\u00a0<\/em>Tomislav Gotovac: \u201cPrava je stvar snimati pedere!\u201d (<\/span>Plastic Jesus<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Plasti\u010dni Isus<\/span><\/i>, dir. Lazar Stojanovi\u0107, 1971)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n First and foremost, before even explaining the origin of the <\/span>Bury Your Gays <\/span><\/i>trope, one should explain the origin of tropes in the first place, and Soviet folklorist and structuralist Vladimir Propp\u2019s <\/span>Morphology of the Folktales. <\/span><\/i>While Propp had not specifically analysed and identified tropes in literature, he had deconstructed 100 tales by Alexander Afanasyev (nos. 50 to no. 151, to be precise) into recurring motives and plot devices. Overall, counting 31 functions that can and often are the backbone of fairytales, he analysed the common occurrences in characters, plot devices, and sequences of events, which can easily be compared to how we observe tropes today. (Propp, n.d., p. 64)<\/span><\/p>\n First of all, it should be mentioned what the definition of a trope is \u2013 a common or overused theme or device, also known as a <\/span>clich\u00e9<\/span><\/i>. (<\/span>Definition of CLICH\u00c9<\/span><\/i>, n.d.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Bury Your Gays <\/span><\/i>is a trope that first appeared in a different medium; specifically, it began appearing in the late 19<\/span>th<\/span> century as a literary trope. Due to decency laws that outlawed homosexual sex and made it punishable by imprisonment for up to two years, with or without hard labour, many authors could not tackle such themes without being accused of promoting homosexuality. (Book (eISB), n.d.)<\/span><\/p>\n One way of avoiding explicitly dealing with the subject of homosexuality was coded language. Code words can have a sexual and homoerotic effect or indicate something other than what a heterosexual account could explain. (deviating from the norm, page 1). For example, in Oscar Wilde\u2019s <\/span>The Portrait of Dorian Gray<\/span><\/i>, the way Basil often describes Dorian could be read as queer-coded. (\u201c\u2018Dorian Gray is my dearest friend,\u2019 he said. \u2018He has a simple and a beautiful nature. Your aunt was quite right in what she said of him. Don\u2019t spoil him. Don\u2019t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don\u2019t take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him. (\u2026)\u2019\u201d (Wilde, 1999, p. 16) \u201cIn fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together \u2013 music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it.\u201d (Wilde, 1999, p. 158) In the uncensored version of the novel, some of these examples become even more obvious: (\u201c(\u2026) As a rule, he is charming to me, and we walk home together from the club arm in arm, or sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things.(\u2026)\u201d (Wilde, 2012, p. 68) In the first version that was published, the \u201cand we walk home together from the club arm in arm\u201d phrase is completely missing.<\/span><\/p>\n Another way to make it clear that homosexual behaviour was not endorsed was to have an LGBTQ+ character be \u201cpunished\u201d, usually by killing them off. The same is present in Oscar Wilde\u2019s novel, where Dorian first kills Basil, and later dies by stabbing his own portrait that Basil had painted.<\/span><\/p>\n While the earliest examples of LGBTQ+ characters in Western cinema were more sympathetic \u2013 where cross-dressing and gender-role reversals such as \u201cpansies\u201d and \u201cbutches\u201d, as well as even same-sex kisses have been common \u2013 a change took place with Will Hays, and subsequent creation of the Motion Picture Production Code in the 1930s, by which the industry regulated itself. In the 1960s, it was more commonly known as the Hays Code. (Russo, 1987, p. 26) Again, it was never outwardly stated what the sexuality of a character was, and it depended on viewers to notice it based on subtext and queer coding.