Introduction
On 18 June 1949 in the Croatian Adriatic town of Dubrovnik, sixteen men were convicted for homosexuality on sentences ranging from one to twelve years in prison. The judgement was read aloud not only in court to the men standing on the bench but also on a loudspeaker to the crowd gathered outside the courthouse. After the verdict was delivered, the convicted men were brought out into the streets where they were forced to run the gauntlet of the angry crowd in a walk of shame.Footnote 1 This image was so potent and traumatic that continued to reverberate half a century later in the memory of Toni Marošević, a Croatian journalist and gay man. In his testimony, given for a queer oral history project, resurfaced the story of ‘men dragged through the streets of Dubrovnik with the words “I am a faggot” written on bags placed over their heads’.Footnote 2 Marošević, born in 1945, could not have personally remembered the event and his recollection is mediated through accounts he heard from older gay men he met later in life. I have not been able to corroborate the scene with the demeaning inscription on the bags. Nevertheless, from prosecutor’s office reports, it is clear that the sorrowful procession was forced to walk through Dubrovnik exposed to insults, contempt and the fury of citizens, assembled on the initiative of the local authorities.
The year 1949 was an annus horribilis for homosexuals in Yugoslavia, the worst in the twentieth century. Amid the Dubrovnik trial, a wave of arrests in Zagreb led to another major anti-homosexual show trial later that year.Footnote 3 In the late 1940s trials were also held in Belgrade, Ljubljana, Rijeka, Herceg Novi, Nikšić, Kotor, Čačak, Pirot, Šabac, Valjevo, Sremska Mitrovica, Ruma, Prizren and elsewhere.Footnote 4 Various sources suggest that at least two hundred men were convicted on prison terms for ‘unnatural fornication’, while several hundred more were arrested and detained in police stations with their names entered into police registries.
The extant literature on persecution of homosexuality in post-revolutionary Yugoslavia is focused on recording basic facts on some court cases, without offering an interpretation in a broader political, social and legal context.Footnote 5 Also, prior to this research it was common knowledge that ‘unnatural fornication’ was a criminal offence in socialist Yugoslavia, as it had been during the inter-war period and, more broadly, in penal codes dating back to the nineteenth century, similarly to many other European states.Footnote 6 However, the application in judicial practice of the Criminal Code provision on ‘unnatural fornication’ has not been a subject of historical analysis. This article seeks to fill this gap and to offer an interpretative framework for the criminal prosecution of male homosexuality in late 1940s Yugoslavia. The main points the discussion will focus on are: the ideological background of the persecution of male homosexuality in communist-ruled post-war Yugoslavia, particularly the influence of tropes such as the ‘depravity and saturation of the upper classes’ and the ‘seduction of the youth’, in the second section; the third section explores the reasons why this persecution occurred in a time of revolutionary fervour and in the years the Tito–Stalin conflict was at its peak and why the targets of the most repressive and punitive measures were visible or prominent homosexuals, while other, more discreet men were mostly ignored. In the last two sections major show trials held in Zagreb and in Šibenik are analysed in detail. Extensive verdict reasonings, written by magistrates from different tribunals, can not only offer valuable insights into the legal history of homosexuality in Yugoslavia but also contribute to a more profound comprehension of the ideological underpinnings surrounding homosexuality in early socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, adding the Yugoslav historical experience to the growing queer scholarship on this topic. This period is thus inscribed in Yugoslav queer history as a time of persecution, when the judiciary was an extended arm of the new communist authorities and the revolutionary zeal was at its zenith. Contributing to the repressive measures were the images built within socialist thought of homosexuals as embodiments of carnal excess and unrestrained pleasure, traits usually associated with the aristocracy, clergy and bourgeoisie. Coupled with groups the new order considered to be its main opponents, homosexuals were readily subsumed into the broader category of enemies of socialism and even the state. The persistent notion of the homosexual as a corrupt seducer of naïve youth, widespread in the European imaginary beyond ideological divides, was further exacerbated in the early years of communist rule by its obsessive concern for the proper moral development of the young, regarded as the champion of the overall long-term success of the socialist project.
The research presented here is based on new archival material, mainly police and judicial records and court sentences from the late 1940s, but also on some texts published by legal scholars and public prosecutors.Footnote 7 What remains out of our sight are the materials from trials that lacked political relevance – those involving individuals punished with mild sanctions, mostly in misdemeanour procedures – since files for these cases have largely been lost, as they were not kept in court archives but in police record offices. Nevertheless, various reports unmistakeably indicate that such disciplinary proceedings in abbreviated ‘administrative procedures’ were anything but rare. Even so, the major anti-homosexual trials ultimately proved to be the most important indicator of the communist authorities’ attitude towards homosexuality in the first five years of their rule and significantly influenced the decision to continue treating ‘unnatural fornication’ as a criminal offence in early socialist Yugoslavia.
