The history of gay porn cinema.

[haiducii]

Queer Cinema In Southeastern Europe

''Queer film festivals have gradually become well established and a part of contemporary culture in the Western world over the course of the last 20 years. Although most of these festivals are still regarded as independent and marginal events, some of them have become part of mainstream culture,'' wrote Serap Erincin in Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (2006). In the late 1970's and early 1980's the first annual gay film festivals developed, especially in big cities - which have historically been more welcoming to subcultures and gay communities - in the US. In 1977 the very first edition of what today is known as the Frameline Festival in San Francisco took place under the name of the Gay Film Festival of Super-8 Films.

HERE is a map of LGBT Film Fetsivals Global (1977 - 2015)

In the mid-1980's several festivals were founded in Europe. Somewhat surprisingly the first European gay and lesbian film festival started in Yugoslavia, now Slovenia, in Ljubljana on April 23, 1984. This is surprising because queer film festivals massively spread to Eastern Europe in the late 1990's and early 2000's in a sort of queer globalisation. This anomaly can be explained by Yugoslavia's position as a country that was open to the West and enjoyed relative independence from the strict Soviet political agenda in contrast to the rest of the Eastern bloc.

While homosexual acts had been decriminalized in a number of countries in the region in the 1960's and 1970's, homosexuality was certainly not accepted or encouraged by the state. Lenin's dictum that film is the most important of the arts coupled with the fact that most film studios were state run meant that control over film production was even tighter than over book publishing or theater. While there no doubt were gay and lesbian directors, screenwriters, and actors, they do not appear to have smuggled much if any covert gay meaning into their films. Homoerotic images—images presented as or read as the objects of same-sex desire on the part of either the viewer or a character in the film itself—could be found: women's bodies have always been objectified in film, and Socialist-Realist films often presented male bodies for admiration as well.

Movie available HERE​

Queers and queer desire are virtually invisible in feature films from Eastern Europe before the 1980's. There were a few films about homosocial relationships with homoerotic overtones: Wajda's Promised Land (1975) and Zanussi's Camouflage (1977), for example; and occasionally stereotypical gay characters were included in episodes for comic relief, for example in Zivko Nikolic's Beauty of Sin (1986), where the swishy gay character wears makeup and makes fruitless passes at the visiting village macho. But only in the 1980's, with increasing relaxation of political scrutiny, did the first gay and lesbian characters appear as the focus of feature films.

Movie available HERE​

The first film in Eastern Europe to feature homosexuality openly was Karoly Makk's Another Way (1982). It was also the first film in Hungary to refer to the events of 1956 as a revolution, rather than a counter-revolution. Makk's film was therefore groundbreaking in its portrayal of both sexual and political dissidence. The screenplay by Makk and Erszébet Galgoczi was based on Galgoczi's 1980 novel, Another Love. Makk's film, which won the 1982 FIPRESCI critics' award at Cannes, centers on the love between two women journalists in the aftermath of 1956. In his article on Hungarian film in Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, David Paul writes that ''at first glance the issues of lesbianism and censorship may strike one as unlikely twins'', but the connection between sexual and political dissidence should be obvious, and the parallels are drawn brilliantly in both the film and the novel. Makk, one of Hungary's top directors, confessed that the story grabbed him both because of its dramatic tension and because it contained two taboo subjects: lesbian love and 1956. In October 1956, the people of Hungary stood up against the oppression of Soviet rule. The subsequent uprising almost succeeded but the Soviet Union, in a full show of force, re-established its control and the revolution was quashed as quickly as it had erupted.

Eva is politically the more outspoken and the more out of the two journalists. At the newspaper she crusades for revealing the truth about the methods used to coerce farmers into joining the collective, and her refusal to compromise results in her losing her job. Eva is much more cautious in her affair with the married Livia, who obviously loves her, but is less willing to brave the consequences. When Livia finally tells her husband Donci she's leaving him, he shoots her, perhaps leaving her paralyzed for life. Livia then rejects Eva again, and the latter is shot trying to cross the border.

One might argue that the shape of the plot is homophobic, since one lesbian is killed in a quasi-suicide and the other is shot by her jealous husband and paralyzed. Vito Russo doents numerous Hollywood films in which homosexuals are punished by death at the end of the plot, but the suicide and homophobic violence in Another Way are not meant to confirm heterosexual values. Donci's actions are meant to turn the audience against brutal homophobia. The predicament of real lesbians in Hungary is revealed both in the authorities' ignorance about lesbian sex (one investigator asks, ''how do you do it?'') and in a scene in which the police harass the pair for kissing on a park bench. After checking their doents, the policeman reminds Eva that ''we are not in America'', she is detained, and Livia is warned to return to her husband.

Two films from Yugoslavia in the early 1990's feature transgendered heroes / heroines: Srdjan Karanovic's Virgina (1992), about a girl raised as a boy in the early 1900s, and Zelimir Zilnik's Marble Ass (1994), about a transvestite prostitute in contemporary Beograd. Set in the mythic past, Karanovic's Virgina is about a sworn virgin - a village girl raised as a male because the family had no male children. Virgina shows a culturally conservative society in which the expectation that the sworn virgin will live as a man comes into conflict with her desire to live as she wants. In the West people usually think of transvestites and transgendered people as going against societal norms to perform their desired identities, but in the case of sworn virgins, it is the patriarchal society that forces the women to live as men.

Movie available HERE​

Transvestism is also a central plot device in a more recent film from the region, Ahmed Imamovic’s Go West (2005). Go West focuses on a mixed gay couple in Sarajevo: Kenan, a Muslim, and Milan, a Serb. Though set in the 1990's, when some sort of gay community surely existed in Sarajevo, there is no evidence of any such community. Kenan reads as convincingly gay, unlike his partner Milan. There is no chemistry whatsoever between the two supposed lovers. The two plan to emigrate to the gay-friendly Netherlands, but the war strands them in Serb-controlled territory, and Kenan adopts female drag to avoid being found out as a circised Muslim. They escape to Milan's village, where the disguise is maintained through a traditional wedding. These two men barely kiss onscreen, though Kenan, who is bisexual, is shown having sex at least twice with Ranka, the village prostitute. Ranka eventually outs the gay men to Milan’s father, while Milan is drafted into the Serbian army and killed. The connection between violence and gender in the Balkans is captured in a saying quoted by Kenan: ''Ako ne nosiš suknju, onda nosiš pušku'' (If you don't wear a dress, then you carry a gun). Kenan wears a dress and, unlike Milan, is spared being drafted into the army. During the wars nationalists derided homosexuals as traitors to the nation. Anyone against the war was ''not a real man'' because a real man is a man with a gun.

Movie available HERE​

Violence is central to the other three recent feature films from ex-Yugoslavia, though they show lesbian, rather than gay male, desire: Maja Weiss's Guardian of the Frontier (Slovenia, 2002), Dalibor Matanic's Fine Dead Girls (Croatia, 2002), and Dragan Marinkovic’s Take a Deep Breath (Serbia, 2004). Guardian of the Frontier is the first Slovene film directed by a woman and the first to show lesbian desire. Take a Deep Breath portrays a younger generation that blames parents for the dire situation of contemporary Serbia. In Fine Dead Girls Iva and Marija move into an apartment building that is home to a rogues' gallery of characters: a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, a prostitute paid to break up the couple by one girl's religiously-motivated father, a homophobic gorgon landlady, and her son, a slacker mama's boy who rapes one of the pair to prove his masculinity. The film takes aim at the brutality and amorality of contemporary Croatian society, targeting patriarchy, nationalism, and the Catholic Church, as well as homophobia. It obviously struck a chord, becoming the audience favorite at the Pula festival in 2002 as well as Croatia's nominee for an Oscar the following year. Though convincingly antihomophobic, Fine Dead Girls still hews to some stereotypes: the women are shown making love for the titillation of the audience, and the more butch of the pair is murdered, while her femme girlfriend (conveniently bisexual) marries and has a child.

