COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

The second issue of the magazine Viks, entitled “Homosexuality and Culture,” came out on April 24, 1984, the opening day of the Magnus Film Festival, the first cultural manifestation dedicated to homosexuality in any socialist country. The magazine was edited by a group of gays and lesbians who gathered around the youth cultural center ŠKUC and organized the festival. This special edition of the magazine was printed in 600 copies and handed to audiences at the festival. It contains 42 pages, and approximately 20 illustrations with contemporary, easily recognizable European gay subcultural motifs. Over the three following decades, this issue of Viks gained a cult status in Slovenian and the post-Yugoslav LGBT community, and was exhibited at events dedicated to the history of homosexuality and the LGBT movement.

Alongside the festival’s program and a schedule of affiliated cultural and club events, in an effort to appeal to the younger generation of Ljubljana’s gays, lesbians and artists, Viks also carried several lengthy programmatic articles and interviews with emancipatory, educational and mobilizing overtones. Thus it aligned itself politically and theoretically with contemporary liberationist, leftist and counter-cultural movements in Slovenia and Western Europe. These texts promote an ideal of freely and openly lived (homo)sexuality. Non-normative sexual practices were viewed as strongly dissident in nature, but not so much against socialism as against patriarchal and traditional forms of sexual and family life.

The article “Pink Love under the Red Stars – Homosexuality under Real Socialism” (“Roza ljubezen pod rdečimi zvezdami – homoseksualizem pod realnim socializmom,” pp. 18-21) delivers a historical overview of the legal and social status of same-sex sexual and emotional relationships in socialist countries. The anonymous author is equally critical of the 20^th century discrimination of homosexuality both in western liberal democracies and socialist countries. However, the Stalinist period in the USSR was seen as especially brutal and arduous insofar as it attributed negative political meanings to homosexuality, declaring homosexuals “traitors,” foreign “spies,” decadent bourgeoisie, and enemies of socialism. Soviet homosexuals, the article suggests, were not able to recover from this traumatic period, and were still unable to engage with emancipatory social movements and practices. At the same time, the example of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, known also as East Germany) is held as an example of both positive changes in communist stance on homosexuality, and a way in which, since the late 1970s, a dialogue could take place between the government and gay and lesbian groups.

The Croatian State Security Service's operational data from the mid-1950s contain descriptions of the connections of Djilas supporters in Zagreb (the group around the banned weekly newspaper Naprijed) to the brothers Stevan and Vladimir Dedijer. Vladimir was editor-in-chief of the newspaper Borba at the time of publication of the Djilas articles. After a suspended year and a half sentence, he withdrew from political life and in 1955 emigrated to the United States. From 1950 to 1957, Stevan was director of the Nuclear Research Institute in Belgrade and the Rudjer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. Because of his public criticism of the Yugoslav nuclear programme, he was expelled from the Rudjer Bošković Institute, and in 1961 managed to emigrate to Sweden.

The documents in the Croatian State Security Service's file on the Djilas case and Djilas supporters in Croatia  include a transcript of Vladimir Dedijer's open letter to Josip Broz Tito. Dedijer protested against the prosecution and arrest of Milovan Djilas due to an interview in which he criticised the neutral position of Yugoslavia on the Soviet army’s intervention in Hungary, which he saw as tacit support for that action. He was arrested on 19 November, and on 12 December 1956 convicted to 3 years of strict imprisonment for “anti-Yugoslav activities.ˮ  Dedijer wrote, inter alia, that he is not defending Milovan Djilas as his personal friend, but rather because he has to stay “consistent in his conviction that they have to promote more democratic and humane forms” in Yugoslav society, that he cannot act against his conscience, defending in this way his personal integrity as a writer and intellectual.

The document is available for research and copying.

Jan Vladislav (1923–2009) was a Czech poet, translator and signatory of Charter 77; he was forced to emigrate from Czechoslovakia in 1981 and later lived in France. He was visited there by a film crew from the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature in the summer of 1992, as part of the Authentic project and the Independent Documentary Centre of Aleš Záboj. On this occasion, a video recording of Jan Vladislav being interviewed by Petr Kotyk in his study was made on 6 August 1992. Jan Vladislav recalled his activities in Czechoslovakia before his emigration and also mentioned the importance of translators, whose work made it possible to “promote both classic and modern authors, whose work was liberatingly defying the official Czech cultural politics through its spirit, content and mission”. He was talking also about the cultural repression in Czechoslovakia after 1948, de-Stalinization, the Prague Spring and role of intellectuals in the twentieth century. Apart from this video recording of the interview between Jan Vladislav and Petr Kotyk, the recordings of Vladislav’s own public appearances as well as conferences concerning him are also deposited in the video and audio library of the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature.

The sermon is an ideal example of Anton Vovk's theological views, which included preservation of the honour of the Catholic Church and its struggle for human liberty and dignity. It served as a source of encouragement for the faithful. The message was cloaked in rhetoric that did not openly attacking the ruling regime. But the fact that it was very clear about the Christian worldview, which was in conflict with the worldview imposed by the regime made the sermon a very influential and important milestone in relations between Bishop Vovk and the state, showing that he was not deterred from propagating the Christian truth even after an extremely violent attack – the burning in 1952. Document is located in the Anton Vovk Collection and it is available for research purposes.