Trials with derogatory ideological rhetoric were ubiquitous also in other socialist states, with the first decade of communist governments regularly being the most vehement. It was following the establishment of the communist rule that, in Anita Kurimay’s words, ‘for the first time a Hungarian state came to systematically prosecute homosexual men’.Footnote 8 They were seen as ‘unreliable elements who were incompatible with the emerging political system’, state enemies reflecting both ‘moral and physical degeneracy of the former ruling capitalist classes’. Homosexuality was considered ‘antithetical to the socialist way of being’ and ‘prosecuted not simply as a crime against morality but a crime against socialism’.Footnote 9 Between 1949 and 1962 some eight hundred cases were tried in Budapest only. In the early 1950s the ‘prosecution of homosexual men intensified to an unprecedented level’, with courts openly expressing ‘abhorrence toward sex between men (even if consensual) on a moral as well as ideological basis’.Footnote 10 In Hungary decriminalisation went into effect in 1962, after – as was the case in Czechoslovakia – a debate between the medical and legal professions that concluded that ‘homosexuality did not pose a danger to the health of society because it was not “spreadable”’, but rather ‘a congenital abnormality that required neither punishment nor treatment’Footnote 11 or, as the analogous official Czechoslovak explanation read, ‘a sexual deviation that is untreatable given the current state of medical science’.Footnote 12 Until intense medicalisation and sexological expert discourse paved the way for decriminalisation, in Czechoslovakia men who had sex with men were also treated as detritus of the capitalist past while homosexual behaviour was considered a gross infringement on the socialist morality and queer men faced trial, though with less vigour when compared to Hungary.Footnote 13 In the two decades between 1949 and 1969 West Germany was far more committed to the criminal prosecution of queer men than its communist counterpart. East Germany, nevertheless, continued to treat same-sex sexual acts as criminal ‘on the grounds that “the seduction of young people poses an especial danger for society”’ and the law was employed with particular care when ‘the accused had in some way endangered the regime’.Footnote 14 As Samuel C. Huneke summarised, much like in West Germany, ‘the seduction of minors remained a central preoccupation of the East German judiciary’ and socialist newspapers ‘described homosexuality as a symptom of Western decadence’.Footnote 15 On similar grounds and with similar underpinnings homosexuals were treated, labelled and prosecuted, with different levels of intensity varying over time, in the Soviet Union. In the first decade of communist rule, in 1922, same-sex intercourse between men (muzhelozhstvo) was decriminalised in Bolshevik Russia. However, public or intimate expressions of homosexuality were far from accepted. In 1934, after Stalin had consolidated his firm grip on the Party and the State, sodomy was re-criminalised. The initiative came from the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), the political and security police, which claimed that homosexuals posed a security threat to the state by infiltrating the Red Army, undermining the masculinity and fighting strength of Soviet youth.Footnote 16 Even though the 1932 decision to decriminalise same-sex sexual acts was upheld in socialist Poland, for decades homosexuals were mistreated, interrogated, intimidated and registered in police files – a system of surveillance that culminated in the notorious Operation Hyacinth of 1985.Footnote 17 In Poland, as elsewhere, the police viewed homosexual circles as intrinsically criminogenic.Footnote 18
Throughout the 1950s, homosexuals were targets of a similar, nearly synchronic, wave of persecution in Western European countries and in the United States. There the ideological underpinnings were centred on the values of the traditional family and sexual propriety, while efforts were made to consolidate the culture of marital and familial domesticity and the patriarchal division of gender roles in both private and public spheres – policies that served to reinforce the prestige and authority gained by Christian Democratic parties during the first two post-war decades. Yet, the protection of male youth from homosexual initiation and prostitution was a feature common to both sides of the East–West Cold War geographical and ideological divide.Footnote 19
In Yugoslavia decriminalisation came with some tardiness and only in half of the country. Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and the province of Vojvodina, part of Serbia but with a newly granted legislative sovereignty in some domains, took the lead in 1977, while the so-called inner Serbia (including here the federal capital Belgrade), its southern province Kosovo with an Albanian ethnic majority, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia went through the process in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Federation and the fall of socialism.
The Ideological Roots of the Persecution: The Demise of Bourgeois Deviance
Homosexual behaviour is rare in our country, but it does exist. While education and the moral elevation of the masses – through both spoken and written word – remain the most effective means of eradicating it and eventually making it disappear, its suppression must, for the time being, be enforced by criminal sanctions.Footnote 20
In this brief remark of the Supreme Court of Serbia, written in 1949 in support of maintaining the criminal status of homosexuality in the Yugoslav Criminal Code, some crucial ideological underpinnings of the socialist thought on the nature of ‘sexual deviations’ can be discerned. The revolutionary optimism of the post-war years in Yugoslavia fostered the belief that all forms of exploitation – along with social deviations such as ‘sexual perversions’ – could be extinguished. Communists had an unwavering faith in the possibility of a radical transformation of the world, of not only the economic order but all social relations, including those in the realm of sexuality.Footnote 21 By relying on a superficial reading of sporadic remarks on same-sex sexual practices in classic Marxist philosophers, the notion that homosexuality was a trait of the privileged classes – an expression of their decadence and exploitative tendencies – was repeatedly reinforced.
Among the Marxist classics, Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State briefly addressed homosexuality within his historical and anthropological analysis of the interdependence between economic relations, family structures and gender.Footnote 22 To vividly illustrate historical male gender supremacy ‘in all its severity’ as ‘monogamy for the woman only, but not for the man [emphasis in the original]’, Engels resorted to the example of same-sex eroticism in ancient Athens.Footnote 23 He interpreted the practice of ‘pederasty’ in ancient Greece as a tragic consequence of the patriarchal family, reading it through the lens of his nineteenth-century morality as a corruption of humanity, nature and god.Footnote 24 While criticising the bourgeois family, Engels simultaneously constructs an idealised vision of proletarian love: a property-free union based on the free choice of the spouse.Footnote 25 From this idealised image of proletarian men and women emerged the socialist perception of the health and purity – both moral and sexual – of the working class, devoid of the economic basis for exploitation within marriage or any ‘perverse’ sexuality.
