Queer people have always been here. Sadly, much of queer history across the world has been lost or remains hidden still, in private archives. The same seems to be the case for Novi Sad. Feminist activist and journalist Vanja Petrović works to uncover some of the hidden and marginalized stories of her city’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community.
Activist and drag artist Ana Jovanović grew up in Novi Sad and has participated in Roma activism since her teenage years. However, she was unaware that an established queer community existed in the city before the LGBTIQ+ youth community center Group COME OUT (Grupa Izađi) organized Pride in 2019.
“Had Group ‘COME OUT’ not organized Pride and made themselves known publicly, I would not have approached them,” Ana said. She added that it makes sense to her that we don’t know much about local queer history because of safety issues and the need to remain “incognito.”
The question remains: What do we know of our history? This text attempts to tease out the threads of Novi Sad’s queer history. We begin in one of the region’s darkest periods, the 1990s.
The 1990s: The Jumping-Off Point in a Country in Turmoil
By decriminalizing homosexuality in 1977, the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina adopted a relatively progressive stance for its time. Although homosexuality was recriminalized in the province in the early 1990s for a period of four years, there are indications that Novi Sad was fairly socially liberal in the 1980s. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of the likely rich queer history of Novi Sad from that period remains hidden in private archives across the city, waiting to be uncovered and celebrated.
However, in 1997, the Women’s Studies and Research center was founded in Novi Sad by feminist linguist and theoretician Svenka Savić, and served as a space where many queer women who would later become active in different LGBTIQ+ organizations and initiatives first became acquainted with queer and feminist theory. The late Čarna Ćosić, a Novi Sad activist, artist, poet, and co-founder of the Novi Sad Lesbian Organization, said that Svenka gave her the freedom to work on things that interested her, and she considered her time at the center a significant part of her education.
This period also saw many gay and gay-friendly places open up and develop a cult following. The gay-friendly café and bookstore Nublu opened in 1994.
“By the late 1990s, the queer population of Novi Sad had iconic gay parties at attractive venues. The club ‘Obsession’ was the main place to dance in peace, but we also had queer hair salons, boutiques, and cafés as gathering spots,” said Biljana Stanković Lori, artist and co-founder of Novi Sad’s first lesbian organization.
The 2000s: A Dangerous but Hopeful Time
Long-time activist, graphic designer, and founder of Group COME OUT, Adorjan Kurucz, spoke about what it was like to be a young gay man in Novi Sad in the early 2000s: “Discretion was the hallmark of queer life in Novi Sad. You would go to Belgrade to mess around and then come back here to live your modest, closeted life.”
He added, “We did not have a community back then.”
At that time, Kurucz was a graphic designer for Serbia’s first – and, at that time, only – gay magazine, Dečko (Boyfriend), which was published from 2001 until 2004 by a Novi Sad organization called New Age Rainbow. Kurucz and the editor-in-chief, Atila Kovač, would sometimes perform activist interventions in public spaces by reading the magazine while riding around on the bus. He says this was a dangerous thing to do at the time.
“There are no photos (of these interventions) because, well… you had to shoot on film and who’s going to develop it? You couldn’t just leave evidence lying around.”
Although life for queer people was difficult as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, in January 2000, Novi Sad was home to the first gay and lesbian conference in the country. In his report on the conference for the February 2000 edition of the Labris newspaper, Kovač wrote that the conference aimed to speak openly about homosexuality and begin a “resocialization” of queer people, a reintroduction into society.
In September of 2004, Labris, a lesbian and feminist organization from Belgrade, organized the third Lesbian Week, which brought together lesbians from across the former Yugoslav countries. Less than a month later, the Novi Sad Lesbian Organization (NLO) was founded on October 23 by Čarna Ćosić and Biljana Stanković Lori with the goal of empowering lesbians and promoting lesbian culture and rights.
Lori wrote this about how NLO came to be:
“About ten of us lesbians, who had barely seen one another despite living in the same city, sat down in my living room and looked each other straight in the eyes—once, twice, three times… We were motivated by Lepa Mlađenović (long-time lesbian, feminist, and anti-war activist). She simply brought us together from all sides, in the way only she knows how, all thanks to her ‘sweetie’ discourse. As I recall, at least three of us came with Svenka’s dowry tucked under our arms. The idea of founding a lesbian group was born right there in Novi Sad, during the third Lesbian Week.”
NLO created a video archive and library, held workshops and creative discussion groups, organized the lesbian activist festival Art for Action from 2008 until 2013, and was home to the Feminist Theater of Novi Sad (FENS). Slovenian feminist Maja Pan saw Lori perform under the FENS banner in 2000 during the second Lesbian Week in Sombor and said, “She fascinated me to such an extent that I didn’t dare to approach her afterward. She was an irresistibly seductive, charismatic activist and artist!”
Unfortunately, NLO disbanded in 2013 due to a lack of funding. Importantly, members of NLO were also among the founders of the CK13 youth center, which to this day remains one of the few truly independent spaces in the city. Feminist and queer activist and theoretician Laura Pejak told me that they see CK13 as a central space for queer culture in the city:
“CK13 is the space where both NLO and the Group COME OUT found refuge at one point, and where some of the first events of the trans community in our city were held—a space which is, to this day, probably the main gathering place for the LGBT+ community here.”
2010s: A Bit More Room to Breathe
The Group COME OUT first began as an informal support group for young gay men in 2010. They met at CK13 and were strongly influenced by the youth center’s antifascist roots, according to Adorjan. NLO helped Adorjan find funding for the support group. He remembers this time fondly and says that a testament to the importance of CK13 is the fact that these young gay men, who had at first been reluctant to attend events at the center because they perceived it as a place for “metalheads”, were first in line to lend support to the center when it came under attack in a wave of gentrification of that part of the city.
Group COME OUT held its founding assembly in 2013. It opened the first social center for LGBTI+ youth and their families in Serbia in 2018 and established counseling services for LGBTI+ persons and their families in 2019. The group organizes the annual Novi Sad Pride Week and was behind the first Novi Sad Pride.
Where Do We Go Now?
I asked Aleksa Savić, executive director of Group COME OUT, why he thinks we do not know so much about our history here in Novi Sad. He said, “A systematized memory of decades of effort by the LGBTI+ movement does not exist, as this suits political decision-makers. Activists, faced with pervasive systemic and interpersonal discrimination in everyday life, burn out and abandon their efforts, rarely finding the strength to adequately document their work and pass on knowledge to younger generations. It suits those in power that we’re always starting from scratch.”
I asked Lori the same question. Her answer was surprisingly similar to Aleksa’s: “Those who built queer history did not have sufficient support and collaboration for archives to be preserved or handed over to new organizations for historical review. The movement is driven by a need for quick heroism and for rewarding measurable impact. Grassroots activism, as an idea of building a community worthy of everyone who wants to belong, is slowly disappearing. Mainstream activism is increasingly present, and its form is temporary and always driven by donor requirements. Authenticity has disappeared.”
For their part, Laura was somewhat more hopeful. Although they note a clear shift in the culture of young queer people, they do see continuities at least in the fact that many queer groups continue meeting and holding events at CK13.
“Unfortunately, due to processes of gentrification and repression, there are fewer and fewer of them in our city, and many groups are forced to start completely from scratch,” they said.
One thing is certain: much of Novi Sad’s queer history remains to be uncovered. Here’s to hoping that future generations will have greater scope for action and a lesser need for activist heroism.
To learn more about the marginalized histories and vibrant communities of our region, get the digital edition of City Less Ordinary.
Author: Vanja Petrović
Photographs: Private archive (Biljana Stanković Lori)