<\/span><\/p>\n In post-war Hollywood films, queer characters stopped being silly, and were instead often portrayed as villainous, such as the murderers Brandon and Phillip in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s <\/span>The Rope <\/span><\/i>(1948), or the thugs Fante and Mingo in <\/span>The Big Combo <\/span><\/i>(dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1955). While in the former it is implied that both characters will be arrested (and presumably sentenced to death, which was the penalty for murder in the United Kingdom at the time), in the latter one of them, Fante, is killed by a bomb, while Mingo is badly injured and arrested. (Benshoff & Griffin, 2010, p. 37)<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It is hard to truly tell what the first portrayal of an LGBTQ+ person on film was, as in the late 19<\/span>th<\/span> century there were all sorts of same-sex physical intimacies that today might be read as homosexual, but were more common at the time, such as hugging, kissing, and caressing between two people of the same sex. One of the early silent short film experiments (lasting only about 20 seconds), shot at Thomas Edison\u2019s estate in 1895 depicted two men dancing. The short has been dubbed <\/span>The Gay Brothers <\/span><\/i>as no title card existed. (Benshoff & Griffin, 2010, p. 31) Of course, there is also the problem of the word \u2018gay\u2019 having changed meaning over time (although even in the 1890s it could have a promiscuous undertone), having started being used more commonly as \u2018homosexual\u2019 in the 1940s. (<\/span>Homosexual – Etymology, Origin & Meaning<\/span><\/i>, n.d.)<\/span><\/p>\n However, we can say with certainty that the first film with a gay romance was the Swedish film <\/span>The Wings <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Vingarne<\/span><\/i>, dir. Mauritz Stiller, 1916), which presents a homoerotic plotline happening between a sculptor and his model. The film was based on the novel <\/span>Mik\u00e4el <\/span><\/i>by Danish writer Herman Bang. There was also a German adaptation, <\/span>Michael <\/span><\/i>(dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924). The first widely known same-sex kiss between two people of the same sex took place in <\/span>Wings <\/span><\/i>(dir. William A. Wellman, 1927) between two soldiers, one of whom is dying at that moment. However, due to aforementioned socially accepted friendly intimacies between two men, it remains ambiguous how homosexual it was intended to be. (Danesi, 2013, p. 137) The same can be said for the kiss between two men in <\/span>Intolerance <\/span><\/i>(dir. D. W. Griffith, 1916) or the two women kissing in the background in <\/span>Manslaughter <\/span><\/i>(dir. Cecil B. DeMille, 1922).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While not technically a film but a chronophotographic sequence, Eadweard Muybridge\u2019s <\/span>Two Models Shaking Hands and Kissing Each Other <\/span><\/i>(1887) captures two nude women doing just that. Because of\u00a0 the social conventions of the time, however, women were considered to have little or no sex drive, so even in the eyes of Victorians it was not viewed as erotic. (Lim, n.d., p. 1) What is considered the first real homosexual kiss takes place in <\/span>Sunday Bloody Sunday <\/span><\/i>(dir. John Schlesinger, 1971) between two men. (Danesi, 2013, p. 137) Despite having no kiss, the first film that could be viewed as critical of homosexuality being a criminal offence was a German film <\/span>Different from the Others <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Anders als die Andern<\/span><\/i>, dir. Richard Oswald, 1919), in which a gay violinist kills himself after being publicly exposed as gay. His partner tries to do the same but survives. (Nudes & Stiles, n.d., p. 8)<\/span><\/p>\n In the following decades, due to various censorship laws, LGBTQ+ characters were mostly only queer-coded. In the Balkans, particularly in Yugoslavia, that has also been the case. Occasionally, some seemingly straight characters would also engage in homoerotic behaviour \u2013 for example, the bride and bridesmaids engage in somewhat sexual wrestling in bed in <\/span>Handcuffs <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Lisice<\/span><\/i>, dir. Krsto Papi\u0107, 1969).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Despite homosexuality still being criminalised until 1977, Yugoslav cinema often featured LGBTQ+ characters in minor roles, even in more mainstream films of the time. During my research, I have found around 25 more that appear to include an LGBTQ+ character.