Engels’s theory of the family became one of the canonical texts of Marxism. The Origin of the Family was included in mandatory reading lists for Communist Party courses from the formative years of socialist Yugoslavia and remained a key theoretical text throughout the socialist period.Footnote 26 In the late 1940s, the book was strongly recommended for Marxist training of primary and secondary school teachers and was required reading for future magistrates at the Faculty of Law in Zagreb.Footnote 27
In his study Woman and Socialism, another classic of socialist literature, August Bebel also suggested that homosexuality was conditioned by class and that it was more prevalent among the privileged. A life of abundance and indulgence led the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie to various excesses, to the pursuit of ‘perverse pleasures’.Footnote 28 Bebel’s support for the early German movement for the emancipation of homosexuality was overshadowed by some of his remarks associating homosexuality with bourgeois moral decay, egoistic sensual indulgence and carnal excess.Footnote 29
Class-based society was thus regarded as the primary source of ‘perverted’ sexual practices. Through its material constraints, it compels both women and men into highly limited forms of sexual behaviour and serves as a driving force behind male infidelity and domestic violence. The restrictive nature of the bourgeois marriage creates space for prostitution. Ultimately, it enables homosexuality as a consequence of the bourgeoisie’s life in abundance and moral decay. Hence the view that same-sex relationships are inherently exploitative, with a privileged, wealthy or mature man taking advantage of a young, poor or gullible adolescent, vulnerable to ‘unhealthy bourgeois influences’. In a communist society, with the abolition of private property and the withering away of the state, the laws of historical materialism would ensure the end of patriarchy; consequently, unequal marital relations would fade, prostitution would disappear and homosexuality would cease to exist.Footnote 30 Finally, in socialist thought homosexuality became entangled with notions of vice, misogyny and the depravity of the upper classes, often framed as a danger that could lead the youth astray, particularly in large urban centres. The trope of homosexual ‘corruption of the youth’ – whether through the seduction of impressionable young boys with still-undeveloped masculinity and heterosexuality, or through initiation by spiritual coercion, physical force or money – was deeply rooted in modern European societies, extending far beyond any single ideology, set of societal values or school of psychological thought.Footnote 31 In early Yugoslav socialism the youth was seen as the hallmark of the socialist future and instilling socialist values in adolescents was of paramount importance and this fear became even more pronounced, while homosexuals came to be viewed both as class aliens and obstacles to building socialism.
The upbringing of the youth, as Aleksandar Ranković – one of the leading communist politicians and the Federal Minister of Internal Affairs – explained in 1952, should have been considered ‘a matter of socialist building’ because their neglect or improper education ‘could undermine the very foundations of our new society’.Footnote 32 As historian Ivan Simić notes, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička Partija Jugoslavije; KPJ) envisioned that the first generation of youth growing up in socialism would become the most progressive segment of society, a firm guardian of communist ethos and values and a vehicle for the transformation of gender relations in line with the socialist ideals.Footnote 33
The first post-war Yugoslav manual of criminology, published in 1946 and based on Marxist teachings, reflects some of these ideas. In this handbook, the jurist Janko Tahović portrayed the city as a breeding ground for ‘sexual perversions’ and identified the capitalist economy as the source of sexual deviancy. However, when licentiousness and immorality appeared within the working class, he argued, they were a consequence of the proletariat’s unfavourable position, rather than any inherent tendency.Footnote 34 This is not to say there were not also some dissonant voices within this dominant outlook. For example, Zagreb Faculty of Law professor Stanko Frank pleaded for the principle that sexual morality has no place in criminal law, arguing instead that the state should protect individuals’ freedom to ‘decide for themselves what attitude to take toward sexual matters’.Footnote 35 According to this tenet, which in 1949 the federal Ministry of Justice unsuccessfully sought to incorporate into the first draft of the Criminal Code adopted in 1951, offences such as public indecency or ‘unnatural fornication’ were no longer to be treated as felonies but rather as misdemeanours or even decriminalised.Footnote 36
In 1949, Ranković emphasised the inseparable link between criminality and class antagonisms. Inter-war Yugoslavia, he clarified, ‘like any other capitalist state, was powerless in combatting crime’. In the new order, once ‘the inherent contradictions of capitalism are resolved through the consolidation of socialist economic and social principles’, the root causes of crime would be drastically reduced, if not eradicated entirely.Footnote 37 Yugoslav socialist criminology, especially in the first post-revolutionary decade, sought the causes of social phenomena it labelled corrupt and depraved in the underlying forces of capitalism and class inequality. Like crime and other forms of social pathology, ‘sexual deviance’ was considered a social superstructure of economic and class relations.
A telling example in this regard is the viewpoint of criminologist Tomislav Marković – a high-ranking police official, who, at the time of major anti-homosexual trials in 1948 and 1949, served as a deputy public prosecutor in Zagreb.Footnote 38 In 1953, Marković sought to explain the aetiology of homosexuality through the lens of socialist criminology, criticising his colleagues for focusing on biological and psychological factors while neglecting the socio-economic ones.Footnote 39 For Marković, homosexuality was merely an expression – albeit a difficult one to comprehend – of the capitalist social superstructure. While the correlations between property crimes and poverty, unemployment and misery are obvious to all, he argued, there is also a connection ‘between a homosexual’ and the underlying ‘historical forces of the economic structure within which homosexuality has emerged’. Therefore, Marković asserted, homosexuality can only be understood by studying the interdependence between human psychology and the material conditions of a society in a historical perspective:
A life full of upheavals and conflicts, filled with uncertainty about what tomorrow may bring; a world whose moral and ethical norms are crumbling under the weight of a new reality; and a class standing at this pivotal historical crossroads awaiting its downfall. Aren’t all these factors essential to a better understanding of homosexuality? This question, therefore, is not a matter of innate human nature but of significant exogenous influences. [. . .] Homosexuality is a phenomenon that has persisted for thousands of years; hence, its economic causes have also endured over millennia. [. . .] Surely, psychoanalysis comes to our aid, helping to clarify part of this issue, but we cannot disregard the economic factors.Footnote 40
The forces that enable homosexuality will disappear in a distant – yet by no means unattainable – communist future. Until then, Marković concluded, Marxist ‘science and practice instil a profound conviction’ that such a future – free of crime, prostitution and homosexuality – is achievable, but only through ‘a resolute struggle’ under socialism. That battle will not be won by police repression alone – though it is necessary – but through a comprehensive socialist transformation of the working classes, with particular attention to the moral development of the youth. Although slow, the withering away of all deviations is inevitable. Should any survive, they will merely be, in Marković’s words, ‘insignificant remnants of the past’.Footnote 41
The Revolution and Its Enemies
In winter and spring of 1945, during the last months of the Second World War on Yugoslav soil and the communist takeover in Yugoslavia under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, the judiciary was transformed into an instrument of consolidation of the revolution as a ‘class organ of the workers’,Footnote 42 or, as Edvard Kardelj, one of the main ideologues of the KPJ, explained in April 1946: a tool of liberation ‘from all capitalist ideas, in the economy and in life in general’.Footnote 43 Sexuality was not excluded from this transformative process.
