precarity and uncertainty as matters of individual choices and developmental opportunities. Thus, “the need for understanding complexities posed by intersections of various axes of differentiation is as pressing today as it has always been” (Brah & Phoenix, 2004, p. 75).
Of course, even minimally legitimate intersectional analysis postulates reflections upon the researcher’s (shifting) positionalities, personal experiences, professional aspirations, and political commitments (Berger, 2015; Davis, 2014). Although both of us have been for years engaged with the post-Yugoslav region in academic (Bojan and Sanja) and activist (Sanja)—as well as what we want to believe is academic-activist—capacity, we do not argue in favour of the idea that locals are in possession of “truth” only by virtue of their existential intimacy with the “object” of study, nor do we think that precise binary oppositions between “insiders” and “outsiders” are at all tenable (Todorova, 1997).6 We have decided to bring Croatia and Serbia together in this book not only because of our
6 Rather than taking recourse to Eastern European “indigenous conceptualisations” (Blagojević & Yair, 2010, p. 346) in our critical attitude towards neo-colonialist practices within the global system of institutionalised social sciences, we are more interested in politics of translation and the processes through which non-linear movements of concepts and policies result in unintended and unanticipated assemblages (Clarke, Bainton, Lendvai, & Stubbs, 2015). Such effects and meanings, (re)articulated in contexts of highly asymmetrical power relations, “remind us of the fluid and dynamic nature of the social world, encompassing ‘displacement’, ‘dislocation’, ‘transformation’, and ‘negotiation’” (Clarke et al., 2015, p. 35). Thus, “periphery” is not a passive recipient nor an “authentic” depository of knowledge, but can, rather, be seen as a “contact zone” in which “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt, 1999, p. 34) and provide us with a better insight into contradictions and tensions that are being played out in the “centre” (Gilbert, Greenberg, Helms, & Jansen, 2008).
citizenship (Sanja is a citizen of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bojan is a citizen of Serbia), with which we have both personal and political (personal-political) investments, but because we wanted to recover an analytical platform that acknowledges the nowadays largely obscured interactions and diffusions as well as painful tensions, fissures, and disappointments occurring within and between these two countries and in the wider post-Yugoslav space (see, for example, Mlađenović, this volume; Stubbs, 2012).7 Even though the majority of contributions to this volume operate within the nation-state framework, all of them, to a lesser or greater extent, problematise “methodological nationalism” (Chernilo, 2011)8 by attending to multiple transrepublic resonances and resistances, and—hopefully—encouraging inclusion of other republics that, mostly for logistical reasons, could not be represented here.9 However, more than anything else, focusing on Croatia and Serbia is for us a political act with which we want to point to the potential of nonheteronormativity to challenge synergic, mutually reinforcing, and essentially identical patriarchal mechanisms of exclusion identical patriarchal mechanisms of exclusion operating in both countries of our interest. This “antithetical solidarity” (Veljak, 2005) in which Serbia and Croatia have been “locked” for decades is illustrated by a queer activist who took part in both the 2001 Belgrade and the 2002 Zagreb Pride Parades:
Fascists and nationalists came to beat people. They all looked like men, like what traditional men look like. They were all referring to their national identity, and they were all referring to God. These are the three things that mostly stand together. They were shouting “Go to Croatia!” and “ustaše!” When I went to the Gay Pride in Croatia, nationalists were shouting: “Go to Serbia!” and “četnik”, which is the same thing, but there. We can see the
7 For more information regarding the dominance of women in (post-)Yugoslav activist enterprises, see Barilar et al. (2001) and Bilić (2012). See also Mlađenović (this volume).
8 Chernilo (2011) claims that methodological nationalism treats the nation-state as the necessary representation of the modern society and establishes an equation between the sociological concept of society and the process of historical formation of the nation-state in modernity. See also Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002).