Movie available HERE​

Wiktor Grodecki's three films about Czech rent boys, Not Angels, but Angels (1994), Body without Soul (1996), and Mandragora (1997) purport to be objective, honest doentaries in which the boys' ''frankness and need to talk become the engine that drives the film.'' The first film, Not Angels, but Angels, comes the closest to being a doentary, with interviews with the rent boys arranged by theme to tell the story Grodecki wants us to learn: these are straight guys exploited by gay men from Western Europe. Religious music and intercut shots of statues of angels emphasize by contrast the evil of what is happening. The second film, Body without Soul, introduces us to a pornographer as well. With his last film in the trilogy, Mandragora (1997), Grodecki gives up all pretense of making a doentary - though the video box still claims that ''all the events in this film actually occurred, and were photographed just as the street kids described them''. Mandragora is in fact a feature film, scripted by Grodecki and one of the rent boys, David Svec. It is the dramatization of Grodecki’s fantasy of the boys’ experience, this time with no messy testimony by the boys themselves to get in the way of the director's interpretation of their lives.

Another film from Prague, David Ondricek's Whisper (1996), also includes prostitution as a secondary plot motif in a film that is mostly about amoral Czech youth. Compared to other parts of Central and East Europe, Prague's gay scene was more fertile ground for prostitution and pornography. While Grodecki's ''doentaries'' capture some of the ethnographic detail and geography of these worlds, they do so in an extremely moralizing way. They also present a world in which Czechs are innocent straight victims, while gay men are all old, ugly, and Western. Grodecki seems obsessed with sex, particularly gay sex, and his portrayals certainly do not reveal queerness in a realistic light.

In most of the films from Central and Eastern Europe queer characters appear not as themselves, but as a metaphor for political dissidence, or for capitalist exploitation and corruption. Homosexuality is presented as an isolated phenomenon or as an import from the West. With the exception of Marble Ass, which features real transvestite prostitutes, these films show only isolated queer characters, not real queer people or a local LGBT community. Another phenomenon worthy of mention is the use of Central and East European queer characters in films scripted and produced in the West. These are not films in which LGBT people from the region would recognize themselves. In this age of globalization, it seems much more likely that LGBT people anywhere will get their media representations of LGBT identities from the same sources: predominantly US and Western European media. An American reporter once claimed that ''gay culture is absolutely uniform across the world. A gay bar in Ulan Bator is no different from one in Chicago or Berlin or Buenos Aires. You’ll hear the same vapid dance music, smell the same cologne, hear the rustle of the same neatly pressed Polo shirts, and touch the same tanned, well-moisturized skin.''

 

[gorgik9]

I just came home from my afternoon walk and got this great post to read! It's obviously gonna take several hours before I can have something substantial to say - but it looks super!!! So thanks a lot for the post!!!

 

[gorgik9]

Your great post about gay cinema in central and south-eastern Europe has made me think about gay cinema in the part of Europe I know the best: Scandinavia and - in particular - Sweden.

We could engage in terminological and historiographical niceties such as "Gay cinema: what does that include? What does it exclude? If it includes everything except the cis-gender hetero norm, then why specifically talk about GAY cinema? And gay CINEMA - what does and what doesn't that mean in our day and age, thinking about YouTube, Vimeo, Chaturbate etc etc ?"

But that's probably a discussion for another post in another thread, a discussion I'd love to have with you.

OK. Let's get a bit more down to earth: Considering the fact that one of the first gay movies in film history actually was Swedish - Vingarne (1916, eng. "The Wings") by director Mauritz Stiller - and that Ljubljana had it's queer film festival from 1984 on, you might think that Sweden must have had a queer festival about the same time as San Fran or LA, but oh no! Far from it! Stockholm Queer film festival was established in 2006 and stopped in 2009 and from 2012 it's Cinema Queer Stockholm. We also got Malmö/Lund Queer Film festival from 2012, and the biggest of all Scandinavian film festival - Gothenburg Film Festival, established in 1979 - got a LGBT section from about 2008.

Am I impressed with Swedish film culture? No, not at all! It took 22 years after Slovenia until Sweden got its very first queer film festival, and 29 years after San Fran. That's pretty shitty if you ask me! Some other day I maybe could try a socio-historical explanation of why this is the case, but not right now...

 

[gorgik9]

Brokeback Porn, sort of...

Do you think it's a mere coincidence that the course of events in Annie Proulx's story and Ang Lee's movie Brokeback Mountain was located precisely in the state of Wyoming?

My answer to this question must be: NO WAY! Not a snowballs chance in Hell!

Yellowstone National Park & Owen Wister's novel The Virginian.

The state of Wyoming is the home of the first National Park in the US and as far as I know the first in the entire world: Yellowstone National Park in the upper north-western corner of Wyoming, just south of the state border of Montana, and established by the US Congress 1 March 1872.

Not very many kilometers south from Yellowstone we find another National Park with equally majestic nature: Grand Teton National Park, established in 1929.

Photographers like William Henry Jackson and the publishers disseminating Jackson's pictures throughout US society made sure that the images of Yellowstone would become central parts of a national iconography.

But there was more to it! Wyoming wasn't just a state with the most iconic nature. Maybe even more important it was the state where the modern version of the most mythical of all American stories - the Western/Cowboy story - took place:

The course of events in Owen Wister's novel The Virginian (1902) takes place in Wyoming, and to be more precise the story starts at the Sunk Creek Ranch outside Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

Wister's novel became a tremendous commercial success with a great many later editions, and the novel got adapted into movies several times. First as silent movies in 1914 and 1923, and then as sound movies of which the first came in 1929 with Gary Cooper as the Virginian (the good guy) and Walter Huston as Trampas (the bad guy).

First let's look at the 1929 film poster, and then let's watch the 1929 movie!

There was a new film adaption in 1946 with Joel McCrea and Brian Donlevy and a TV series 1962-1971 with James Drury and Doug McClure.

So The Virginian became unquestionably of the greatest influence on American popular culture becoming the base of a set of genre defining Hollywood movies, i.e. the cinematic version of the Western story.

But if you start digging in Brokeback Country, you'll find there's even more to it than that; now it's time to start digging really deep!

Pardners and/or Schoolmarms: Owen Wister and the heteronormalizing of the Western story.

According to the article on Wister's novel in English Wikipedia, it was "the first true western ever written", but Wikipedia isn't telling us the full truth. OK the article tells that there were "short stories and pulp dime novels" long before The Virginian, but it doesn't say a word about the essential narratological difference between Wister's novel (and all movies based on Wister) and the Western story in the dime novel tradition starting in the times of the US Civil War and continuing in to the early years of the 20th century.

So what's the narratological nub of the matter in Wister's story? What's its narratological backbone?

It's the story about The Good Guy (the Virginian) fighting and defeating The Bad Guy (Trampas), getting the Christian Schoolmarm (Molly Stark Wood) as his "prize" and settles down and stops being a cowboy. And that, my friends, is the backbone of every Post-Wister Western.

The Pre-Wister Western.

If there is a Post-Wister Western there should be a Pre-Wister Western, or if you like: the very deeply forgotten original Western story. In discussing this topic I'll take my cue from literary scholar Chris Packard's book Queer Cowboys (2005) and a couple of books about male intimacy in popular photography in the 19th and early 20th century.

The backbone of the Pre-Wister dime novel Western is very different: It's the story about the Cowboy and his Pardner herding cattles, hunting for big prey, fighting and killing villains, scoundrels and indians - and keeping women and everything feminine at arms length.

