Content note for suicide
“Because if you hide, your whole life will be spent focusing on heterosexuality, and you’re not like that; so when you finally decide to end it, that’s achieving some freedom. It turned out that I became the only openly homosexual person in Yugoslavia.” - Dejan Nebrigić
During an era in which Serbia was dominated by war, nationalism, and widespread violence, Dejan Nebrigić emerged as a stubbornly vocal pacifist and is widely considered to be one of the first publicly gay activists in his country. As one of the earliest leaders of the LGBTQ+ movement in Serbia, Nebrigić was able to make significant strides for queer rights during what would come to be a tragically shortened life, including co-founding his nation’s first ever LGBTQ+ organization. In particular, Nebrigić is remembered for boldly initiating the first legal trial in Serbia that centered on homophobic discrimination. This case would ultimately be a leading cause in his untimely demise.
Dejan Nebrigić was born on December 29th, 1970 in the city of Pančevo, located in the present-day autonomous province of Vojvodina, Serbia. At the time of Nebrigić’s birth, however, Pančevo was part of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, one of the six constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Growing up in a country mired in turmoil where war, nationalism, and brutality ruled the streets, Nebrigić from an early age emerged as a vocal political writer, theater critic and activist for peace and LGBTQ+ rights, lending his voice to numerous publications and becoming involved in several significant organizations.
Perhaps most notably, alongside Lepa Mlađenović and ten other individuals, Nebrigić co-founded Arkadija, the first LGBTQ+ organization to ever exist in Serbia, when he was just 20 years old. In an interview with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), Mlađenović recalled first meeting Nebrigić and engaging in long talks with him at a pastry shop inside the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade. She remembered how easy it was to relate to the young radical: “Since we were starting from scratch, we had to connect with each other and talk in order to invent who we are. We did not rely on what you call the ‘culture of memory’ – at that time, there were no ‘outed’ lesbian and gay activists for us to remember.” Mlađenović further commented on their similarities, adding: “Dejan Nebrigić and I, on the one hand, grew up on the socialist morality of brotherhood and unity and, on the other hand, we had to invent what it means to be a lesbian and to be a gay man in the ‘90s in Serbia during the criminal regime.”
The founding of Arkadija, whose primary goal was to fight for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Serbia, was seen as a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ people in the region but came at a time when nationalism and war were surging in the country and little tolerance was allotted towards the expression of nontraditional sexual orientations or gender identities. As Mlađenović put it, “We were excited to exist and to meet…and since we lived in Serbia, the most important thing for us was to survive, because same-sex love called into question the ideology of the patriarchal family and was therefore considered a greater crime than the war crimes of nationalism.” Despite this, Arkadija’s first act as an organization was to send an open letter to the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, condemning the nation’s sweeping militarism.
In addition to helping found and run Arkadija, Dejan Nebrigić was also extremely involved in several other activist-minded organizations and publications. In 1991, he was one of the founders and co-editors of the anti-war magazine Pacifik, for which he often wrote articles that centered on gay and lesbian themes. That same year, he became an active member of several recently formed NGOs, including the Centre for Antiwar Action and the Women in Black, which became well known for staging some of the most powerfully moving anti-war protests of the 1990s.
In 1994, Nebrigić was called up to serve in the Serbian army. In response, he came out to the recruiting committee as a homosexual. The army then released Nebrigić from his required service and referred him for psychiatric assessment, where Nebrigić was informed that he was suffering from a personality disorder and was prescribed the anti-anxiety drug Valium. According to Mlađenović in BIRN: “That was an example of the activism of anti-war gay activist Dejan Nebrigić. He would say: ‘How to use truth to deceive the ‘stupid laws of the stupid system of the fascist state’.”
Nebrigić was thus one of the first Serbian anti-war activists to also speak publicly about his sexuality in the media, which then unfortunately exposed him to both verbal and physical abuse. At one point, Nebrigić described his later years as “pretty much hell,” and in one of his written pieces, entitled Morning Diary (1997), described a particular occurrence during which he went out to a store with a friend one evening and was slapped across the face by a stranger. Nebrigić wearily remarked that by that point, events like that night had become so ordinary to him that he simply walked home from the store “as if nothing had [even] happened.”
Despite these frequent persecutions, Nebrigić persisted and remained a vocal activist and critic. He became the executive director of the Campaign Against Homophobia which, supported by the Humanitarian Law Fund and the European Youth Association, produced four reports analyzing homophobia in Serbia and documenting hate speech endured by Serbian LGBTQ+ people. In 1997, Nebrigić published what is considered by many to be the first gay-themed Serbian novel, entitled Paris-New York. One year later, he published the para-philosophical work Labyrinth Dictionary. He continued to write frequently about police harassment and the abuses faced by LGBTQ+ people, with numerous pieces of his published in counter-culture journals like Uznet, KulturTreger and ProFemina. Nebrigić also frequently criticized the police’s failure to protect queer people in his work, often by detailing the attacks that he himself was personally experiencing.