9 Stubbs (2012, p. 14) argues that “the variable geometry and discursive claims of space, scale and reach need to be studied without imposing an a priori nation-state container limit”, but also that a transnational research framework in Yugoslav studies “is a position to aspire to rather than a sine qua non”.
same pattern, this was happening several years after the war. Serbian identity is mainly constructed as opposition to Croatian—and any other—but Croatian identity was in that time the biggest threat to Serbian identity. (as cited in Dioli, 2011, p. 128)10
Thus, our volume shows that impossibilities to conform to the suffocating, but extremely resilient, “national(ist)” canon as well as methods for unleashing streams of knowledge and emotions that cannot be kept within national borders are closely associated with non-heteronormative sexualities and practices that rest—and sometimes depend—upon transnational solidarity networks.11
Moreover, as scholars and activists (activist-scholars) who have lived through the disintegration of Yugoslavia and then studied at foreign universities and had a series of precarious and temporary jobs within Western academia, our positions as editors of this volume are not devoid of contradiction. On the one hand, we insist on a longer-term ethnographic immersion, which presupposes at least an active interest in, if not a full command of, local language(s); critical engagement with the local knowledge production; theoretical sophistication that appreciates ambiguity and hybridity above and beyond (Western) normative impositions; methods that tap processes that do not operate solely at an elite level; sensitivity that recognises the emotional burden created by decades of (armed) conflicts, uncertainty, and unpredictability; as well as a policy of translation that allows sociological and anthropological accounts to be absorbed by the local communities from which they originate. On the other hand, by being at least provisionally employed by Western European universities, we have had not only a distinctly
10 Similarly, Selmić (2016) shows how non-heterosexual individuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina are increasingly positioning themselves outside and beyond the ethnocratic political system that perpetuates the idea that ethnic belonging is the crucial criterion of political life. In this regard, she asks whether LGBT activist initiatives could encourage transethnic networks of solidarity and support that would open up a path towards a different kind of polity in this profoundly divided country.
11 Slapšak (2003) theorises the transborder feminist activism in post-Yugoslav countries as made possible by a collective memory of a “certain freedom to change” that characterised (women’s) history of this region. She sees “mobility“ as comprising the meaning both of physical movement and of being emotionally “moved“ and “motivated“ (p. 299), which she relates to the way in which Žarana Papić saw the travelling of women in the post-Yugoslav region as “itself a political act” (Slapšak, 2003, p. 295).
privileged vantage point from which to observe developments at home and follow the way in which they are sometimes simplified and distorted under the pressure of ignorance, racism, and the professional constraints of neoliberal academia, but also we have had access to resources and different forms of capital that have enabled us—individually and together—to form a loose network of friends, colleagues, scholars, activists, and activist-scholars that is instrumental if collections of this kind are to be produced.
Similarly, we understand that writing first and foremost in English and publishing with a renowned international/British publisher, whose books can hardly be purchased by people in the region of our interest, is a double-edged sword: it draws attention to and solidifies symbolic and financial disparities, underscores the professional character of our work, and may, to a certain extent, distance us from and delegitimise us within the local activist communities whose work we would like to support.12 As a collective and representational activity and an arena of power struggles embedded in severely straitened circumstances in which divergent professional ambitions, existential concerns, and personality idiosyncrasies grapple for domination, activism is imbued with painful disputes regarding the ownership of activist initiatives and the legitimacy to narrate and intervene in the fragile and inevitably fragmented activist history (Bilić, 2012).13 However, the frustration that emerges from our in-betweenness, neither-here-nor-there-ness, could be partially offset by the insight that it may occasionally afford.14 Writing in English perpetuates but also hopefully opens a crack in the academic and policy mainstream that we want to address, and it may eventually dislocate the normative “centre” by enriching it with analytical frames and empirical corpus that stem from
12 For a satirical but distinctly perceptive account on the relationship between (leftist) academics and activists in today’s Serbia and Croatia, see Grupa za konceptualnu politiku (2013).
13 See, for example, how the conference REDacting Trans-Yugoslav Feminisms: Women’s Heritage Revisited, which took place in Zagreb in October 2011, revealed deep fissures on the post-Yugoslav feminist “scene” (Knežević, 2011; Ler Sofronić, 2011; Slapšak, 2012).
14 In this regard, Blagojević and Yair (2010, p. 342) argue: “Having been exposed to institutional and organisational earthquakes […], social scientists in semiperipheral areas may be said to ‘enjoy’ epistemic advantages relative to their peers in the centres of science—who work in stable locations—because they were witnessing—much to their distraught at times—the positive and negative repercussions of profound and fast social change”.
