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www.gay-serbia.com |
On the evening of July 11, on a Belgrade city bus, a woman first showered Aleksandar Savić, better known as drag queen Aleksis Plastik, with homophobic insults, then stabbed him with a sharp object. Doctors treated a cut on his lower leg and injuries to his eye.
Hours earlier that same day, right-wing hooligans attacked the writer Vladimir Arsenijević, program director of the Krokodil literary festival, in broad daylight as he was preparing a commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide below Belgrade’s Branko Bridge.
Attacks of this severity are still rare, but violence against queer people in Serbia is becoming more frequent, Deutsche Welle reports from Belgrade. Da Se Zna, the only organization systematically documenting threats, vandalism and physical attacks on queer people in the country, recorded 110 incidents last year, more than ever before.
“Since most of these attacks are never prosecuted and perpetrators rarely answer for what they did, they cannot be considered isolated cases,” Matija Stefanović, the organization’s program coordinator, told DW. “This is a systemic problem that further fuels violence and emboldens perpetrators to keep attacking marginalized groups without fear of serious consequences.”
In May of this year alone, unknown assailants attacked the Belgrade queer club Mornar with tear gas, and a transgender woman and her partner were beaten unconscious in a night-time assault.
The fear is measurable. In a 2025 survey by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, around 80 percent of queer respondents in Serbia said they avoid holding their partner’s hand in public. On Europe’s Rainbow Index, Serbia has been sliding for years, from 22nd place five years ago to 29th today.
The activists’ answer is visibility. Alongside Belgrade’s annual Pride parade, Da Se Zna has been organizing a Pride Caravan through smaller Serbian towns since last year. The message is simple: we are here, and we are staying.
The price is high. After this year’s caravan stops were announced in early July, death threats followed. In Pirot, police cancelled the event at the last minute, saying they could not guarantee safety from dozens of violent hooligans; three journalists were attacked.
“We are trying to show people on the ground that we know how hard it is for them, and that we have not forgotten them,” Stefanović says.
Stefanović knows firsthand what it means to grow up queer far from Belgrade. A transgender boy from a small town, he only began living openly as Matija after moving to the capital to study: first he told a few professors, then friends, and finally his parents, in an eight-page letter.
He also decided to speak publicly about his transition, at a time when Serbia had almost no openly transgender public figures. “I wanted to be the person I was missing while I was exploring my own gender identity,” he says. The hatred that followed his first television interviews was almost unbearable at first. He stayed visible.
Acceptance is a process, and people change. It was his conservative father who first started consistently using his new name, and last year his parents joined the Belgrade Pride parade for the first time. “I am incredibly proud of them. My parents have become my greatest allies.”
Even Savić, despite everything, points to the support he has received since the attack: “I think it is yet more proof that this society is actually much better than we think, it is just that sometimes the bad people, including those in positions of power, are emboldened to be louder than us.”
Source: DW. English adaptation: gay-serbia.com.