<\/span><\/p>\n In the film <\/span>Crows <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Vrane<\/span><\/i>, dir. Ljubi\u0161a Kozomara, Gordan Mihi\u0107, 1969) one of the characters, \u010cedica, is clearly written as a gay man. He is a ballet dancer, quite effeminate, who, like the rest of the characters, has been shunned from society. Another side-character also appears to be a homosexual, as at one point he asks for sexual intercourse with \u010cedica, which results in the gang killing him. \u010cedica is implied to survive at the end of the film although he is still physically assaulted by the main character. Two years earlier in the film <\/span>The Rats Woke Up <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>\u0411\u0443\u0452\u0435\u045a\u0435 \u043f\u0430\u0446\u043e\u0432\u0430<\/span><\/i>, dir. \u017divojin Pavlovi\u0107), the same actor who played \u010cedica, Milan Jeli\u0107, portrayed a student who was implied to be in a relationship with a pornography collector, Milorad. Milorad is meticulous about self-grooming, and could be described as a dandy. Despite the main character being of lower social status when compared with an affluent collector, he is still considered to be above Milorad. (Gili\u0107, 2021, p. 10) Both characters survive.<\/span><\/p>\n While \u010cedica was quite an important character in <\/span>Crows<\/span><\/i>, the gay character Simke in <\/span>National Class Category Up to 785 Ccm <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Nacionalna klasa<\/span><\/i>, dir. Goran Markovi\u0107, 1979) is more of a background character appearing only a handful of times. He is a DJ who has a boyfriend, with whom he breaks up by the end of the film.<\/span><\/p>\n The following year, a film by the same director, <\/span>All That Jack\u2019s <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Majstori, majstori<\/span><\/i>) also features a homosexual character, this time a more latent one. An art teacher at a local school is often teasingly nicknamed \u201cEmanuela\u201d, a distinctly female name, for that reason.<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>The Promising Boy <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>\u0414\u0435\u0447\u043a\u043e \u043a\u043e\u0458\u0438 \u043e\u0431\u0435\u045b\u0430\u0432\u0430<\/span><\/i>, dir. Milo\u0161 Radivojevi\u0107, 1981), the main character, Slobodan, has a brief fling with a queer-coded character Pit. Whether it was as a promotion for their band or something genuine is not clarified, although up to that point Slobodan only showed interest in women. Pit ultimately ends up dead, whether by suicide or accident, it remains unclear.<\/span><\/p>\n In many of the Yugoslav films up until the 1990s, homosexuality, though often laced with elements of homophobia, was not punished in the way it often did in Western films, nor were LGBTQ+ characters portrayed as inherently evil. Occasionally, however, they served as a stereotypical comedic relief.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/span><\/li>\n\n
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\n<\/b>This paper discusses the result of a study that explored the \u201cBury Your Gays\u201d trope and its presence in Balkan cinema. After broadly defining the trope and referencing some of the more well-known Western examples, the paper examines how Balkan cinema portrayed LGBTQ+ characters in its early stages (from the 1960s to 1980s), depending on the country of origin, and continues its analysis into the 1990s and the present day. The main goal of the research is to determine whether Balkan cinema was more or less progressive compared to its Western counterpart. <\/span><\/p>\n\n
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\n<\/span>While quite a few films had homosexual characters \u2013 either explicitly or subtly \u2013 before the 1990s, the first film that could truly be called \u2018queer\u2019, and not just queer-themed, was <\/span>Marble Ass <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Dupe od mramora<\/span><\/i>, dir. \u017delimir \u017dilnik, 1995), because it used performers who identified as queer outside of the film itself, and was provocative narratively and aesthetically. (Jela\u010da, 2016, p. 105) A docufictional comedy set in Belgrade that follows a transsexual sex worker, during the period of international sanctions and war. The film addresses ethno-nationalism, the rise of criminal activity, as well as hypermasculinity. It is interesting that, among many LGBTQ+ in the film \u2013 most of whom were trans sex-workers playing a fictional version of themselves \u2013 the only character that ends up dead is D\u017eoni, a man who has returned from the war and is determined to get rich by any means necessary. Unlike other characters, he is hypermasculine and nationalistic, refuses to confront his wartime trauma and instead embraces it, and it is this behaviour that ultimately leads to his death. <\/span>