With this in mind, in the first section of this chapter we engage with the long genealogy of intersectionality as one of the most ubiquitous concepts in present-day feminist studies and explicate the way in which we approach it for the purpose of our volume. While we cannot do justice to the breadth of sophisticated debates that have proliferated along the evolutionary trajectory of intersectionality, our objective is to present it not only as an analytical and theoretical lens, but also—and perhaps primarily—as a political tool for uncovering oppression that stems from the efforts of (North American) black feminists to attend to various forms of subjugation experienced by black women. In the second section of the introduction, we draw upon this emancipatory legacy to account for the striking paucity of intersectional political consciousness in Serbia and Croatia and create a niche for our volume in the in the nowadays profoundly fragmented post-Yugoslav feminism. We then present individual contributions and show how each and every one of them illuminates specific aspects of non-heteronormative intersectionality as a lived experience that has not up to now received adequate attention. These methodologically diverse chapters, which combine empirical analysis with autoethnographic dimensions and personal activist experiences, weave an intricate map of exclusions and hierarchisations that take place not only in still quite highly homophobic state institutions, media outlets, and other public venues, but also within LGBT activist enterprises that often fall short of intersectional reflexivity and accountability.
While we are, as we have indicated above, aware that “the encounter between activism and the academy has never been an easy one” (Stubbs, 2012, p. 12), by bringing political and conceptual concerns into conversation with activist practices, we aim to progress beyond elitist “research on activism” and strengthen our commitment to reflexive activist-research (Barilar et al., 2001; Bilić, 2016b; Bilić & Stubbs, 2016). This academic-activist symbiosis (Bevington & Dixon, 2005), which presupposes “a kind of bending and blending of different positions and perspectives” (Stubbs, 2012, p. 12) does not only bring
reality to sometimes overly abstruse theoretical inquiries, but it constitutes part and parcel better OF our belief that the LGBT movement as an agent of progressive social change needs to be “on the leading edge of those who are asking the tough questions about who’s left out and why, and what to do about that” (Sears as cited in Sernatinger & Echeverria, 2013, online).15
Intersectionality and Its Political Potential
“Intersectionality was a lived reality before it became a term” exclaimed black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (2015, online) in her recent assessment of the long and convoluted developmental trajectory of the concept that she coined in 1989 (Crenshaw, 1989). A tinge of frustration that comes out of her statement points to the fact that intersectionality, both widely celebrated and seriously contested, has become a trope in academic efforts that engage with the ways in which certain combinations of identitarian dimensions are structurally occluded and subordinated. While hailed as the most enduring contribution of black feminism to social theory in the last quarter century (Cooper, 2015; McCall, 2005), intersectionality has become so popular that there does not seem to be much of a consensus on what it exactly is and how an intersectional analysis should be done (Davis, 2008; Parent, DeBlaere, & Moradi, 2013). This “double entanglement” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 6) is often the destiny of versatile concepts that
move across disciplines and geographies [and] fall prey to widespread misrepresentation, tokenisation, displacement, and disarticulation. Because the concept of intersectionality emerged as a tool to counter multiple
15 Sears (as cited in Sernatinger & Echeverria, 2013, online) states: “At the very best, the better end of Marxism has tended to adopt and work out the best ideas liberals have about sexual freedom. Through the twentieth century, certainly in my period as a socialist and queer activist, my view looking back on the record of a socialist-queer movement was that it was largely picking up the best knowledge of the liberal-left of the existing movement and putting out a liberal political practice. I think that one of the things we’ve learned from the queer movement is that that’s not good enough”. See also Sears (2005).