Armed with an immense legislative power and driven by a firm will for a swift and broad transformation of Yugoslav society along socialist principles and Stalinist models, in February of 1945 the new government declared void not only all regulations, statutes and laws enforced by the occupation and collaborationist authorities but also those valid before the Axis attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, promulgated during the inter-war period. The decision was justified by the assertion that laws from the time of occupation were illegitimate since they were imposed by force in an illegal occupation, while those from the inter-war Yugoslavia were a manifestation of the social, economic and constitutional order toppled in the National Liberation War (Narodnooslobodilački rat; NOR).Footnote 44 The old legal order was overthrown in the name of the people’s right to a proletarian and socialist revolution and as a prerequisite for a radical and comprehensive restructuring of the political, economic and social order coupled with re-educational policies for the population that was to be transformed in socialist citizens. Consequently, the old Criminal Code for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia of 1930 formally ceased to be valid and, along with it, Article 285, which prescribed sanctions of up to five years’ imprisonment for ‘unnatural fornication’, criminalising same-sex sexual contact, understood primarily as anal intercourse.Footnote 45 To prevent a legal vacuum, it was explicitly permitted that old laws could be ‘applied in matters not yet regulated by new provisions’. However, there was a condition: old laws could be invoked ‘provided they were not in contradiction’ with the fundamental principles of the new constitutional and social order.Footnote 46
In practice this meant that governmental and judicial bodies could not ground their acts or verdicts by explicitly quoting pre-1941 regulations. Such laws – including the 1930 Criminal Code – could be mentioned only as general guidelines, a kind of framework whose validity had to be repeatedly justified and explained, in each act, ruling or sentence, with the new ideological precepts derived from the socialist revolutionary legacy.Footnote 47 This is the main reason why verdicts delivered up until 1951, when the new Criminal Code for the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (Krivični zakonik FNRJ) was finally adopted, contain lengthy, politically and ideologically charged reasonings. Therefore, in sentencing homosexuals, judges would usually refer indirectly to the criminal status of ‘unnatural fornication’ under the 1930 statute, but they were also required to additionally justify their guilty verdicts by invoking the guiding ideals of the revolution. Sexual intercourse between men remained a criminal offence also after 1951, but the prohibition was now unequivocally codified in Article 186 of the new Criminal Code, eliminating the need for extensive ideological justifications in court rulings.Footnote 48
As historian Marie-Janine Calic summarised, in the pursuit of their ambitious and encompassing revolutionary ideals, Yugoslav communists ‘used dictatorial means to accelerate the pace of modernisation in the years immediately following the war’.Footnote 49 In this context, the judicial regime was drastically hardened and, for example, in 1946 was marked by trials against war profiteers and industrialists, targeting also some merchants, small business owners and shopkeepers. Judges were instructed to serve the people and to fight against obstacles hindering the path to a socialist future. Their rulings became politically coloured and abounded in long, formulaic phrases, often referring to accused individuals or groups as ‘pests’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘social filth’, ‘class enemies’ and ‘exploiters of the people’.Footnote 50
After the Tito–Stalin split and the June 1948 Cominform Resolution – which accused the Yugoslav communists of betraying socialism’s core principles – the police and the judiciary further tightened their increasingly repressive grip. In 1949, the post-revolutionary restrictive measures reached its peak, leaving little room for dissent.Footnote 51 KPJ’s response to the smear campaign orchestrated in Moscow relied, among other things, on a strict constraint and control over all aspects of social life. Josip Broz Tito and the communist leadership had to prove that the country was on the right path to socialism and that all energies were being channelled into building a new, healthy, progressive nation. The Party was determined to demonstrate that it was not pandering to the ‘petite bourgeoisie’, to the remnants of the old order and that the confrontation with ‘class enemies’ was being carried out thoroughly and scrupulously.Footnote 52 The crackdown on real or perceived supporters of the Cominform Resolution broadened also to other dissidents or undesirable social and political elements, such as peasants resisting the collectivisation of the agriculture and small landowners, smugglers, illegal traders, pre-war intellectuals labelled as agents of ‘petty-bourgeois ideology’,Footnote 53 all the way to sex workers and homosexuals, seen as symbols of unhealthy eroticism. The anti-homosexual trials were part of this wave of increased police and judicial force.
Verdicts found in archives, prosecutors’ reports, data from police files and other surviving documents provide a valid basis for the estimate that in the whole of Yugoslavia from the end of 1945 to the end of 1950 at least six hundred men that had sex with men were arrested and detained in police stations, while approximately two hundred of them were convicted of homosexuality in criminal proceedings.Footnote 54 Trials against lesbians and other regulatory mechanisms of disciplining female same-sex intimacy remain unresearched and it is not yet possible to make broader conclusions. So far two cases are known, both also involving other charges, other the lesbianism, like domestic violence or theft.Footnote 55 Female homosexuality and emotional intimacy were largely confined to private, domestic settings; female sexual agency was generally devalued, whereas male homosexuality was more commonly expressed in public places, such as cruising areas. This visibility made male same-sex relations more noticeable, fostering the belief that male homosexuality was more prevalent and, therefore, more dangerous than lesbianism.Footnote 56
The Dubrovnik anti-homosexual trial mentioned at the beginning was the largest of its kind in post-war socialist Yugoslavia. The crackdown began with arrests on 9 June 1949 and ended ten days later with sixteen stern convictions for ‘unnatural fornication’, followed by the humiliating walk of shame on the streets of the Adriatic town. The main defendant, Ivo Gracić, an employee of the State Archives, was charged for homosexuality in general and additionally for procuring local young men for his friends and acquaintances.Footnote 57 He was initially sentenced to a drastic twelve years’ imprisonment, but the punishment was later reduced so that he ultimately served two years.Footnote 58
In official reports the Dubrovnik group was associated with ‘gambling, alcoholism and an opulent lifestyle’. The prosecution claimed that these ‘vices and transgressions are ubiquitous among homosexuals’, even more so in Dubrovnik ‘where they have been widespread since the time of the old [Kingdom of] Yugoslavia due to the influence of the city’s wealthy bourgeoisie and foreign tourists, but also as a consequence of the degeneration of the local aristocracy’.Footnote 59 This portrayal resonates with the Yugoslav early socialist revolutionary rhetorical culture where labels such as ‘petite bourgeoisie’ and ‘upper class’ were associated with ‘exploitation’ and ‘decadence’, the antithesis of the most cherished values the new order promoted.Footnote 60 Here the homosexual is depicted as a corrupt bourgeois, a wealthy foreigner or a decrepit aristocrat, a sinister figure who preys on pure, vigorous young men, leading them to an immoral and vain life.