The Pre-Wister western can end in either of two fashions:
Either the all male couple carries on further into the West and the next dime novel, or the Cowboy is killed by villains or indians.

But you always know in what way the Pre-Wister western will never end: with the Cowboy getting married to a gal and settling down.

That's an ending as impossible as led floating on water.

The dime novel westerns were probably the commercially most successful genre in the American book market in the period 1865-1890, sold by publishing houses like Beadle & Adams and Street & Smith.

Back to The Virginian.

The way we can see that The Virginian (the book) actually comes out of the old dime novel tradition is that the Virginian (the character) actually had a partner named Steve when the Narrator meets the couple in Wyoming, but because of unhappy cirstances the Virginian comes to the conclusion he must kill Steve, and what happens next is that the Narrator becomes the new partner of the Virginian and they go out for an all-male sort-of honeymoon to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. (Getting Brokeback vibes, anyone?)

It's during this male homoerotic honeymoon that the Virginian abruptly utters the unimaginable: "-Have you ever studied much about marriage?"

To which the Narrator says no, but the Spirit is out of the Lamp...

After camping on an island in Snake River, fishing, skinny dipping and doing a lot of almost lude talking about the waggle of your thumb and other male appendages, we start realizing that it has become time for the Cowboy to ask the religious schoolmarm to marry him and to settle down. Cowboy life was to be no more, the Frontier was closed, the West wasn't Wild anymore.

So Owen Wister's novel The Virginian certainly wasn't "the first true western ever written" as Wikipedia has it. It's the most consequential revision of the Western story. The heteronormalizing Schoolmarmification of the western story.

But of course you just can't stop people going West, getting Wild(e)...

There's another origin behind every origin; or: James Fenimore Cooper.

If any particular American writer could be said to be "the origin behind all other origins", it must be James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) and his two most important categories of stories. Today the stories about the lives of frontiersmen in the Leatherstocking Tales are the most well known, including "The Pioneers" (1823), "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826), "The Prairie" (1827), "The Pathfinder" (1840) and "The Deerslayer" (1841).

The second category is the tales about life at sea as in "The Pilot" (1823), "The Red Rover" (1827) and "Afloat and Ashore" (1844).

The most important thing about Cooper is that he paved the way for everything originally American - and not just pale reproductions of things British & European - in 19th century American prose fiction.

Looking at the European scene what do we see? What's it all about? From Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac and Sören Kierkegaard, Leo Tolstoy, Fjodor Dostojevskij, Henrik Ibsen, Selma Lagerlöf and August Strindberg - It's all about marriage, marriage, marriage. The obstacles for marrying, the joys and horrors of marriage, the consequences or non-consequences...European 19th century literature is all about marriage.

The look at the American scene! The emotional and narratological center in American literature is - the relation of two men.

Their names will vary - Nathaniel Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Joe, Tennessee and his Pardner.

And of course the couple that was the reason for this post...ah, you know them: Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar.

So Brokeback Mountain, what's it all about?

It's the story of the mythical homecoming of the original Western Story!!!

Some Brokeback Porn, maybe?

I've uploaded two early feature length gay porns with western & cowboy themes. The first is "The Magnificent Cowboys" from 1971 directed by Dick Martin: http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=532180

The second is "Greenhorn" from 1984, directed by Steve Scott: http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=532182

The thing I like the most about Greenhorn is it's great soundtrack! In how many other gay porn movies will you find bluegrass guitar and really classy harmonica?

I think that listening to bluegrass music is a good way to end a lesson!

 

[haiducii]

An exciting voyage from Wyoming to Pornland! :thumbs up:

Wister’s The Virginian, one of the greatest-selling Western novels ever, was the first western that won critical praise. But as you said, the earliest and finest works in this genre were written by James Fenimore Cooper.

 

[haiducii]

Queer Ljubljana behind the Iron Curtain

Legend has it that Ljubljana was founded by the Greek mythological hero Jason and his companions, the Argonauts, who had stolen the golden fleece from King Aetes and fled from him across the Black Sea and up the Danube, Sava and Ljubljanica rivers. They stopped at a large lake in the marsh near the source of the Ljubljanica, where they disassembled their ship to be able to carry it to the Adriatic Sea, put it together again, and return to Greece. The lake where they made a stop was the dwelling place of a monster. Jason fought the monster, defeated it and killed it. The monster, now referred to as the Ljubljana Dragon, found its place atop the castle tower on the Ljubljana coat of arms.

The capital city of Slovenia, which is geographically located at the crossroads of Slavic, Germanic and Latin cultures, has a hate / love relationship with the gay and lesbian community in Slovenia. As a space it offered a social, cultural and political platform for the gay and lesbian movement to emerge in the early eighties. At the time Ljubljana was considered the most liberal capital in Yugoslavia and with its geographical closeness to the West, it was a ''natural'' place for alternative social movements to emerge. It remains the only city in Slovenia with an organized and recognizable gay and lesbian scene, partly due to the fact that with approximately 280.000 inhabitants it is the only large city in Slovenia. For this reason, the history of the gay and lesbian movement in Slovenia is in fact the history of how this movement emerged and developed in Ljubljana and how it fought for and kept its own space in the city.

According to Podlesnik’s Homoseksualnost (Homosexuality), the first book on homosexuality in the Slovenian language published in 1926, the life of homosexuals at the beginning of the twentieth century was an unhappy and isolated one. Homosexuality was a 31 page essay by the Slovenian writer Ivan Podlesnik who wrote under the pseudonym Vindex. His pioneering work, which draws mainly on the ideas of the German author Magnus Hirschfeld, was written in support of homosexuality. The newspapers in the 1920's and 1930's only randomly reported homosexuality. The articles were mostly short, partly gossipy criminal reports - usually about certain men who allegedly wanted to have sex with other men. On 22 October 1927, the daily newspaper Slovenski narod (Slovenian nation) reported in one sentence that ''police arrested an older man yesterday due to homosexuality''. Življenje in svet (Life and the world), a weekly magazine, featured an article on homosexuality in 1938 in which physician Fran Goestl claimed that homosexuality had spread among Slovenians ''more than one can imagine''. He goes on to explain that homosexuality is a mental disease and a sexual disorder.

There is no evidence that homosexuals were heavily persecuted before and after World War II, despite the fact that Article 168 of the Penal Code criminalized ''unnatural acts of unchastity between persons of the male sex''. The criminalization of homosexuality was primarily used for the elimination of political enemies such as, for example, catholic priests, or even the mayor of Ljubljana Anton Pesek. When he was elected in 1921 the Minister of Interior refused to place his candidacy before the King for approval due to the accusations that Pesek was a homosexual. Pesek took the case to the court but failed to produce a ruling in his favour and the election results were eventually overturned.

The seeds of the homosexual subculture in Ljubljana can be traced back to the late sixties and early seventies. This was due to the influences of the transnational sexual revolution and relaxed political situation in Slovenia which accompanied a prospering economy. Although homosexuality was often still confined to private spaces, two types of public places started to emerge: cruising areas and places for socializing. None of these places were officially gay - it was simply ''common knowledge'' among homosexuals that ''our kind of men'' could be found there.

In 1970, a progressive and liberal students' magazine Tribuna (Grandstand) published what seems to have been the first gay guide to Ljubljana. In an article entitled ''A small homosexual guide'', some meeting places were listed where ''kindred souls'' could be found. According to the guide, one should visit a certain public toilet during the day, while Knafljev prehod (city passage) was frequented by gay men in the evenings. For the majority of gay men, candy shop Tivoli, Cafe Union and also tavern Opera bar were simply meeting places where one could socialize with other fellow travellers. Cafe Union coexisted with a lively, but hidden and anonymous sexual scene: gay men would meet in several public toilets in Ljubljana (which they called ''a chapel''), in the cruising areas in the parks or in the sauna. The public places in Ljubljana which offered a more or less safe space for homo-socializing were typically only for gay men. Lesbians never met in parks, saunas or any other public space, because they did not know each other in the context of a broader social network, and instead usually met privately and often via contact ads in newspapers.