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para condenarte que tu inocencia para hazerte salua. Beuire en soledad de ti y en conpañia de los dolores que en tu lugar me dexas los quales de conpasion viendome quedar sola por acompañadores me diste. Tu fin acabará dos vidas; la tuya sin causa y la mia por derecho, y lo que biuiere despues de tí me será mayor muerte que la que tú recibirás, porque muy mas atormenta deseada que padecella. Pluguiera á Dios que fueras llamada hija de la madre que muryo y no de la que te vido morir. De las gentes serás llorada en quanto el mundo durare. Todos los que de tí tenian noticia auian por pequeña cosa este reyno que auies de eredar, segund lo que merecias. Podiste caber en la yra de tu padre y dizen los que te conoscen que no cupiera en toda la tierra tu merecer. Los ciegos deseauan vista para verte y los mudos habla por alabarte y los pobres riqueza para seruirte; á todos eras agradable y á Persio fuiste odiosa. Si algund tiempo biuo, él recebirá de sus obras galardon iusto, y avnque no me queden fuerças para otra cosa sino para desear morir para vengarme dél, tomallas he prestadas de la enemistad que le tengo, puesto que esto no me
satisfaga, porque no podra sanar el dolor de la manzilla la secucion de la vengança. ¡O hija mia! ¿por qué si la onestad es prueua de la virtud no dió el rey mas crédito á tu presencia que al testimonio? En la habla, en las obras, en los pensamientos siempre mostraste coraçon virtuoso, ¿pues por qué consiente Dios que mueras? No hallo por cierto otra causa sino que puede mas la muchedumbre de mis pecados que el merecimiento de tu iustedad y quiso[274] que mis errores comprehendiesen tu innocencia. Pon, hija mia, el coraçon en el cielo; no te duela dexar lo que se acaba por lo que permanece. Quiere el señor que padezcas como martyr porque gozes como bienauenturada. De mi no leues deseo, que si fuere dina de yr do fueres, sin tardança te sacaré dél. ¡Qué lastyma tan cruel para mi que suplicaron tantos al rey por tu vida y no pudieron todos defendella y podrá vn cuchillo acaballa el qual dexará el padre culpado y la madre con dolor y la hija sin salud y el reyno sin eredera! Detengo me tanto contigo, luz mia, y digote palabras tan lastimeras que te quiebren el coraçon porque deseo que mueras en mi poder de dolor por no verte morir en el del verdugo
por iusticia, el qual avnque derrame tu sangre no terna tan crueles las manos como el rey la condicion. Pero pues no se cumple mi deseo, antes que me yaya recibe los postrimeros besos de mí, tu piadosa madre; y assi me despido de tu vista y de mas querer la mia.
EL AUCTOR
Como la reyna acabó su habla, no quise esperar la respuesta de la innocente por no recebir doblada manzilla, y assi ella y las señoras de quien fue aconpañada se despidieron della con el mayor llanto de todos los que en el mundo son hechos. Y despues que fue yda enbié á Laureola vn mensaiero suplicandole escriuiese al rey, creyendo que auria más fuerça en sus piadosas palabras que en las peticiones de quien auia trabaiado su libertad. Lo qual luego puso en obra con mayor turbacion que esperança. La carta dezia en esta manera:
CARTA DE LAUREOLA AL REY
Padre, he sabido que me sentencias á muerte y que se cumple de aquí á tres dias el termino de mi vida, por donde conozco que no menos deuen
temer los inocentes la ventura que los culpados la ley, pues me tiene mi fortuna en el estrecho que me podiera tener la culpa que no tengo, lo qual conocerias si la saña te dexase ver la verdad. Bien sabes la virtud que las coronicas pasadas publican de los reyes y reynas donde yo procedo; pues ¿por qué nacida yo de tal sangre creyste mas la informacion falsa que la bondad natural? Si te plaze matarme, por voluntad obralo, que por iusticia no tienes porqué; la muerte que tú me dieres, avnque por causa de temor la rehuse, por razon de obedecer la consiento, auiendo por meior morir en tu obediencia que beuir en tu desamor. Pero todavia te suplico que primero acuerdes que determines, porque, como Dios es verdad, nunca hize cosa porque mereciese pena. Mas digo, señor, que la hiziera, tan conuenible te es la piedad de padre como el rigor de iusto. Sin dubda yo deseo tanto mi vida por lo que á ti toca como por lo que á mi cunple, que al cabo so hija. Cata, señor, que quien crueza haze su peligro busca. Mas seguro de caer estaras siendo amado por clemencia que temido por crueldad. Quien quiere ser temido forçado es que tema. Los reyes crueles de todos los onbres
son desamados y estos á las vezes buscando cómo se venguen hallan cómo se pierdan. Los suditos de los tales mas desean la rebuelta del tienpo que la conseruacion de su estado; los saluos temen su condicion y los malos su iusticia. Sus mismos familiares les tratan y buscan la muerte vsando con ellos lo que dellos aprendieren. Digote, señor, todo esto porque deseo que se sostente tu onrra y tu vida. Mal esperança teman los tuyos en ti viendote cruel contra mi; temiendo otro tanto les darés en[275] exemplo de qualquier osadia, que quien no está seguro nunca asegura. ¡O quanto estan libres de semeiantes ocasiones los principes en cuyo coraçon está la clemencia; si por ellos conuiene que mueran sus naturales, con voluntad se ponen por su saluacion al peligro, velanlos de noche, guardanlos de dia; más esperança tienen los beninos y piadosos reyes en el amor de las gentes que en la fuerça de los muros de sus fortalezas; quando salen á las plaças el que más tarde los bendice y alaba más temprano piensa que yerra. Pues mira, señor, el daño que la crueldad causa y el prouecho que la mansedumbre procura, y si
todavia te pareciere meior seguir antes la opinion de tu saña que el conseio propio, malauenturada sea hija que nacio para poner en condicion la vida de su padre, que por el escandalo que pornas con tan cruel obra nadie se fiará de ti ni tú de nadie te deues fiar porque con tu muerte no procure algund su seguridad. Y lo que más siento sobre todo es que daras contra mi la sentencia y harás de tu memoria la iusticia la qual será siempre acordada mas por la causa della que por ella misma. Mi sangre ocupará poco lugar y tu crueza toda la tierra. Tú serás llamado padre cruel y yo sere dicha hija innocente, que pues Dios es iusto él aclarará mi verdad. Assi quedaré libre de culpa quando aya recebido la pena.