All the while, attacks against Nebrigić became more frequent and more dangerous. In 1998 alone, Nebrigić’s apartment was broken into and raided on four separate occasions. Though he would notify the police, officers either ignored or insulted him, at one point telling him: “You’re a fag; one of your fuckers did it,” and advising him not to call them again. Things escalated further in April of 1999 when Nebrigić filed a landmark lawsuit against Vlastimir Lazarov, accusing him of repeated harassment and of being a threat to his security. The lawsuit is widely considered the first ever case to be brought in Serbia on the grounds of homophobic discrimination. Lazarov was, in fact, the father of Nebrigić's ex-boyfriend Milan Lazarov, and at the time had blamed Nebrigić for the fact that his own son was gay. Once the case was initiated, however, the Duty Attorney initially refused to represent Nebrigić on the grounds that he was a homosexual. Eventually, the first hearing was scheduled for November 1999, but was then delayed due to the judge falling ill.
During this waiting period, Nebrigić continued to be harassed and began fearing for his life. He penned a will and sent it to several of his friends, including Nandor Ljubanović, who reflected that the document was “more of a manifesto” than a last will and testament. Though the will had no legal validity, Nebrigić listed in detail to whom he wished to leave his books, writings, diaries and magazines, as well as who would get to oversee the rights to his unpublished works. Despite the conflict at hand, Milan Lazarov’s name appeared throughout the document, and Nebrigić stated that any works of his published posthumously must include a dedication to Milan. In said document, Nebrigić at one point even wrote that he wished to “present these ‘orders’ to you as concisely as possible, the pleas of a broken – and, when I finish this, I hope also a dead – friend.”
Unsurprisingly then, Dejan Nebrigić was found dead in his apartment in Pančevo on December 29th, 1999–what would have been his 29th birthday. Police investigations found he had been strangled to death, and subsequently arrested his former lover Milan Lazarov, accusing him of committing the crime. Nebrigić’s body was buried two days later at the Catholic cemetery in Pančevo. As if not a tragedy on its own, the government of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević then proceeded to use Nebrigić’s murder to further attack its own LGBTQ+ community, employing it as both anti-gay rights and anti-Western propaganda. According to Mlađenović at the time: “They use every opportunity to say that all the activists, that all the NGOs are negative and dangerous as well as opposition members.”
Alongside Mlađenović, many of Nebrigić's colleagues believe that his murder was a direct result of his activism, especially after Nedeljko Martinović, the investigative judge who conducted the case, was quoted in Serbia’s pro-government tabloid Politika Express as saying: “Our information is that Nebrigić founded a movement of homosexuals who had access to various funds from abroad…That movement was, in effect, a gateway for all kinds of sects conducting a special war against our country.”
In 2017, the documentary film Angel's Premonition (2017) was released in memory of Nebrigić. In the film, which was both written and directed by Branislav Princip, Lepa Mlađenović is interviewed and at one point recounts that Nebrigić had spoken to her about eventually wanting a gay and lesbian organization to one day be named after him. Whether this specific request occurs remains to be seen, but Nebrigić is nevertheless remembered as a pioneer in his country, as an individual who broke through numerous barriers for the sake of Serbian LGBTQ+ rights and who remained fearless and active until the very end.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Athanasiou, A. (2017). Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black. Edinburgh University Press.
Bilić, B., & Kajinić, S. (2016). LGBT Activist Politics and Intersectionality in Croatia and Serbia: An Introduction. In B. Bilić & S. Kajinić (Eds.), Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia (pp. 1–29). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59031-2_1
Brakus. (2017, October 10). A regional fight for rights. Kosovo 2.0. https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/regional-fight-rights/
Kalem, J. (2023, September 7). Serbian Gay Rights Pioneer and Anti-War Activist Remembered. Balkan Insight. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/07/serbian-gay-rights-pioneer-and-anti-war-activist-remembered/
Marek, M. (2017). Bojan Bilić (2016) (ed.) LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space: On the Rainbow Way to Europe. Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.17356/ieejsp.v3i2.375
Prendergast, F. (2000, January 26). Dead man used to attack Yugoslav gays | Xtra Magazine. https://xtramagazine.com/power/dead-man-used-to-attack-yugoslav-gays-47510
Štulhofer, A., & Sandfort, T. (2005). Sexuality and Gender In Postcommunist Eastern Europe and Russia. New York: Haworth Press.