The decriminalization of homosexuality on 11 June 1977 was not directly connected to the emerging gay subculture in Ljubljana. Dr Ljubo Bavcon is the legal expert who initiated decriminalization and his proposal was based on scientific research. It was his firm belief that all moralistic and religious ‘leftovers’ from previous political regimes, such as ''unnatural acts of unchastity'', should be deleted from the Penal Code. There is no clear record of whether the police in the sixties and seventies (before decriminalization) collected information on people's sexual orientation. While the police denied having a ''pink list'', some gay men reported otherwise: the police did collect information on one's homosexuality, especially for those who were active in the political structure of the socialist government. The information was part of their dossier and could be used if a certain person needed to be discredited. According to available statistical data, 18 gay men were recorded in Slovenia infringing article 186 of the Penal Code between 1945 and 1951, 30 between 1952 and 1955 and 90 in 1964 and 1965 indicating a marked increase over those years.

''I didn't like the previous political system (communism), but it was quite open in this regard. It is true they have punished the political dissidents, but they did allow people to live as they wish and to love whom they wanted. They didn't interfere with one's private life'', remembers Stanko Jost, director of Boys (Dečki), the first Slovenian gay movie from 1977. The movie is based on a novel with the same name by France Novšak, published in 1938. The story is set in a catholic boarding school and depicts a teenage love story between two boys. Jost prepared the script for the movie in 1971, but at first he was not allowed to make the movie as the Cultural Union forbade the shooting. In 1976, he decided to make and finance the movie on his own. This time the authorities did not protest (although the police did pay a few visits during the filming). Once the movie was publicly shown in 1977, however, its further distribution was prohibited. The movie was shown only twice before its second premier in 2004 at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Ljubljana. This screening gave the community a sense of its own history, both in terms of the topic of the film as well as in terms of the screening itself. This sense was extended in 2009, when the festival screened some other Slovenian movies from the seventies - none of which was marked as a ''gay movie'', but had clear gay undertones or even featured explicit gay and lesbian scenes, as in Boštjan Hladnik’s Maškarada (Masquerade, 1971). The film was banned in Yugoslavia until 1982, primarily due to the explicit homoerotic scenes and scenes of full-frontal nudity.

Movie available HERE​

The openly gay actor and director Boštjan Hladnik was born in Kranj on 30 January, 1929. In 1935 his family moved to Ljubljana, where he soon became an avid moviegoer, regularly visiting all Ljubljana's cinemas. His first amateur film, Girl in the Mountains (1947) was awarded at the amateur film festival in Salerno (1952). After completing seconding school, he first enrolled in the study of art history, then (1949) transferred to the Academy of Performing Arts. His graduation work - the direction of Strindberg's play, Miss Julia was awarded first prize at the international festival in Erlangen (1953). He continued his film education at the IDHEC school in Paris (1957-60). As assistant director and director trainee, he participated in the production of films by Claude Chabrol, Philippe de Brocca and Robert Siodmak.

There are cineastes all over the world, including Slovenia, who make a great many films, but many of these leave no traces in the minds of viewers, nor in national cinematography, let alone film history and esthetics. And there are cineastes who create something big, leave a trace in the minds of individuals and in history, with a single film. Such is Boštjan Hladnik, whose very first film, Dancing in the Rain (1961), not only managed to catch the moment of modernism in European film, but to place Slovenian cinematography on an equal level. Director Hladnik was one of the founding fathers of the new wave "Novi Film" movement, a cinema of political awareness in Yugoslavia, during the 1960's.

In the early sixties, Dancing in the Rain had quite a "shocking" effect on Slovene cinematography, and was perceived (though not completely) as a "dark" film. A similar film is Masquerade, which "shocking" not only because of its moral and sexual perversities or the obviousness of its "cheap" genre, but primarily because it "unmasked" something which some Slovene filmmakers so resented in their country at the time - the fact that the country itself was beginning to resemble the Masquerade.

As the borders in Slovenia of the seventies and later were relatively open to the West, there existed exchange not only with Western culture but also its scientific discourse. The influential Slovenian Research Report on Social Pathology borrowed extensively from reports by Alfred Kinsey and John Wolfenden. The report defined homosexuality as a ''less dangerous social phenomenon'' and argued against repressive measures as a solution for homosexuality. While the authors claimed that homosexuality should remain valued as a ''negative sexual activity'', they nevertheless opted for its decriminalization. They concluded that in practice, police in Slovenia had already realized that repression was not an effective tool for dealing with the ''deviant sexual behaviour of two consenting adults''.

The possibility for a change to the Penal Code came in 1974, when Yugoslavia adopted a new Constitution, granting each of the six republics the right to its own Code. Janez Šinkovec, the Supreme Court judge at the time, believed that homosexuality should be decriminalized as Slovenia was already lagging behind contemporary jurisprudence. In an interview in 1974 he said: ''I certainly believe that intimate lives of adults . . . are truly their own personal issue and there is no need for the society to feel obliged to intervene in this field''. However, it took another 3 years before the Penal Code was changed. This created a platform for the future cultural and political ''coming out'' of the lesbian and gay movement in Ljubljana in the eighties. Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro decriminalized homosexuality in 1977, while other republics repealed the article about 20 years later: Serbia in 1994, Macedonia in 1997 and Bosnia in 1998.

There is no doubt that the success of the American gay movement of the late sixties and early seventies had an effect on similar movements in Europe, but the beginnings of the Slovenian movement are not so much inspired by the American story. It can rather be traced to the lively gay and feminist scene in Western Berlin in the eighties. ''I will not stop before I have Berlin in Ljubljana'', leading Slovenian feminist Mojca Dobnikar famously declared. Similarly, Bogdan Lešnik, the initiator of the gay movement, also found one of his inspirations in Berlin; he wanted to bring to Ljubljana the Berlin exhibition ''Queers and Fascism''. ''But the very idea (of starting the movement) did not emerge abroad'', says Lešnik. They came up with the idea on the basis of relatively liberal and relaxed attitudes about sexualities in the clubs of Ljubljana at the time. They tried to take advantage of this openness and turn it into a social movement and activity. It was only later, says Lešnik, that they realized that initial efforts to change the legislation and the system were not enough, as they had to deal with the people's homophobic mentality as well: ''At the time we didn’t know what opinion people had about homosexuality and we were not even much interested in that. Later these (homophobic) opinions not only came to the surface, but also gained political power. A new situation emerged; one that we thought was already surpassed''.

In April of 1984, the first festival of gay culture was organized in Ljubljana, followed by the establishment of the first gay organization in December of the same year. The festival and the organization were called ''Magnus'' after Magnus Hirschfeld. The six-day festival – which for the first time created official, if temporary, ‘gay spaces’ in different locations in Ljubljana – presented the exhibition of European and American gay print media, featured a variety of lectures, including a lecture by the French theorist Guy Hocquenghem, and screenings of films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band and the infamous Cruising and Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo.

Movie available HERE​

While Berlin emerged as an important reference point for the gay and lesbian movement in Ljubljana, resulting in a similar queer lexicon and imagery between the cities, Lešnik nevertheless claims that they did not care too much about the preoccupations of the gay movement in the West. ''We had our own (preoccupations). Only here and there we would take some key words (from them) and use them in our context''.