\n<\/span>Surprisingly, the film was well received at the time, surprising even its director. \u201cI was even surprised that there were no protests against the film. Nobody tried to censor it\u2026 They said it was a bit extreme, but we had had extreme films before.\u201d, \u017dilnik said, while also assuming it was perhaps because the groups most likely to protest such a film were preoccupied with the ongoing war. (<\/span>Marble Ass<\/span><\/i>, n.d.)<\/span>
\n<\/span>However, the change and fight for the LGBTQ+ rights was only just beginning, and the film did not make life any safer for sexual minorities. Tragically, the main character and star of the film, Vjeran Miladinovi\u0107, also known as Merlinka, was brutally murdered only a few years later, and no one has ever been convicted for his murder. (Jela\u010da, 2016, p. 119)<\/span>
\n<\/span>In 1995, it won the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival, considered the oldest and most prestigious award for queer cinema worldwide. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>(<\/span>Calvary <\/span><\/i>(1996), <\/span>Russian Meat <\/span><\/i>(1997), <\/span>Fine Dead Girls<\/span><\/i> (2002), <\/span>Guardian of the Frontier<\/span><\/i> (2002), <\/span>Take a Deep Breath<\/span><\/i> (2004), <\/span>Love Sick <\/span><\/i>(2006), <\/span>Obituary for Escobar <\/span><\/i>(2008), <\/span>Go West<\/span><\/i> (2005))<\/span>
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\n<\/span>Occasionally, a homosexual character would still serve as a comedic relief in films, such as in <\/span>Third Time Lucky <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Tre\u0107a sre\u0107a<\/span><\/i>, dir. Dragoslav Lazi\u0107, 1995), where one the main character meets a homosexual man in prison. He is simply there to deliver a joke about being arrested for stealing bras \u2013 which is preposterous, as he has quite a wonderful collection at home already. The character does not influence the plot in any meaningful way, and serves purely as a source of humour.<\/span>
\n<\/span>In 1996, <\/span>Calvary <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Kalvarija<\/span><\/i>, dir. Zvonimir Maycug (Majcug)) was released, although primarily on VHS tapes. It was screened in only one theatre in Zagreb \u2013 cinema Kusto\u0161ija, and was rejected from the Pula Film Festival at the time due to technical faults. (<\/span>(PDF) [Curated Retrospective] PSIHOTRONI\u010cKI FILM (PSYCHOTRONIC FILM) Of Zvonimir Maycug – Feature Film Retrospective | Zeljko Luketic – Academia.Edu<\/span><\/i>, 2021, p. 158) Surprisingly, the movie does not portray itself as a \u201cgay\u201d or \u201cqueer\u201d film, but rather as a film about human relationships, in which a same-sex male relationship is treated as entirely ordinary. (<\/span>Nakon Molitve Bludili Smo Cijeli Dan<\/span><\/i>, 2022) Unfortunately, the film is plagued with awkward editing, horrible acting, and is nowadays regarded as one of those \u2018so-bad-they\u2019re-good\u2019 productions, which is quite unfortunate. Considering the film also engages with themes such as provincial unrest, scandal, and religion, it is a shame that its legacy now lies firmly within the <\/span>trash <\/span><\/i>category of cinema. However, both characters surprisingly survive the ordeals, and the film concludes on a somehow hopeful note. <\/span>
\n<\/span>Russian Meat <\/span><\/i>(<\/span>Rusko meso<\/span><\/i>, dir. Lukas Nola, 1997) is set in an elite brothel in Croatia. While the main plot follows a woman investigating the murder of her sister, who had worked there, it is heavily implied in the background that one of the senior female employees may have been in love with one of the prostitutes – also murdered, like the protagonist\u2019s sister. She ultimately kills the brothel owner responsible for both deaths. In the film\u2019s final shoot-out, all the characters except for the protagonist are killed. Although the story references the war and involves weapons smuggling, it is not as overtly political as some later films.<\/span>
\n<\/span>The works that followed began to engage more directly with themes of homophobia, the deeply ingrained nationalism of post-Yugoslavian countries, and the lingering consequences of the war \u2013 in ways not dissimilar to <\/span>