The issue of national identity is taken seriously by Balkan people – including the least serious among them.
Next year in Belgrade? Don’t Count on it
London | 29 September 2009 | By Marcus Tanner
Yes, but only up to a point. The reality is that governments often face a dilemma when balancing their desire to uphold the law against the need to preserve public order – and quite often they sacrifice the former to the latter. It doesn’t sound as if it would have been much of a celebration anyway, with thousands of cops shielding a couple of hundred marchers from a baying mob.
Ah, but without visibility there’s no hope of progress, equality activists say; our situation is the same it was in London, or Paris, or Berlin, a few decades ago. This analysis is questionable. Visibility only helps change society’s attitudes when the public is half-willing to accept what’s being put in front of it. Otherwise, the results can be totally counterproductive – the parade acting as a lightning rod for public fury.
And Belgrade today is not “like London” was 30 years ago. It’s not like it was 40, 50 or a hundred years ago. Balkan equality activists have been taking the discourse of their UK counterparts on their heroic fights against the force of darkness and conservatism in the 1960s a bit too literally.
Lesbians never had that much of a problem in England – ever, as far as one can tell. When those two high society girls, Lady Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, refused to marry and instead eloped to Wales to set up house in the 1780s they became legends in their own lifetimes, not fugitives. They didn’t have the equivalent of Obraz on their backs, threatening to murder them. Curious people trekked for miles to see the “Ladies of Llangollen”, as they were known, after they town where they settled. The fact that they lived openly as man and wife, or rather as man and man, for they both wore male clothes, made them seem odd, not evil.
It was different, much more difficult, for men, of course. But even if the middle and upper class British hated homosexuality as a vice that undermined the empire, the same can’t always be said for the much, much more numerous working class – in London especially.
In the 19th century, cross-dressing artistes – the original drag queens – were wowing working-class crowds in pubs with burlesque routines of songs and dirty jokes. Take the careers of Earnest Boulton and Frederick Park, two guys who preferred to be known as “Fanny” and “Stella”. Far from hiding in slums, or emerging only at night, this infamous cross-dressing duo marched round the centre of London in broad daylight in the late 1860s, wearing huge crinoline dresses and bonnets – often followed by their fans and admirers.
True, middle-class London eventually decided it was being mocked, and had the police arrest them for “indecent conduct” in 1871. But the jury threw out the case. Just as interestingly, their working-class neighbours knew the whole story about Fanny and Stella from the word “go”– that they were a couple of men in frocks. They never gave them much trouble. It was the church-going middle classes, predictably, that did the persecuting. They were the ones holding the line against “vice” and making sure the law and the police did, too.
But once the middle classes lost their taste for social conservatism in the 1960s and discovered sex, a seachange immortalized in a famous poem by Philip Larkin, the end of that crusade was in sight. Abolishing the laws that criminalized homosexuality in the 1960s was pushing at an open door. The biggest danger gay pride marches have faced since then in the UK is the weather.
Yes, gay bashing and bullying continue in the UK, especially in schools. But, as in neighbouring Holland and France, hard-line homophobia has become a minority interest. It’s often more a preserve of socially conservative ethnic minority cultures than it is of the mainstream population. It’s not that popular anymore, and definitely not “respectable”, which is why so many middle-of-the-road TV stars and comperes of TV shows in the UK are gays and lesbians now – think of Sandi Toksvig, Sue Perkins, Julian Clary and Dale Winton for starters. These aren’t risqué figures, parked in late-night slots on marginal stations that hopefully no one listens to. They’re prime-time “family” entertainers on the BBC’s flagship Radio 4.
Activists in Belgrade, Zagreb or Sarajevo need to face the fact that they are just not in the same boat and perhaps not even heading in the same direction. Their capitals are not sprawling, culturally autonomous metropolises – cities where pressure to conform to pretty much anything is fairly weak – and where often the only real rule appears to be “Mind your own business!”. Balkan capitals don’t overawe the surrounding countryside and its traditional values. The countryside and its values overawe them. Major difference. That doesn’t mean activists giving up the ghost; it does mean being realistic about the set of cards they hold in their hand. It may mean the whole idea of parades is a non-starter.
Maybe Belgrade, or Sarajevo, will turn into the new Madrid – dump their reputations for conservatism and conformity overnight, change their personalities and go all liberal, like the Spanish did in the 1980s. But it’s hard to imagine that happening right now, following the latest news from the city. So, next year in Belgrade? Don’t count on it.
2009-09-30 16:46:26