The emerging gay community demanded its own organized public space (such as bars and clubs) in Ljubljana, next to already existing gay sexual culture in cruising areas. The ''chapels'' and especially the parks were still frequented by gay men. The outdoor gay sexual culture started to die out only later with the introduction of the internet in the mid-nineties.

In 1984, Magnus organized the first gay club nights at the newly established students' alternative club K4 in the centre of Ljubljana. Gay Saturday nights became an important part of Ljubljana's alternative scene. The club has been frequented by people from all over Yugoslavia, Italy and Austria. Despite some interruptions, gay nights at K4 remain to this day an important spatial reference point for the gay and lesbian community in Ljubljana.

The gay and lesbian movement of the eighties helped to relocate the issue of homosexuality from the psychiatric context of the seventies and earlier (reflected primarily in media reports) to the cultural and political contexts of the eighties and after. For example, in 1986, Magnus issued a public manifesto demanding that the school curriculum should include teaching that homosexuality had the same social status as heterosexuality and called for an amendment to the Constitution so that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation would be prohibited. Although these requests were never fulfilled, such interventions contributed to an increased attention to the gay and lesbian community from the media and the general public.

The formation of the gay movement in Ljubljana may be understood through two contexts. First, the Slovenian movement was influenced by the experiences of the Western movements, which were by then already practising identity politics and experiencing some success. The second context is related to the political agenda of the new social movements of the eighties in Slovenia. The goal of Magnus was to transform the social relations in a way to guarantee the freedom of expression, including the expression of sexuality. Rather than the question of identity, the initial urge was to bring the question of agency and action to the forefront of the movement. The aim was to make visible and hearable what used to be silent and set at the social margins.

 

[gorgik9]

Thanks for a great and beautifully written post!

My intention is to give some comments on the two paragraphs starting with Ivan Podlesnik's essay "Homoseksualnost" from 1926.

While gay sex is fun and pleasurable, homosexuality - word and concept - is seriously tricky business. We know when, by whom, and in what context the word "homosexual/ity" was coined: the inventor was german-hungarian writer Karl Maria Kertbeny, who wrote the very first text about homosexuality in a letter 1868 to his friend and pen-pal Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and in the same letter he also coined the other big word, "heterosexuality".

"Homosexuality" came out in public in a little pamphlet published anonymously in 1869 most probably written by Kertbeny. It was a pamphlet protesting the Prussian governments intention to re-criminalize sodomy in the princedoms where it already had been de-criminalised in the decades before.

"Heterosexual" didn't go public until 1880 in a book by a zoologist on "The Discovery of the soul", and the it had four public appearances in 1889 in the fourth german edition of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis", and with the help of the English translation of Krafft-Ebing we get the first instance of "heterosexuality" in American English in James Kiernan's "Responsibility in Sexual Perversion" published in Chicago Medical Recorder, May 1892.

Homosexuality was a perversion, sure, but in the 1890s heterosexuality was just another perversion and that was to be the case for decades ahead, at least in the Anglophone world. "Heterosexuality" got it's debute in Merriam-Websters dictionary in 1923, defined as a "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex". "Homosexuality" had been in Merriam-Webster as early as 1909, defined as "morbid sexual passion for one of the same sex".

It's instrumental to understand that the only healthy, normal, non-morbid sexuality defined by medicine since the mid 19th century was the expressions of the procreative drive, so everything and anything outside sex to make more babies was perversion, morbidity, pathological.

But in the early 20th century more and more doctors started seriously question if the famous procreative drive was anything more than fiction and misunderstanding. One of the early pioneers among Swedish doctors was Anton Nyström, who in his most important book from 1904 stated, that procreation was the consequence of the sexual drive, not an autonomous drive on its own. The sex drive was a matter of love, sympathy and pleasure, procreation merely a consequence.

Now is the time when the sex drive becomes the normal hetero-sex drive, and, hence, the opposite of homosexuality. We get the definition of heterosexuality as sexual normality we're used to in Merriam-Webster 1934; now it's a "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality".

My idea with this small comment is that homosexuality becomes a really important term in the social vocabulary in western languages precisely when homosexuality becomes radically opposite to heterosexuality, which happens in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

[gorgik9]

James Dean & 1950s Hollywood, part 1.

I will cut up this post in two parts of which the second will be posted by me two weeks from now. In between next weekend haiducii will make another post.

There are two points-of-departure for this post of which the first got to do with the big differences in the portraits of James Dean in the modern biopics of him. So lets say I got this urge to get a better understanding of our modern quests to understand and misunderstand this 1950s phenomenon - James Dean.

My second point-of-departure emerged out of my desire to try and find a gay porn movie portraying the 50s - the rock music, the clothes, the bog cars. In Toby Ross' film Cruisin '57 there's a scene where one of the boys sucking and fucking has a very well known photo of Dean in his room. So in a way he - Dean - got to watch juicy boyfucking from beyond the grave. I couldn't resist this kind of boysmut, so here's a link :http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=532850

Hollywood in the 1950s.

62 minutes into Matthew Mishory's film Joshua Tree, 1951 (http://www.gayheaven.org/showthread.php?t=531709) a young woman called Violet says in conversation with James Dean (James Preston): "- People doesn't change, the system doesn't change, Hollywood will never change!"

Violet it portrayed as an employee of Dean's early mentor, radio producer Rogers Brackett, and together with Dean and one of Dean's male friends they've made a trip to Joshua Tree National Monument in the desert east of San Bernardino. They're walking about looking at the iconic desert nature and starts talking about what they expect in and from life when Violet blurts out the line quoted above.

Boy was she wrong! In 1951 Hollywood was just about to experience the most traumatic changes since the LA entertainment industry was founded in the early 1910s, changes more traumatic than the change from silent movies to sound in the late 1920s.

The short name of the trauma was: television, TV.

The longer and more complete name was TV+the sub-urbanization of US cities+legal and political fuck ups. In the early 1960s the big studios were in the very questionable habit of making movies to become big time economic disasters. We know what Shakespeare could have said: "- Time is out of joint."

The three big TV networks started their continuous broadcasting in the second half of the 1940s: NBC 1946, CBS 1948, ABC 1948.

However! The arrival of TV broadcasting networks wasn't the only cause of the problems in Hollywood studios. The big studios own behaviour in previous decades was also an important cause for economic and legal problems in the 50s. ("The big studios" or "the major studios" are the usual abbreviations for the following companies: Universal, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/MGM, RKO Pictures.)

There were two decisions of the US Sopreme Court that would have grave consequences. The first was the decision in the Paramount-case in 1948 and its fundamental practical long term consequence for the major studios would be to sell off their lucrative first run cinemas and, thus, demolish the so-called "vertical trusts" that had put its stamp on the American movie business since the late 1910s. Major studios owning a large percentage of all first run cinemas was one of the keys to their economic success, but it was more than that: at the same time it was a key to the way the system of film censorship had functioned since about 1930. A film reel without the official seal of the Production Code Administration could never be screened in a movie theater owned by the major studios.

The second important decision was in the case Burstyn v. Wilson, or more popular: the Miracles-case, handed down in 1952. Ever since the courts decision in the Mutual-case 1915 films had been denied First Amendment protection of the kind bestowed on newspapers and book publishers. Movies were considered commercial entertainment of the same category as circus and country fairs and, hence, didn't deserve First Amendment protection. Legally speaking there was no freedom of speech for films in the first half of the 20th century.

The denial of freedom of speech-rights from 1915 was the legal bedrock beneath all the actions against movies from local censors on county and state level, and the actions of the Catholic Legion of Decency. The reason why the major studios decided to found a censorship institution (the Production Code Administration) within the film industry was that they much preferred to have their films censored under a single unified body of rules and a centralized group of censors applying the rules in a standardized way, rather than having all county and state level censors ordering different cuts of the movies. The consequence would have been industrial and economic chaos.