EL AUCTOR
Despues que Laureola acabó de escreuir, enbió la carta al rey con vno de aquellos que la guardavan, y tan amada era de aquel y todos los otros guardadores que le dieran libertad si fueran tan obligados á ser piadosos como leales. Pues como el rey recibio la carta, despues de avella leydo mandó muy enoiadamente que al leuador
della le tirasen delante, lo qual yo viendo començe de nueuo a maldezir mi ventura y puesto que mi tormento fuese grande ocupaua el coraçon de dolor mas no la memoria de oluido para lo que hazer conuenia, y a la ora porque auia mas espacio para la pena que para el remedio hablé con Gaulo tio de Laureola, como es contado, y dixele como Leriano queria sacalla por fuerça de la prision, para lo quél le suplicaua mandase iuntar alguna gente para que sacada de la carcel la tomase en su poder y la pusiese en saluo, porque si el consigo la leuase podria dar lugar al testimonio de los malos onbres y a la acusacion de Persio. Y como no le fuese menos cara que a la reyna la muerte de Laureola, respondiome que aceutaua lo que dezia, y como su voluntad y mi deseo fueron conformes dió priesa en mi partida porque antes quel hecho se supiese se despachase. La qual puse luego en obra, y llegado donde Leriano estaua dile cuenta de lo que hize y de lo poco que acabé, y hecha mi habla dile la carta de Laureola, y con la compasion de las palabras della y con pensamiento de lo que esperaua hazer traya tantas rebueltas en el coraçon que no sabia qué responderme. Lloraua
de lastyma, no sosegaua de sañudo, desconfiaua segund su fortuna, esperaua segund su iusticia. Quando pensaua que sacaríe á Laureola alegrauase, quando dudaua si lo podrie hazer enmudecia. Finalmente dexadas las dubdas, sabida la respuesta que Galio me dió, començo a proueer lo que para el negocio conplia, y como onbre proueydo, en tanto que yo estaua en la corte, iuntó quinientos onbres darmas suyos, sin que pariente ni persona del mundo lo supiese. Lo qual acordó con discreta consideracion, porque si con sus deudos lo comunicara, vnos por no deseruir al rey dixieran que era mal hecho y otros por asegurar su hazienda que lo deuia dexar y otros por ser al caso peligroso que no lo deuia enprender; assi que por estos inconuenientes y porque por alli pudiera saberse el hecho quiso con sus gentes solas acometello; y no quedando sino vn dia para sentenciar á Laureola, la noche antes iuntó sus caualleros y dixoles quanto eran mas obligados los buenos á temer la verguença que el peligro. Alli les acordo como por las obras que hizieron avn biuia la fama de los pasados; rogoles que por cobdicia de la gloria de buenos no curasen de la de biuos, traxoles a
la memoria el premio de bien morir y mostroles quanto era locura temello no podiendo escusallo.