However, it should be noted that homosexuals who led a secretive and discreet sexual life, some of them married, were seldom targeted. When this did occur, it was usually in cases involving in flagrante delicto arrests for sexual intercourse or other indecent behaviour in public. The surviving sources show no traces of police entrapments, raids on places of homosexual socialisation or systematic nighttime surveillance of parks, baths, bars, urinals or public toilets and other cruising spots in anticipation of arrests. Victims of active and planned police persecution were, in most cases, groups of acquaintances and friends associated with or implicated in other undesirable or criminal activities. These included organised plans to flee the country, connections to prostitution rings or involvement – often driven by a basic need for financial survival – in minor offences such as dealing in foreign currency, selling alcohol or trading other high-demand goods on the black market. When law enforcement identified circles of homosexual men – who, understandably, sought to keep their private lives hidden – they would often surmise that these were suspicious, nearly impenetrable networks. To the police, they resembled to clandestine political cells, even conspiratorial hotbeds plotting against the state. Or in the words of a report produced by the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs in April 1950, homosexuals ‘tend to form closed and organised groups, which easily turn into rings prone to anti-state activities’.Footnote 61
‘This Debauchery that Has Become So Widespread in Our City’: The Trial of the Zagreb Seven
In June 1949 Branko Vujaklija, a seminarian and student of Orthodox theology, was apprehended in Zagreb for illicit trade of gold and other valuables. Struggling to make ends meet, he resorted to selling some jewellery he had inherited from his father and became involved in the black market in foreign currencies and expensive American-made ties for modest commissions. Beyond these petty crimes, the police also discovered evidence that he was planning to leave the country, suspecting that he intended to join the Yugoslav anti-communist opposition in the West.Footnote 62 This young man had indeed entertained the idea of escaping to Austria or Trieste with a small group of friends, hoping to be able to pursue his education abroad and eventually become an Orthodox priest in the United States. In the course of the investigation, he admitted – though it is unclear under how much pressure – that his desire to leave Yugoslavia was driven by his disapproval of the new communist government.Footnote 63 Finally, evidence of his homosexual relations also came to light, apparently based on some previous police knowledge of a homosexual group in Zagreb.Footnote 64 At one point, the police agent asked: ‘Who did you have homosexual relations with?’ Vujaklija named some of his sexual partners and went on to describe house parties of Zagreb homosexuals. During the interrogations he gave twelve names, including some friends with whom he had planned to flee the country, triggering a wave of arrests.Footnote 65
Vujaklija had known the friends with whom he planned to flee to the West for several years. With some of them he also had sexual relations. They would often meet in apartments in Zagreb city centre where they would have parties with up to twenty people. In the late 1940s, among them was one of the most recognisable figures in Zagreb’s queer circles, the young Miroslav Kratković, better known as ‘The Queen’.Footnote 66
On several occasions in the early spring of 1949, Vujaklija and Kratković discussed their intent to reach the West. Soon another friend, Ivica Horvatić, joined them in this plan. They were very young. Vujaklija was twenty-three years old and Kratković, who worked as a librarian and was active in the local branch of the socialist youth organisation, just turned twenty-two.Footnote 67 Horvatić, a clerk in the Ministry of Trade, was twenty-six years old.Footnote 68 At some point, Boleslav Strzeszewski, a thirty-two-year-old film director known for producing short educational documentaries, joined the group. He dreamed of living in Rome, where he had graduated in cinema studies before the war.Footnote 69
For one reason or another, they were all dissatisfied with life in post-war Zagreb. Vujaklija was the only one whose dissatisfaction had a political background since, as a future Orthodox priest, he felt the pressure of the anticlerical climate in the new socialist context. Horvatić, on the other hand, was unhappy with his personal life, while Strzeszewski was disappointed with his professional status. In the weeks when they were planning to escape abroad, he was especially angry because he had been unfairly denied a promised promotion. Kratković had been depressed since his boyfriend, a certain Mishkin from Belgrade, had abruptly left him earlier that year.Footnote 70
Vujaklija’s arrest sparked a sense of confusion and fear among his friends. Kratković panicked, saying that he would rather swallow up some poison than go to prison, and began urging the others to leave the country as soon as possible.Footnote 71 But after Vujaklija gave their names, they were prevented by the police and by the end of June of 1949 they were all taken into custody. At the hearings, they admitted both their intention to flee Yugoslavia and their homosexuality. Yet, the charge of ‘unnatural fornication’ became the focal point of the investigation.Footnote 72
Although the sources contain no trace of an explicit order that may have been behind the arrests of Zagreb homosexuals, it is highly indicative that various internal public prosecutors’ reports from 1949 frequently refer to extensive ‘actions against undesirable elements’, listing among them ‘prostitutes’, ‘vagrants’, ‘plungers’, ‘smugglers’, ‘scoundrels’, ‘homosexuals’ and other ‘social pests’.Footnote 73 Also, at a closed door conference held earlier that year, district public prosecutors received political instructions from their superiors, influential members of the KPJ with a strong political background, to stamp out juvenile delinquency and vagrancy in major urban areas. They were also urged to intensify efforts to protect young people from ‘counterrevolutionary elements’ who sought to seduce and corrupt the youth through ‘petty-bourgeois entertainment’ and various forms of ‘immoral conduct’.Footnote 74 In those months, some thirty women were arrested for prostitution, including a ballerina from Rijeka and an actress from Zagreb, as well as several students. As women who ‘spend their days in fornication’ socialising with ‘declassed elements’, ‘indulge in all kinds of perversions’, including ‘lesbianism’, they were also labelled as ‘social pests’.Footnote 75
The first to be tried for ‘unnatural fornication’, in a separate proceeding, was Branko Vujaklija. In court, he made no secret of his homosexuality. While he confessed to the other charges, he asked to be acquitted of his homosexual relationships, arguing that they were ‘natural’ to him and that there was ‘nothing he could do about his instincts’.Footnote 76 All of his partners had prior homosexual experiences, he tried to explain, and he had never seduced or coerced anyone to have sex with him, nor had he caused any public or obscene scandal. None of this had any effect. He was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to a total of five years in prison with hard labour.Footnote 77 The judge described him as a ‘lecherous bourgeois character’ whose homosexuality was known to the public, a circumstance that had a negative impact on the moral development of the youth, and therefore he ‘had to be removed from the socialist community’.Footnote 78 In a plea for a reduction of his sentence, written from prison at the end of 1950, Branko Vujaklija tried to justify his intention to flee the country by a sense of panic after the news of the trial of homosexuals in Dubrovnik spread all over the country. He claimed that in those days, in spring of 1949, he was afraid that a similar clampdown on homosexuals could happen also in Zagreb.Footnote 79
