Franko Dota

An Ambiguous Affair:
The Yugoslav Socialist State and Its Homosexuals
The transmission of Stalinist ideological recipes into the new Yugoslav socialist state and society, from the
end of WWII until the early 1950s, entailed also the construction of the "new socialist man and woman". Up
until the late 1950s, the Yugoslav version of the "new man" was entangled in an authoritarian form of an
ultra-modernist neo-traditionalist sexual ideology which professed sexual purity and socialist orthodox
morality in intimate relations. Immediately after the war, homosexuality, defined in the Penal Code as
"debauchery against nature", got branded as a threat to the society as a whole, a corruptor of youth, an
expression of class exploitation and a decadent, rotten remnant of the old, defeated regime. An elaborate set
of socio-legal and judicial mechanisms aimed to control and punish non-reproductive sexual practices
remained in force until the mid-1960s. However, simultaneously with the consolidation of the singular
Yugoslav path to socialism, a new "Homo Yugoslavicus" began to take shape: no longer a Soviet duplicate,
but neither too Americanized, suspended between the East and the West, destined to self-manage not only
the factories, but also his intimate and sexual relations. In this refashioning of the socialist masculinity, the
"Yugoslav homosexual" could also find a new place, with the first emancipatory tools provided by the State
and the Party. Indeed, a partial and slow decriminalization, and a tacit depathologization in the 1970s,
dispensed "from above", opened the door not only to an increasingly westernised sexological frame, but also
to models of self-organization and self-emancipation in many ways mirroring the Western liberationist
movements of the same period.
Franko Dota is working on his PhD thesis on homosexuality in socialist Yugoslavia at the Department of
History, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Zagreb. He is active in the Croatian LGBT
movement and was among the founding members of Zagreb Pride organization. He is the author of Post-War
History at War: Narratives on Persecutions and Migrations of Italians from Istria (2010).

Friday, 27 February 2015, 15:30-17:00

REC JK [Valckenierstraat 65-67], Room 1.18
The lecture is organized in the framework of Dr Bojan Bilis research project:
[Post-]Yugoslav LGBT Activism: Between Nationalism and Europeanisation

The lecture is free and open to the public. Registration is not required.
For more information visit: www.arcgs.uva.nl