The Miracles-decision in 1952 overturned the 1915 decision. Suddenly movies should have First Amendment protection, and everybody understood that the consequence would sooner or later be the dissolving of the PCA. That took years. The code lived through a revision in 1956, but it wasn't dead and buried til 1966.

Two other important factors to consider to get an understanding of the climate in Hollywood in the 1950s was, first, the political blacklisting after the questionings in the US Congress in the infamous House Committee on Un-American activities (HUAC) in 1947-48; it's known that more than 300 film professionals were blacklisted during the period 1947-1957.

The second major thing making the social climate much colder was the new type of very aggressive gossip magazines, relentlessly sniffing after all kinds of Un-American activites in Hollywood, political un-americanism as well as sexual, with the intent to publish and scandalize. The first of these new bloodhound magazines was the infamous Confidential starting in 1953.

James Byron Dean (1931-1955): Career in TV, on stage and in movies.

It's not my ambition to write my own biography od JD - I'm definitely not competent to do that. There are dozens of Dean-biographies and if you want a short version I can recommend the article in English Wikipedia:Anon URL

Comparing the not more than three big Warner Bros. movies with James Dean in central roles - East of Eden 1955 (dir. Elia Kazan), Rebel without a cause 1955 (dir. Nicholas Ray), Giant 1956 (dir. George Stevens) - before he had his lethal car crash in autumn 1955, comparing this with the big mountain of written, televised and cinematographized biographies, doentaries and biopics heaping up since the late 1950s, chances are you start thinking that understanding James Dean in the middle of all conflicting biographies is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack...

The comparison isn't fully fair though, since his acting career didn't start and end in 1955. Starting in 1951 he made a lot of TV commercials and a large number of hour long TV plays. Here are some examples on YouTube:





He also had roles in a handfull of stage productions on and off Broadway in 1952-54, and in Hollywood he had a few minuscle uncredited roles in 1951-53.

But of course he became one of the central icons of the American fifties because of his portrayals of three role figures:

Cal Trask in East of Eden:

Jim Stark in Rebel without a cause:

Jett Rink in Giant:

And then some pics of a more private nature! Concerning the first, I can't guarantee it's authenticity but I just had to show it to y'all! The others are just pics I like...

OK that's all for now! Part 2 in two weeks & hoping for a nice weekend to all of you!

 

[haiducii]

Interesting article and it does give great insight into the inner mechanisms of 1950’s Hollywood movie scene. :thumbs up: BTW, If you are interested in finding out what Hollywood was like in 1940's, then you should read THIS BOOK!

 

[gorgik9]

Interesting article and it does give great insight into the inner mechanisms of 1950’s Hollywood movie scene. :thumbs up: BTW, If you are interested in finding out what Hollywood was like in 1940's, then you should read THIS BOOK!

Big thanks for the book! It comes in very handy! :thumbs up:

 

[mikk33]

this thread just gets better, thanks gorgik9 and haiducii for your great insights and research.
welcome to the five and dime jimmy dean, the biopics tend to show threads of dean's life rather than the whole picture. however the impact on modern youth culture and his iconic status is astonishing given the brevity of his actual career. the mere fact that biopics are still being made today, more than 60 years after his untimely death, is astonishing of itself.

through the aegis of 'rebel without a cause' and the creation of the 'teen-age', dean becomes the epitome of cool, oozing sexuality and screen presence.
I am a fan-tasist who loves his work. its live fast die young mythology encompasses the socio-cultural changes that erupted in the post-war period and re-wrote the script, forever.

 

[gorgik9]

this thread just gets better, thanks gorgik9 and haiducii for your great insights and research.
welcome to the five and dime jimmy dean, the biopics tend to show threads of dean's life rather than the whole picture. however the impact on modern youth culture and his iconic status is astonishing given the brevity of his actual career. the mere fact that biopics are still being made today, more than 60 years after his untimely death, is astonishing of itself.

through the aegis of 'rebel without a cause' and the creation of the 'teen-age', dean becomes the epitome of cool, oozing sexuality and screen presence.
I am a fan-tasist who loves his work. its live fast die young mythology encompasses the socio-cultural changes that erupted in the post-war period and re-wrote the script, forever.

Thanks for the appreciation mikk33 - that's what keeps us and this thread going:thumbs up:

I wouldn't dare to call myself some kind of Dean-expert, but to be frank: If you've watched half a dozen of Dean docus and biopics and read a few texts about him and his life it gets quite obvious that there are themes the biographers doesn't really like to delve too deep into, and all directors of biopics have their own favourite period of Deans life and periods they seem to dislike. And then there's all the problems of systematic fake-and-bullshit publicity in fifties Hollywood... I'll talk more about this in part 2!

 

[gorgik9]

this thread just gets better, thanks gorgik9 and haiducii for your great insights and research.
welcome to the five and dime jimmy dean, the biopics tend to show threads of dean's life rather than the whole picture. however the impact on modern youth culture and his iconic status is astonishing given the brevity of his actual career. the mere fact that biopics are still being made today, more than 60 years after his untimely death, is astonishing of itself.

through the aegis of 'rebel without a cause' and the creation of the 'teen-age', dean becomes the epitome of cool, oozing sexuality and screen presence.
I am a fan-tasist who loves his work. its live fast die young mythology encompasses the socio-cultural changes that erupted in the post-war period and re-wrote the script, forever.

I'll have to make a second comment on mikk33's comment, this time specifically about the very popular idea that the "teen-age" was an invention of the Post-WWII era and more particularly of the 1950s. One of the first TV biographies of James Dean (1976) was subtitled "The First American Teenager".

It's a very popular idea and - a very erroneous idea.

If we look at literature only we find a specific bookmarket sector catering to teenagers from the early 20th century; OK we're talking middle class teens only, but teens never the less.

From about 1930 we get a multimedial teen culture: books of course, but also more and more comic strips, radio series, movies and movie serials.

In 1935 a group of young teenaged actors - Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan - worked in Stanley Kingsley's play Dead End which became a big success. Sam Goldwyn took the group of talented youngsters to Hollywood and let them make movies, lots of movies, lots and lots and lots of movies. The first series of movies was The Dead End Kids (6 films 1937-39), then Little Tough Guys (15 films 1938-1943), The East Side Kids (21 films 1940-45) and lastly The Bowery Boys (48 films 1946-58).

The most important and interesting thing about these old movies series about a gang of working class teenagers is that they don't portray the modern cliche of teenage boys as naturally Girl-Crazy. If the boys in the Dead End gang were crazy about anything they were crazy about eachothers rather than about girls.

But from the late 1930s and early 1940s there were also cultural precursors of the late 1950s teenage boys, the creature unable to do anything else than jodling about Carol, Diana, Laura or Barbara Ann, the teenage boy of the Girl-Crazy tribe.

The two most important precursors were probably

1) Andy Hardy

2) Henry Aldrich

 

[haiducii]

A short history of gay pornography

Gay pornography explained

 

[Hyp]

Does the International Male catalogue count as part of the historical record?

circa 1979

​

 

[haiducii]

Queer Ljubljana after the fall of the Iron Curtain

Following the change of the political system in 1991 involving the secession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia, the gay and lesbian movement institutionalized and took on board the identity model of politics. The politically pragmatic yet essentialist model of identity and its language can already be clearly seen in the first political declaration of the movement after the change of the system entitled ''The right to be different''. The declaration in no way questioned the homo/heterosexual binary. Rather it referred to democratic principles and two identity groups - homosexuals and heterosexuals - and agitated for the equal rights of both.