By the autumn of 1949, a total of forty-five homosexual men had been detained or arrested in Zagreb alone, while four managed to escape abroad. Thirty-eight of them received relatively lenient penalties, mostly fines and brief periods of forced labour without confinement, while the remaining seven were singled out and charged with ‘unnatural fornication’. Four more names were added to the group around Kratković, Strzeszewski and Horvatić. The first name in the indictment was that of forty-one-year-old Mirko Belušić, a wigmaker and owner of a hairdressing salon. The oldest defendant was forty-six-year-old Zlatko Hervoić, an accountant in a construction company. On the bench also sat thirty-seven-year-old photographer Vladimir Radnić and forty-five-year-old Vladislav Kušan, a poet and translator. Almost all of them lived in Zagreb city centre. Belušić and Horvatić were married but estranged from their wives.Footnote 80
The seven men were charged in a single trial and brought to court as ringleaders of a ‘homosexual den’.Footnote 81 The prosecutor described them as ‘remnants of the toppled bourgeois society of the old Yugoslavia’ and ‘enemies of our new political and social order’.Footnote 82 The indictment emphasised their malicious social influence, as they ‘seduced a large number of young men into debauchery and an idle lifestyle’.Footnote 83
Their attempt to leave the country and other petty crimes were treated as matters of secondary importance while the focus was put on the message that homosexuality, as the prosecutor stressed on several occasions, ‘this debauchery that has become so widespread in our city’, would not be tolerated.Footnote 84 The trial of the Zagreb seven had elements of a show trial, serving as a warning to other homosexuals. This is evident from a report published in the Zagreb’s largest daily, Narodni list, entitled ‘Convictions for a Group of Homosexuals’. The article described the seven men as ‘corrupters of youth, depraved individuals and opponents of our new social order’, with their names printed in the first paragraph.Footnote 85 Newspapers’ editorial policy was inseparably linked to the broader policy of the state and the Communist Party. It served both to educate the masses and as a guideline for activists engaged in mass organisation, particularly those working with the youth.Footnote 86 Hence, the article sent a clear message on the official stance on homosexuality and how it should be treated in the emerging socialist society.
The corruption of the youth as a form of sabotage of the political goals of socialism was made the central argument of the trial. The court declared their house gatherings to be a form of ‘recruiting young men into homosexuality’ with ‘small favours and gifts’, ‘seductive words’, ‘theories of decadent writers’ and ‘stories about famous homosexuals in history’. Their parties were described as places where the accused would host allegedly ‘groomed young men’, plying them with drinks and paying for their sexual services, thus accustoming them to ‘an idle and immoral lifestyle’ and turning them into ‘deadbeats and depraved slackers’.
The youngest of the accused, the twenty-two-year-old Miroslav Kratković, firmly denied that he paid or was ever paid for sex. He made no secret of his nickname – ‘The Queen’ – and the fact that he staged a same-sex marriage performance in a wedding dress at one of these parties.Footnote 87
While non-sexual and mostly minor offences were easily brushed aside, in indictments and verdicts they served to reinforce the claim that homosexuality was inseparable from criminality, a serious threat to youth, a danger to socialism and a risk to the state. Profiteering on the black market was seen as an act against the economic interests of the people, while the attempt to flee the country was taken as an additional proof that homosexuals opposed socialism.
During the interrogations and in court testimonies, the accused men were compelled to describe details of their sexual past, indicate places where they usually met, name their occasional partners and depict specific sexual acts. What they described was a narrow and closed world, a life of constant vigilance and fear. But it was also a world of parties, casual sex, friendships and camaraderie: a world of community before identity. They were neither ashamed of nor felt any guilt about their homosexuality. They hid it where and when they had to, but they also lived it as freely and joyfully as possible.
In conclusion, the court proclaimed that homosexuals posed a threat to the ‘development of the Yugoslav socialist project’, which required ‘mentally and physically healthy and morally strong youth’ in order to ensure the transformation of society was successful. All seven men were found guilty as ‘decadent social parasites’ detrimental to the goals of the new regime and destructive to the character of the new socialist man. The verdict emphasised the voluntary component, the desire and the effort to live as homosexuals. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eighteen months to six years.Footnote 88 Those facing multiple charges, such as illegal trading or conspiring to flee the country, received longer prison terms, while those accused solely of engaging in homosexual activity were sentenced to up to three years in prison. Three months later, in the appeal, the Supreme Court of Croatia reduced the punishments significantly, upholding however the guilty verdicts by reaffirming ‘the utmost necessity to protect the youth from homosexuality’. The court partially accepted the defence’s argument that, in the case of the seven men, their sexual proclivities constituted ‘inborn perversities’, a stance supported by a psychiatrist who testified as a medical expert witness. This was accepted as a mitigating circumstance and the sentences for ‘unnatural fornication’ now ranged from three months to one year of imprisonment. By then, several of the defendants had already served their terms in detention while awaiting the outcome of the appeal and were released.Footnote 89 That there were differences of opinion within judicial circles regarding the penal policy toward homosexuals is confirmed by the discontent with the outcome of the trial, expressed in late 1950 by Zagreb’s chief public prosecutor, Mate Zaninović. He was very dissatisfied with the reduced sentences, as he considered the sexual offences to be extremely serious and deserving of more severe punishments. Zaninović described homosexuals as ‘declassed elements who corrupt youth, lead them astray from work and create a true social swamp’.Footnote 90
‘Unnatural’ and ‘Unnational’ Clergy: Don Zorić and His Circle
In the years immediately following the war, marked by a wider struggle against religion – and particularly against the social and political influence of the Roman Catholic ChurchFootnote 91 – the regime targeted priests who were known or rumoured to be homosexual, especially those who abused their positions as teachers or spiritual guides. The trials served to reinforce the negative representation of the clergy as corrupt and depraved, not only politically but also sexually, and to discredit it in the eyes of the predominantly religious population.
