Putting Same-Sex Love in Slovenia

Slovenia legalizes same-sex marriage and adoptions. The first Eastern European country to do so.

BY STEVE PAFFORD

At a time of increased imperial intentions, a little further north-east, progressive politics are in full flow in some of Europe's Eastern Bloc countries once under Soviet influence.

It's more remarkable considering how a cultural Iron Curtain now appears to divide the two eastern and western halves of the European Union in the 2020s. To the west are the most progressive, ethnically diverse, and secular states of western Europe. To the east are the more traditionalist, more homogenous and largely re-Christianizing former communist states. Slightly shocking perhaps to some then that at the time of writing, the conservative and historically Catholic Czech Republic (recently renamed Czechia) appears on the verge of legalizing same-sex marriage, a move which seems likely to pass considering that many of the major candidates in the 2023 presidential election support gay marriage and adoption.

Alas, Slovenia got there first by becoming the first country in Eastern Europe to fully legalize gay marriage.

Since October 2022, same-sex weddings have been permitted in this low-key former Yugoslavian state, as have the right for LGBT couples to adopt children.

It’s the culmination of a remarkable transformation for present-day Slovenia. Previously, it was one of the six constituent Yugoslav republics until the state seceded — peacefully, unlike most of its neighbors — in 1991 and gained independence.

Historical ties to Western Europe, not to mention considerable assistance because of their post-2004 membership of the European Union and NATO, have fueled Slovenia’s transformation from a tiny communist satellite behind the Soviet Union-dominated Iron Curtain to a fully edged modern European democracy.

Happily, Slovenia is a particularly progressive country in terms of the rights of sexual minorities, and the first tacit LGBT associations were formed there as early as 1984. Same-sex partnerships were legalized in 2005, and full equal marriage under the law has been a goal by various political parties since 2015. But gay couples were forbidden from adopting children – something that was recti ed by the recent decision by the country’s Parliament.

With Slovenia the first country originating from former socialist states of the Eastern Bloc to adopt such a law, it casts a spotlight on how most countries in the region still do not allow civil same-sex unions and marriages. There is also a rigid and often rabid state stance against the LGBT community in some countries, such as Hungary, Poland and Russia, the latter pair of which I dealt with in previous issues of Embrace.

It has been common for American commentators to surreptitiously use the gay community to discredit socialism — a kind of pink washing in reverse, if you will. But doing so flattens the important historical relationship between queer culture and communism in general. Centering only on the homophobic elements in the far-left orthodoxy, this kind of dogmatic rhetoric ignores the truly impressive advances made by some communist regimes on equal rights (and papers over long histories of intolerance of LGBTQ people in non-communist countries). Take Cuba, for instance, which also announced the legalization of same-sex marriages in 2022, to great applause.

A more nuanced examination of history shows us that communism and queerness might have been natural bedfellows in a way, however uneasy that sounds. That, in simplistic terms, a striving for equality and egalitarianism would surely embody and even incorporate the fight for gay rights while the forces of conservatism sought to maintain the status quo, with all the inherent hierarchical discrimination that that entails.

August Bebel, leader from 1892 to 1913 of the German Social Democratic Party (the largest socialist party in Europe), was a forceful proponent of legalizing homosexuality. He even took to the floor of the German parliament in 1898 to demand a repeal of the country’s sodomy law. Similarly, after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they introduced a modern penal code in 1922 that abolished Russia’s sodomy law.

In the 1920s, communist and socialist parties were often proponents of legalizing same-sex acts. This was until an anti-liberal backlash in the early ’30s when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to prominence at the same time as Joseph Stalin’s brutal regime throughout the Soviet Union sent the empire back by decades when they recriminalized male homosexuality and imprisoned thousands of gay men under oppressive new laws. This repressive, regressive tendency endured after World War II, and Russia would not decriminalize homosexuality until 1993, under the first term of its only genuinely democratically elected President, Boris Yeltsin.

Other communist states strengthened laws against homosexuality after the war. When gay activists began to organize in the 1980s in Catholic-dominated Poland, the government of the day cracked down in a mass action known as Operation Hyacinth, probably fearful of what it perceived as organized resistance to the establishment.

Conversely, in the same postwar period, other Soviet-bloc territories decriminalized homosexuality earlier than in many Western European countries. With the likes of Hungary relaxing their laws in 1961, what was then Czechoslovakia coming on board in 1962, and Bulgaria following in 1968. Contrast that to England and Wales (1967), Scotland (1980), France (1982), Ireland (1993) and the reunified Germany finally abolishing such discrimination as late as 1994, though both East and West had relaxed their laws in the late 1960s and prosecutions were unheard of.

Interestingly, in 2022 Slovenia also elected a lawyer linked to former US first lady Melania Trump as its first-ever female head of state. Natasa Pirc Musar is a journalist and lawyer who ran as an independent with the backing of Slovenia’s center-left government. Winning almost 54% of the vote, Ms Pirc Musar defeated former foreign minister Anze Logar - a veteran of conservative politics.

Although the presidential role is largely ceremonial, as it is in Ireland and Germany, after her victory was confirmed Ms Pirc Musar was keen to point out that “Slovenia has elected a president who believes in the European Union, in the democratic values on which the EU was founded.”

Perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom after all then.

STEVE PAFFORD is an English journalist, actor and author of the acclaimed book BowieStyle. Having trained from the floor up in UK music titles Q, MOJO and Record Collector, he’s had his work featured in a wide variety of British, American and Australian media including the BBC, CNN, The Independent and the New York Times. Steve divides his time between Australia and the south of France.