In the context of the newly found political democracy, the movement took over the language which had proved to be the most successful in the West: the language of human rights for minorities. Such political grammar was also an effect of the institutionalization of gay and lesbian movements which changed into project-based non-governmental organizations typical of the nineties. As the democratic political system is based on the principle of representation, identity politics seemed to be a logical choice, and one which directed the movement towards mainstream ''normalization''.

The institutionalization of the movement in the early nineties meant that the gay organization Magnus and the lesbian organization LL (established in 1987) got their own small office space in Ljubljana. Located above the club K4, it became another reference point for the gay community. Around such spatial re-organization of the movement emerged a distinctive gay community, which was composed mostly of those who were either willing to help with projects developed by both organizations or agreeing to be their consumers. The community was rather fluid; people who temporarily came to Ljubljana (usually to study at the University of Ljubljana) would join the community and leave it once they moved away. The fluidity of the community remains to this day: it has a relatively solid core of gay and lesbian activists and a broader circle of (temporary) fellow travellers who come and go. The gay community in Ljubljana is therefore not spatially separated in its own quarter as is the case in some Western capitals. Rather there are gay meeting places where the community comes together for a cultural event, lecture or party, and then disperses until the next event. Furthermore, the majority of these places in Ljubljana were not gay per se but were constructed as such temporarily during the particular event. There were also no serious attempts to commercialize the community. Aside from one gay sauna and, recently, the small straight friendly Cafe Open, there are no private commercial initiatives in Ljubljana catering exclusively to the gay and lesbian community.

The turning point in creating a relatively stable all-gay spatial reference point came in 1993 when gay and lesbian activists together with other alternative groups were to squat a former Yugoslav military barracks on Metelkova street. The City of Ljubljana decided to demolish the place and possibly build new shopping malls there. The alternative cultural scene in Ljubljana prevented the demolition of the place with their own bodies. Over 200 people turned the place into clubs and rooms where exhibitions, concerts, parties, readings, lectures and other events took place. At first, the City of Ljubljana reacted by cutting off the electricity and water and by filing a legal suit against these people, but later the suit was dropped and what was to be named as ''Metelkova Mesto'' (The City of Metelkova) became an alternative cultural centre of Ljubljana. Metelkova Mesto also soon became the centre of the gay and lesbian movement, where both organizations – Magnus and LL – had their own small offices, and managed to convert two rooms into gay and lesbian clubs which are known today as Monokel and Tiffany. These two clubs were the first gay-owned and run (although at first illegal) places in Ljubljana. Though initially without electricity and heating, there was now a permanent space, where the gay and lesbian community finally found its home. Metelkova Mesto takes the form of a square, fenced in with a high wall. This symbolically represented the wall between the safe space within and the homophobic and heteronormative space outside. Metelkova Mesto remains such a space, but is losing the radical edge it had in the nineties. On the other hand, for some gays and lesbians the place remains ''too radical'', ''too political'', a kind of a queer ghetto, a dirty place of drug users, and nothing like the imagined fancy gay clubs in the West.

In 1994, the gay movement celebrated its tenth anniversary in what became one of the most resounding gay-related scandals of the nineties. Magnus and LL hired the bar at the Ljubljana Castle, a landmark of the town and a high-profile state-owned site. The party was banned only a few hours before it was scheduled to start. The bone of contention was the space, Ljubljana Castle, which is, according to the city councillors at the time, inappropriate to celebrate such anniversaries. The councillors put pressure on the owner of the restaurant at the Ljubljana Castle, who first agreed to the celebration, but then cancelled it. He claimed that he did not know it was a gay celebration and said he feared that ''queers'' might ruin his restaurant’s reputation.

As in 1987, the scandal ''earned'' the movement further media visibility. It was covered by the mainstream media in Slovenia, and the homophobia of the town authorities once again came under attack. ''This event makes Ljubljana even more of a village than it was before'', claimed a journalist from the main daily newspaper Delo. ''Our piece of advice to the town dignitaries is to publish an announcement stating: No entry to the castle for Blacks, Faggots, Lesbians and Turks.''

Nearly the same words were used in 2001 by the gay activist and poet Brane Mozetič when suggesting in an e-mail to the mailing list of the gay and lesbian ''scene'' that some bars in Ljubljana should hang out a warning stating ''No entrance for faggots, lesbians and dogs''. He was referring to an incident which occurred the previous night to him and his fellow poet, Canadian Jean-Paul Daoust. The incident turned out to be an important touchstone for gay and lesbian life in Ljubljana in the new century.

On 8 June 2001, Mozetič and Daoust wanted to enter the pub Cafe Galerija in the centre of Ljubljana after they had performed at the festival of literature and music Živa književnost (Live literature) just a few tiny streets away from the bar. It was known as a gay-friendly place. The bouncer prevented them from entering, however, stating that ''they should get used to the fact that this pub is not for that kind of people''. The gay community at first reacted with ''protest drinking'' similar to those organized by London GLF in the seventies. Around 40 gays and lesbians gathered in Cafe Galerija a week after the incident and each ordered only one decilitre of mineral water and drank it over a few hours. This practical and symbolic reclamation of space hit the mainstream media, and sparked a lively public debate about Slovenian (in)tolerance. It also added impetus to the first Slovenian Pride parade in Ljubljana on 6 July 2001, which took place just a week after the first Pride parade in Belgrade in Serbia was brutally thwarted when the few participants were beaten up by hundreds of hooligans. There was a lot of fear about what might happen in Slovenia and whether the violence in Belgrade would be replicated on the streets of Ljubljana. The parade took place without any counter protests, however. According to the Slovenian media, around 300 people took part.

Throughout the 2000s, Metelkova Mesto and gay Sunday nights at K4 remained a central gathering place for the gay community in Ljubljana. The turn of the century also saw some new LGBT non-governmental organizations (such as youth organization Legebitra and Association for the integration of homosexuality DIH) emerging with their own offices. These also became places for gay discussion groups and similar activities. Cafe Open, ostensibly the most public gay space in Ljubljana, opened in 2008 at the fringe of the old city centre. It emerged as the first private initiative that catered explicitly and specifically for the gay and lesbian community and its followers. Although officially a commercial initiative, it became heavily involved with the LGBT non-governmental organizations and the activists' scene as both owners of the Café are active members of the Ljubljana's gay and lesbian scene. This scene is small and characterized by a ''homely'' atmosphere where everyone knows everybody else. Shortly after it opened, in June 2009, Cafe Open was attacked by a group of eight men. At the time of the attack, the Cafe Open was hosting a literary reading which was part of the Pride week events leading up to the ninth Pride parade in the city. The group threw a lit torch and stones into the bar and seriously injured gay activist Mitja Blažič. This homophobic attack once again became the leading story in the Slovenian media, transforming Cafe Open into a symbol of the position of the LGBT minority in Ljubljana. The attack was seen as an effect of the increasing use of hate speech in the Parliament and elsewhere. The LGBT community had long been pointing at increasing intolerance, and the attack on Cafe Open, the most brutal attack on the LGBT movement in its 25-year history, proved them right.

The day after the attack several activities took place in Cafe Open, including a ''Petition against homophobia'', which was signed publically by numerous left-wing and even some right-wing politicians, the mayor of Ljubljana and some other celebrities. The attack was condemned by politicians, the general public and the media – who covered the ensuing pride parade extensively. Not only were more people marching in the Parade than usual, it was also the first time that one minister from the government – the Minister of the Interior Katarina Kresal – decided to march as a sign of her indignation at the violent homophobic attack. Three men (aged 18 – 22) were arrested soon after, charged with hate crime, and sentenced to between 5- and 8-month imprisonments in 2011.