In August 1949 in Rijeka, for example, a priest was sentenced to fourteen months of forced labour for having homosexual relations with minors.Footnote 92 A Slovenian Franciscan friar was convicted in Ljubljana for ‘morally and physically corrupting young men’, accustoming them to ‘sexual debauchery’ and luring them to his home with brandy and cigarettes, where he made them masturbate and engage in ‘unnatural sexual acts’.Footnote 93 Archival findings from Slovenia indicate that several more priests were sentenced for homosexuality in those years and that most verdicts carried a strong political overtone with the purpose to morally discredit the clergy.Footnote 94
The ideologically most galvanising trial of a Catholic priest accused of homosexuality took place in May 1948 in Šibenik, a coastal town in Dalmatia. It was also a public trial, as evidenced by the presence of a large crowd in and outside the courtroom. Slobodna Dalmacija, the main regional daily newspaper, reported that over five hundred people from Šibenik and its hinterland attended the main hearing on the ‘sexual crimes’ of a prominent and now infamous priest.Footnote 95
Ante Krešimir Zorić, the headmaster of the Catholic high school in Šibenik, was investigated, along with three other local men, for a series of homosexual affairs. The voluminous court file shows that Zorić, a forty-seven-year-old theologian and canon, had a sexual relationship with the thirty-nine-year-old cobbler and house painter Joso Livaković, who also served as the sacristan at Šibenik’s Cathedral of St. James. They would usually meet in Livaković’s shop, which outside of working hours served as a gathering place for men seeking erotic relationships with other men.Footnote 96 The prosecution’s key witness was Livaković himself. He ‘described in detail how and when all these encounters took place’.Footnote 97
In his statements, Zorić persistently denied any sexual contact and portrayed his acquaintance with the cathedral’s sacristan in an ‘innocent light’. Throughout the trial, he remained steadfast in denying ever engaging in same-sex relations. However, he was also accused of sexually abusing older seminarians. As a priest in a virulent anticlerical climate, but also as a teacher who abused his position, he was sentenced to a lengthy twelve-year prison term.Footnote 98 The sexual corruption of male adolescents was once again the focus of the trial, with fingers pointed at Zorić for ‘developing in his students instincts alien to man’.Footnote 99
As highlighted by the press, the verdict was greeted with great approval by the crowd gathered in and around the courtroom. Slobodna Dalmacija reported extensively on the public reading of the verdict and the trial was also covered by the Zagreb press.Footnote 100 The articles focused on Zorić and his sexual abuse of the Catholic school students but also stressed that the priest engaged in homosexual relations with local residents on church premises, a point intended to further discredit the Church. The press was unambiguous in its portrayal of Zorić, presenting him as an example of the treacherous and politically compromised Roman Catholic clergy:
The case of the priest Zorić is yet another evidence of the difference between the honest clergy who genuinely understand their duties [. . .] and the wicked clergymen, for whom the sacerdotal mantle serves to conceal antinational activities, even criminal offenses. This case confirms that a priest who separates himself from the people, who acts against the people, is bound sooner or later to fall into the depths of filth and commit such abominable acts.Footnote 101
Zorić was not suspected of any specific political offence, yet the verdict linked his ‘abominable acts’ to the Roman Catholic Church’s broader and destructive political influence on society. Zorić’s ‘vice’ was described as ‘inextricably linked to a rotten and exploitative society which, in the interest of pure profit, has begotten degenerates, drunkards and debauchers’. With his ‘depraved behaviour’, the judge explained, he had caused ‘enormous damage to our people’s state, which is now making colossal efforts to raise the working masses not only economically to a level worthy of human beings, but also ideologically and culturally’ so that it may one day eradicate all the vices of the past. The priest was described as ‘an agent of what remains of that old, rotten and immoral society, which even nowadays, without any sense of responsibility, spurts out its poison into the healthy national organism, the same poison with which those of his kind have been polluting the people for many years’.Footnote 102 And finally, once again, the verdict emphasised his harmful influence on the youth, framing it as an act sabotage of the new socialist man in the making:
The defendant spared not even our youth [. . .] and created a seedbed of vices in the seminary, from where they spread to the people. Little wonder, then, that so many students left that institution with perverted moral and political views of the world and that many of them, as Ustashas, sided with the occupation forces during the war and made themselves guilty of many evils against their own people. The behaviour of the accused has considerably hindered the current efforts of our state to raise a morally and physically healthy people.Footnote 103
That homosexuality – rather than solely Zorić’s prominence within the Dalmatian clergy and his opposition to the new communist government – was the central issue of the Šibenik trial is further supported by the fact that three other local residents were tried alongside him. They had no significant ties to the Catholic Church in post-war Yugoslavia. They did not deny their homosexual relationships. The detailed and plausible accounts of their sexual relations and private lives in their testimonies leave little room for speculation that the charges were fabricated.