Prometioles muchas mercedes y despues que les hizo vn largo razonamiento dixoles para qué los auia llamado, los quales a vna boz iuntos se profirieron a morir con el. Pues conociendo Leriano la lealtad de los suyos tuuose por bien aconpañado y dispuso su partida en anocheciendo, y llegado a vn valle cerca de la cibdad estuuo alli en celada toda la noche, donde dió forma en lo que auia de hazer. Mandó a vn capitan suyo con cient onbres darmas que fuese a la posada de Persio y que matase a él y a quantos en defensa se le pusiesen. Ordenó que otros dos capitanes estuviesen con cada cinquenta caualleros a pie en dos calles principales que salian a la prision, a los quales mandó que tuviesen el rostro contra la cibdad y que á quantos viniesen defendiesen la entrada de la carcel entre tanto que él con los trezientos que le quedauan trabaiaua por sacar á Laureola. Y al que dió cargo de matar á Persio díxole que en despachando se fuese á ayuntar con él y creyendo que a la buelta si acabase el hecho auia de salir
peleando, porque al sobir en los cauallos no recibiese daño, mandó aquel mismo caudillo quél y los que con el fuesen se adelantasen a la celada a caualgar para que hiziesen rostro a los enemigos en tanto quél y los otros tomauan los cauallos, con los quales dexó cinquenta onbres de pie para que los guardasen. Y como acordado todo esto començase amanecer, en abriendo las puertas mouio con su gente, y entrados todos dentro en la cibdad cada vno tuuo a cargo lo que auia de hazer. El capitan que fué a Persio dando la muerte a quantos topaua no paró hasta el que se comenzaua a armar, donde muy cruelmente sus maldades y su vida acabaron. Leriano que fue á la prision, acrecentando con la saña la virtud del esfuerço tan duramente peleó con las guardas que no podia pasar adelante sino por encima de los muertos quél y los suyos derribauan, y como en los peligros mas la bondad se acrecienta, por fuerça de armas llegó hasta donde estaua Laureola a la qual sacó con tanto acatamiento y cerimonia como en tienpo seguro lo podiera hazer, y puesta la rodilla en el suelo besole las manos como a hija de su rey. Estaua ella con la
turbacion presente tan sin fuerça que apenas podia mouerse, desmayauale el coraçon, falleciale la color, ninguna parte de biua tenia. Pues como Leriano la sacaua dela dichosa carcel que tanto bien merecio guardar, halló á Galio con vna batalla de gente que la estaua esperando y en presencia de todos gela entregó, y como quiera que sus caualleros peleauan con los que al rebato venian, púsola en una hacanea que Galio tenia adereçada, y despues de besalle las manos otra vez fue á ayudar y fauorecer su gente boluiendo siempre a ella los oios hasta que de vista la perdio. La qual sin ningun contraste leuó su tyo a Dala, la fortaleza dicha. Pues tornando á Leriano, como ya ell alboroto llegó a oydos del rey, pidio las armas y tocadas las tronpetas y atabales armose toda la gente cortesana y de la cibdad; y como el tienpo le ponia necesidad para que Leriano saliese al canpo començolo á hazer esforçando los suyos con animosas palabras, quedando siempre en la reçaga, sufriendo la multitud delos enemigos con mucha firmeza de coraçon. Y por guardar la manera onesta que requiere el rretraer, yva ordenado con menos priesa que el caso pedia, y assi perdiendo algunos
delos suyos y matando a muchos de los contrarios llegó a donde dexó los cauallos, y guardada la orden que para aquello auie dado, sin recebir reues ni peligro caualgaron él y todos sus caualleros, lo que por ventura no hiziera si antes no proueyera el remedio. Puestos todos como es dicho a cauallo, tomó delante los peones y siguio la via de Susa donde auie partido, y como se le acercauan tres batallas del rey, salido de paso apresuró algo ell andar con tal concierto y orden que ganaua tanta onrra en el retraer como en el pelear. Yva siempre en los postreros haziendo algunas bueltas quando el tiempo las pedia, por entretener los contrarios, para leuar su batalla mas sin congoxa. En el fin, no auiendo sino dos leguas como es dicho hasta Susa, pudo llegar sin que ningund suyo perdiese, cosa de gran marauilla, porque con cinco mill onbres darmas venia ya el rey enbuelto con él.