Despite the public response and court verdict that suggested such violence was intolerable, this did not change the disturbing fact that while the first pride parades in the beginning of the 2000s passed off peacefully, more recently there have been violent attacks on participants, most often at night during the ensuing celebrations around Metelkova Mesto. It seems as if such homophobic violence has become a constitutive element of the parades, which – unlike the commercialized ones in the West – still held the shape of a political protest. The violent history of the recent parades also points at the double-edged sword of greater visibility: while it brings benefits, it also comes with new challenges. How, for example, can such a visibility be construed as safe for those constructed as ''others''? This is one of the issues the LGBT scene in Ljubljana will have to address in the decades to come.

Violence is also the central theme to Maja Weiss's intensely provocative film Varuh Meje (Guardian of the Frontier) from 2002. It is the first Slovene film directed by a woman and the first to show lesbian desire. Three girls' summer canoe trip down the river Kolpa becomes a journey into fear when they discover that the wooded riverbanks not only conceal the frontier between Slovenia and Croatia, but also the border between the permissible and the forbidden, and that it is the self-styled Guardian of the Frontier who draws the line. Homophobia and sexism are incarnated in guardian of the frontier / the mayor, who criticizes the girls for being too independent and for swearing. The mayor's speech makes it clear that homosexuality is not a part of Slovene nationality - he wants to defend his country from it, to draw a boundary between good and evil, Slovene and foreign, straight and gay.

Movie available HERE​

The Slovenian LGBT movement has its own specificities, especially regarding the emergence of the movement. While current gay politics in Slovenia can be described as identity politics, functioning in the context of minority human rights, the first wave of the movement in Ljubljana and its politics in the eighties were much more ambivalent in terms of sexuality categorization. The cultural and social specificities of the early movement are in many ways closer to the politics of gay liberation from the seventies and even to the queer politics and activism of today in which social and sexual revolution were entwined.

The gay and lesbian urban experience in Ljubljana differs from other European capitals in some crucial respects. In Ljubljana, the gay and lesbian movement became established in the period after the decriminalization of homosexuality, while at least in some Western states, the decriminalization of homosexuality was one of the movement's primary, if not the first political objective. In this context, the Slovenian movement and primarily the movements which emerged in Yugoslavia before and after the dissolution of the federation in 1991 experienced a ''condensed history'' of similar movements from the West. The movements took on board identity-type politics immediately or soon after their formulation and skipped the assimilationist phase of the Western movements associated with the 1950's and 1960's in the Netherlands, Denmark and England in particular.

Secondly, the movements in Western Europe were usually the result of a critical mass of gays and lesbians, who occupied a certain part of urban space. In Ljubljana, the gay community has formed around certain sites. These are only physical reference points, however. They are lynchpins for a relatively strong sense of community – though that community has not been spatially separated in its own quarter of Ljubljana as we might observe in Chueca in Madrid, the Marais in Paris, or Soho in London. This is partly because of the relative size of Ljubljana in comparison to these other cities.

In the quest for ''spaces for alternative practices'', the movement encountered numerous obstacles. While in 1987 during the fourth Magnus festival scandal gays were asked to move from Ljubljana due to their threat to the ''healthy citizens'', in 1994, when celebrating the tenth anniversary of the movement, they were not denied the space in total, but were asked to ''go somewhere else'' as they would ruin the reputation of a place which held some state importance. In other words, the community could be tolerated, but only on the margins of the city. Similarly in 2001, two gays were requested to ''go somewhere else'' as what used to be a gay-friendly place was not so friendly anymore. But when the community ''went somewhere else'' and found its own space in the fringe of the city centre in Cafe Open it was attacked again. This time a homophobic attack on Cafe Open occurred during the Pride week events leading up to the ninth Pride parade in the city. The community was again clearly informed that they do not belong. However, the gay and lesbian community resisted and continues to resist the condition of being victimized. In its endeavours this community has found many supporters, but many townsmen still do not understand why their follow citizens cannot simply live their homosexuality behind the closed doors of their apartments and houses; about 35 per cent of Slovenian citizens would not want them as neighbours. All this makes Ljubljana ''the most beautiful city in the world'' (in the infamous words of Ljubljana's mayor Zoran Janković) – the most beautiful city for someone else. Not for LGBTQ people. Not yet.

 

[Shelter]

Well Haiducii - after reading this SOOOO very interesting post about the gay/lesbian life in Slovenia (from which I have had no clue until today!) I cannot only press the "Thanks"-button - no, but I must thank you on this way for your great work in this thread. All of us, who are reading these posts here, get up after reading with surely more and deeper knowledge about the not harmless life of our "sisters" and "brothers" in the former Eastern block countries. For this reality check my deepest thanks to you and to your elaborate work.

And a small addendum: your posts here as well as Gorgik's post in this thread are not only a summary of dryly and boring concatenation of occurrences. No - but both of you are writing these posts very thrilling and with much blood, sweat and tears!

And therefore, and I hope I'll speak for all the guys who are reading here, my and OUR great thanks to both of you.

 

[gorgik9]

Well Haiducii - after reading this SOOOO very interesting post about the gay/lesbian life in Slovenia (from which I have had no clue until today!) I cannot only press the "Thanks"-button - no, but I must thank you on this way for your great work in this thread. All of us, who are reading these posts here, get up after reading with surely more and deeper knowledge about the not harmless life of our "sisters" and "brothers" in the former Eastern block countries. For this reality check my deepest thanks to you and to your elaborate work.

And a small addendum: your posts here as well as Gorgik's post in this thread are not only a summary of dryly and boring concatenation of occurrences. No - but both of you are writing these posts very thrilling and with much blood, sweat and tears!

And therefore, and I hope I'll speak for all the guys who are reading here, my and OUR great thanks to both of you.

Big thanks Shelter for the kind words to both of us!

About haiducii's post today I can basically say what I usually say: dense, informative, very well written, mille gracie!

I'll ad on another comment in the thread for the "Guardian"-movie!

Otherwise I'd like to add two short comments of which both could start their own long threads:

The first comment is philosophical: There's a very basic problem with identity politics if and when the identity in case is a matter of (homo)sexual identity: Sexual desire has always been transgressing and dissolving identity, so how - really - do you square the sexual identity circle? By de-sexualizing homosexuality? Sexual desire will not and can not stabilize identity. It's like trying to square the circle...

The second comment is historical: I think that more often than usual we should go back to the real roots of the "Gay" movement: the German roots in the 1890s! (Hello Shelter! German roots! 1890s!)

What we will find is that this movement from very early on had THREE conflicting branches:
1) Anarchist activist, schoolteacher, journalist and writer Adolf Brand (1874-1945) starting the first gay journal "Der Eigene" in 1896 (-1932) and the organization Gemeinschaft der Eigene in 1903. Brand was a masculinist, a proponent of the male-to-male love ("Mann-Männliche Liebe) which was a universal male possibility.

2) In 1903 Brand broke with the very first movement, the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäre Kommittee (started in 1897) and its founder Magnus Hirschfeldt (1868-1935). What became impossible to agree with for Brand was Hirschfeld's idea that the male homosexual necessarily was a special kind of human being, the intermediate sex. Following Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, Hirschfeld could also use the Latin phrase:" Anima muliebris in corpore virile inclusa", meaning: "a female soul inclosed in a male body". In Brand's opinion the homosexual male was rather the super masculine man.

3) But maybe the most controversial of all pioneers was John Henry Mackay (1864-1933) speaking for the man-boy love.

 

[haiducii]

THANK you guys for all your support. And I hope you have a great time reading these posts and I strongly hope you learn something new...

Among other things...

 

[Wohltorf]

International Male part of the record?? As close to having paperdolls as we could get. Are movie stills part of the record? IM was the next best thing.