The youngest among them was twenty-two-year-old Benjamin Baraka, who confirmed his sexual relations with Zorić, as well as with several other men from Šibenik.Footnote 104 The court interpreted his statement as an admission of criminal association, highlighting that Baraka ‘persuaded and incited other men to engage in unnatural fornication and persistently offered himself for sex’. Yet, given his young age, the judge concluded that he also was ‘a victim of a depraved society, shaped by this corrupt environment from his earliest years’. But now, as a mature young man, the judge chastised him, ‘he should have rid himself of this nefarious habit’. He had ample opportunity to do so, as ‘the people’s government [. . .] devotes great attention to the youth, ensuring they are re-educated in a new, healthy environment and cured of the vices of the failed old society’. This reprimand reflects the communists’ belief in the malleability of human character, in the possibility of changing the entire society by changing the character of individuals, primarily the youth as the least infected by old values, with systematic and persistent support from the state and, if necessary, with exemplary punishments. Baraka was sentenced to five years in prison.Footnote 105
Joso Livaković’s testimony served as the key evidence against the accused priest. He confessed to nearly everything, recounting various occasions when he had sex with Zorić, with the young Baraka and with other men, while describing how his shop became a meeting place for Šibenik’s homosexuals. He repented, but to no avail. However, the main antagonist in this court drama was, after all, Zorić and the judge acknowledged that Livaković had also fallen victim to the priest’s harmful influence, ‘only to sink deeper into a life of vice’. He was sentenced to three years in prison with forced labour.Footnote 106
Zorić lodged an appeal. He petitioned the Supreme Court of Croatia to hear as character witnesses his fellow priests from Šibenik, his superiors in the Catholic hierarchy and some of his former students, maintaining that ‘throughout my entire life, not a shadow of suspicion of any immoral inclinations has ever been cast upon me’. Had there been any inkling – especially that he was sexually harassing his underage students – the diocese, as Zorić himself tellingly claimed, would have ‘quietly, so to speak, removed’ him from the seminary and from other duties involving contacts with adolescents.Footnote 107 Over the next four years, he filed several more appeals from prison, pleading for his sentence to be reduced. All his petitions were rejected.Footnote 108
Livaković also intended to file an appeal, but he never submitted the request. When arrests began in Šibenik in the spring of 1948, he lived in constant fear and confided in an acquaintance, saying: ‘My dear lady, I don’t eat or sleep – I’m thinking of taking my own life!’Footnote 109 Livaković committed suicide in his prison cell in April 1949.Footnote 110
Conclusion
In late 1940s Yugoslavia, post-war revolutionary optimism and unwavering faith in the radical socialist transformation of the society left little room for expression of same-sex sexual and emotional relationships. Homosexuality was understood as a by-product of centuries of moral and spiritual depravity that could be eradicated in the new socialist society. First it would be suppressed by the state’s repressive and regulatory apparatus and later eradicated by the internal mechanisms of a classless society as an atavistic remnant of a bourgeois vice, born out of the moral misery and decay of the privileged classes, cultivated in a depraved but now fallen social and economic order.
Meanwhile, the sexuality of the working population, with particular care for the youth, was to be guided towards procreative and ‘healthy’ heterosexuality, through education that will lead to a moral enlightenment of the masses, but also by discouraging and punishing negative examples, notably homosexuals, resorting to police and judicial repression. These notions became deeply embedded in judgements and verdicts pronounced in Yugoslav courts in the late 1940s, serving as justification for sentencing homosexuals as not just simple criminals but also social and political enemies.
Thus, during those years – marked by revolutionary justice and frantic socialist state-building – public prosecutors and judges were expected to treat same-sex sexual acts as not only serious violations of public decency and established sexual morals but also affronts to socialist ideals. The obsession with the healthy and proper sexual and ideological development of the country’s first generation of youngsters growing up in socialism fuelled the deep-rooted moral anxiety and cultural prejudices surrounding homosexuality. Perceived as a threat to the youth and their socialist upbringing, homosexuals would be convicted as renegades of the new socialist order and in some cases even its moral saboteurs. The verdicts expressed a glaring ideological prejudice based on the premise that homosexuality was an expression of class exploitation, petty-bourgeois individualism and hedonism, a visible sign of degeneration stemming from the old regime. Therefore, homosexuality was treated not merely as a common crime, vice or illness but also as a social scourge that the state must fight against. The well-being of the youth and the threat posed by homosexuals to their proper moral and sexual development – thus, indirectly, to the socialist future – were consistently at the forefront of the legal reasoning behind guilty verdicts.
This ideological package vividly and vehemently materialised in the Šibenik trial of 1948 against a prominent Dalmatian Roman Catholic priest and his sexual partners and even more so in the Dubrovnik and Zagreb trials of 1949, when groups of local homosexual men were accused of creating hotbeds of vice and debauchery. They were singled out for the moral and sexual corruption of the youth, framed as an act of political sabotage, even though many of them were as young as their partners and mostly politically disengaged and ideologically disinterested.
Estimates suggest that at least two hundred men were criminally prosecuted for ‘unnatural fornication’ between 1946 and 1950, while four hundred more were arrested and detained. Most of them did not face public shaming, as did those prosecuted in Zagreb or Dubrovnik. Men arrested for engaging in sex in public places or in cases where only a single same-sex act could be proven, less socially visible homosexuals – and thus perceived as less socially disruptive – were generally punished with mild disciplinary measures or released altogether. The same applied to very young individuals who were perceived as having been seduced or lured, whether by money or by the negative spiritual influence of older men. Their verdicts would not appear in the press, nor were these saturated with strong political and ideological overtones, although the sentences would routinely include warnings about the harmful influence such behaviour could have on the young. The most prominent cases typically involved charges for other criminal offences, considered socially harmful or even as forms of hostile activity – usually attempts to flee the country, illegal trading and, above all, male prostitution or the organisation of homosexual gatherings that might involve young men. Here, the emphasis was placed on the social danger of visible homosexuality and on its voluntary aspect, the will and determination to live as homosexuals. The men were prosecuted as ringleaders of homosexual dens, perceived to bear antisocialist tendencies. Their homosexuality could have either served as additional evidence of their ‘depravity’ or easily become the primary focus of the trial. The ideologically charged rhetoric used by judges in their rulings, followed by inflammatory and derogatory articles in the press, gave to these prominent cases the character of show trials with the distinctive mark of active state persecution.
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