El qual muy encendido de coraie puso a la ora cerco sobre el lugar con proposito de no leuantarse de allí hasta que dél tomase vengança. Y viendo Leriano que el rey asentaua real repartio su gente por estancias segund sabio guerrero. Donde estaua el muro mas flaco ponia los mas rezios
caualleros; donde auia apareio para dar en el real ponia los mas sueltos; donde veya mas dispusicion para entralle por traycion ó engaño ponia los mas fieles. En todo proueya como sabido y en todo osaua como varon. El rey como aquel que pensaua leuar el hecho a fin, mandó fortalecer el real, y proueó en las prouisiones; y ordenadas todas las cosas que a la hueste cumplia, mandó llegar las estancias cerca de la cerca de la villa, las quales guarnecio de muy bona gente, y pareciendole segund le acuciaua la saña gran tardança esperar á tomar á Leriano por hanbre, puesto que la villa fuese muy fuerte, acordo de conbatilla lo qual prouo con tan brauo coraçon que vuo el cercado bien menester el esfuerço y la diligencia. Andaua sobre saliente con cient caualleros que para aquello tenia diputados; donde veya flaqueza se esforçaua, donde veya coraçon alabaua, donde veya mal recaudo proueya. Concluyendo, porque me alargo, el rey mandó apartar el combate con perdida de mucha parte de sus caualleros, en especial de los mancebos cortesanos que sienpre buscan el peligro por gloria. Leriano fue herido en el rostro y no menos perdió muchos
onbres principales. Pasado assi este conbate diole el rey otros cinco en espacio de tres meses, de manera que le fallecian ya las dos partes de su gente, de cuya razon hallaua dudoso su hecho, como quiera que en el rostro, ni palabras, ni obras nadie gelo conosciese, porque en el coraçon del caudillo se esfuerçan los acaudillados. Finalmente como supo que otra vez ordenauan dele conbatir, por poner coraçon a los que le quedauan hizoles una habla en esta forma.
LERIANO Á SUS CAUALLEROS
Por cierto, caualleros, si como soys pocos en número no fuésedes muchos en fortaleza yo ternia alguna duda en nuestro hecho segun nuestra mala fortuna, pero como sea mas estimada la virtud que la muchedumbre, vista la vuestra antes temo necesidad de ventura que de caualleros y con esta consideracion en solos vosotros tengo esperança. Pues es puesta en nuestras manos nuestra salud, tanto por sustentacion de vida como por gloria de fama nos conviene pelear. Agora se nos ofrece causa para dexar la bondad que eredamos á los que nos han de eredar, que
malauenturados seriamos si por flaqueza en nosotros se acabasse la eredad. Assi pelead que libreys de verguença vuestra sangre y mi nombre. Oy se acaba ó se confirma nuestra onrra; sepamosnos defender y no avergonçar, que muy mayores son los galardones de las victorias que las ocasiones de los peligros. Esta vida penosa en que bevimos no sé porqué se deua mucho querer, que es breue en los días y larga en los trabaios, la qual ni por temor se acrecienta, ni por osarse acorta, pues quando nascemos se limita su tiempo, por donde escusado es el miedo y devida la osadía. No nos pudo nuestra fortuna poner en meior estado que en esperança de onrrada muerte ó gloriosa fama. Cudicia de alabança, auaricia de onrra acaban otros hechos mayores quel nuestro; no temamos las grandes conpañas llegadas al real, que en las afrentas los menos pelean; á los sinples espanta la multitud de los muchos y á los sabios esfuerça la virtud de los pocos. Grandes apareios tenemos para osar; la bondad nos obliga, la iusticia nos esfuerça, la necesidad nos apremia. No ay cosa porque deuamos temer y ay mill para que deuamos morir. Todas las
razones, caualleros leales, que os he dicho eran escusadas para creceros fortaleza pues con ella nacistes, mas quíselas hablar porque en todo tiempo el coraçon se deue ocupar en nobleza, en el hecho con las manos, en la soledad con los pensamientos, en conpañia con las palabras como agora hazemos, y no menos porque recibo ygual gloria con la voluntad amorosa que mostrays como con los hechos fuertes que hazeys. Y porque me parece segund se adereça el combate que somos costreñidos á dexar con las obras las hablas, cada vno se vaya á su estancia.
EL AUCTOR
Con tanta constancia de animo fue Leriano respondido de sus caualleros que se llamó dichoso por hallarse dino dellos; y porque estaua ya ordenado el conbate fuese cada vno á defender la parte que le cabia; y poco despues que fueron llegados tocaron en el real los atauales y tronpetas y en pequeño espacio estauan iuntos al muro cincuenta mill onbres los quales con mucho vigor començaron el hecho, donde Leriano tuuo lugar de mostrar su virtud y segund los de dentro defendian creya el rey que
ninguno dellos faltaua. Duró el conbate desde medio dia hasta la noche que los departio. Fueron heridos y muertos tres mill de los del real y tantos de los de Leriano, que de todos los suyos no le auian quedado sino ciento y cincuenta, y en su rostro segund esforçado no mostraua ayer perdido ninguno, y en su sentimiento segund amoroso parecia que todos le auian salido del anima. Estuuo toda aquella noche enterrando los muertos y loando los biuos, no dando menos gloria á los que enterraua que á los que veya. Y otro día en amaneciendo, al tienpo que se remudan las guardas acordo que cincuenta de los suyos diesen en vna estancia que vn pariente de Persio tenía cercana al muro, porque no pensase el rey que le faltaua coraçon ni gente; lo qual se hizo con tan firme osadia que quemada la estancia mataron muchos de los defensores della, y como ya Dios tuviese por bien que la verdad de aquella pendencia se mostrase, fue preso en aquella vuelta vno de los damnados que condenaron á Laureola, y puesto en poder de Leriano mandó que todas las maneras de tormento fuesen obradas en él hasta que dixese porqué leuantó el testimonio, el
qual sin premia ninguna confesó todo el hecho como pasó. Y despues que Leriano de la verdad se informó, enbiole al rey suplicandole que saluase á Laureola de culpa y que mandase iusticiar aquel y á los otros que de tanto mal auien sido causa. Lo qual el rey sabido lo cierto aceutó con alegre voluntad por la iusta razon que para ello le requeria. Y por no detenerme en las prolixidades que en este caso pasaron, de los tres falsos onbres se hizo tal la iusticia como fue la maldad. El cerco fue luego alçado y el rey tuuo á su hija por libre y á Leriano por desculpado, y llegado á Suria enbió por Laureola á todos los grandes de su corte, la qual vino con ygual onrra de su merecimiento.
Fue recebida del rey y la reyna con tanto amor y lagrimas de gozo como se derramaran de dolor; el rey se desculpaua, la reyna la besaua, todos la seruian y assi se entregauan con alegria presente de la pena pasada. A Leriano mandole el rey que no entrase por estonces en la corte hasta que pacificase a él y a los parientes de Persio, lo que recibio a graveça porque no podria ver á Laureola, y no podiendo hazer otra cosa sintiolo en estraña manera. Y viendose apartado
della, dexadas las obras de guerra, boluiose á las congoxas enamoradas, y deseoso de saber en lo que Laureola estaua rogome que le fuese á suplicar que diese alguna forma onesta para que la pudiese ver y hablar, que tanto deseaba Leriano guardar su onestad que nunca penso hablalla en parte donde sospecha en ella se pudiese tomar, de cuya razon él era merecedor de sus mercedes. Yo que con plazer aceutaua sus mandamientos, partime para Suria, y llegado allá, despues de besar las manos á Laureola, supliquele lo que me dixo, a lo quél me respondió: que en ninguna manera lo haria por muchas causas que me dió para ello. Pero no contento con dezir gelo aquella vez todas las que veya gelo suplicaua; concluyendo respondiome al cabo que si mas en aquello le hablaua que causaria que se desmesurase contra mi. Pues visto su enoio y responder fui á Leriano con graue tristeza y quando le dixe que de nueuo se comenzauan sus desauenturas, sin duda estuuo en condicion de desesperar. Lo qual yo viendo, por entretenelle, dixele que escriuiese á Laureola acordandole lo que hizo por ella y estrañandole su mudança en la merced que en escriuille le
començo á hazer Respondiome que auia acordado bien, mas que no tenia que acordalle lo que auia hecho por ella pues no era nada segund lo que merecia y tanbien porque era de onbres baxos repetir lo hecho; y no menos me dixo que ninguna memoria le haria del galardon recebido porque se defiende en ley enamorada escreuir que satisfacen se recibe, por el peligro que se puede recrecer si la carta es vista, asi que sin tocar en esto escriuio á Laureola las siguientes razones:
CARTA DE LERIANO Á LAUREOLA
Laureola, segund tu virtuosa piedad, pues sabes mi pasion, no puedo creer que sin alguna causa la consientas, pues no te pido cosa á tu onrra fea ni á ti graue. Si quieres mi mal ¿por qué lo dudas? á sin razon muero, sabiendo tú que la pena grande assi ocupa el coraçon que se puede sentir y no mostrar. Si lo has por bien pensado que me satisfazes con la pasion que me das porque dandola tú es el mayor bien que puedo esperar, iustamente lo harias si la dieses a fin de galardon. Pero ¡desdichado yo! que la causa tu hermosura y
