It has been scorching in Montenegro these days. Rain and cooler weather were promised, but neither came. Not in nature, not in society, and least of all in politics. Whatever once arose to bring us relief evaporated long ago.
The more the sun scorched Podgorica’s asphalt, the more deeply affected I was as I watched the Parliament of Montenegro debate the everyday lives of LGBTIQ people. My life, too. The heat intensified with the solo performance of MP Milan Knežević, defender of the tradition, honour and honesty of his Montenegro. This time, we were not the problem as a community. The problem was homosexuals themselves and our bridal bouquets on Budva’s beaches, as he put it.
Your outlook is provincial, my fellow countryman. Provincial and primitive.
Let me explain at once why I am addressing you informally. I am not addressing an institution, but a man from the same country who speaks about me as though I do not exist. We speak to one another informally among our own, and that is what we are, whether you like it or not. And let me explain why I am writing this at all. Not because you are important to me, but because, that day, we were discussed without a single one of our voices being heard. You have a microphone in that chamber. I have only this.
Enough has already been said about what the laws you spoke about actually say and why you are wrong. What remains is the way in which you did it. You structured your entire speech so as to set us against citizens who do not hold Montenegrin citizenship. But there is no such scale, Milan. No one close to you will obtain citizenship any sooner because someone close to me is unable to register their residence at the address where they live with their partner.
You do not listen to us, that much is clear. But you hear us perfectly well. Whenever one of our rights is to be denied, you are the first to take the floor. Then you know exactly what we are called. Then you carefully read the provisions of the law. Always at our expense. Even though, at the 2019 Pride march, we said that we would not accept that.
I am not asking you to understand us. I am asking only that, for a moment, we switch places. Imagine that your wife ends up in hospital and that, at reception, they ask for the contact details of someone else from her family. Not yours, even though you are standing there beside her. Imagine bringing her personal belongings the following day and having to explain, in the corridor of the Clinical Centre of Montenegro, in front of everyone, who you are and what your relationship to her is, and then having to repeat the same thing to the next shift. This is not an imagined situation. It was one of my days two years ago. A day you do not have to think about because you enjoy the privilege of the majority.
And now to what bothered me most. You turned the question of what a language should be called into a political priority. You claim that this state is taking the Serbian language away from you and demand a change to the Constitution. You are defending your community. With this text, I am defending mine.
But there is one difference. You are asking for the Constitution to be changed. I am asking for nothing remotely comparable. I am not asking for the definition of marriage to be changed. I know what the Constitution says. I am asking only for the laws to be brought into line with the Constitution, which already guarantees that I am equal before the law, just as you are. Your demand is the most far-reaching demand that can be made of a state. Mine is the smallest. And yet it was precisely my demand that was mocked from the parliamentary benches.
What you have is called marriage. What I have with the man I live with is not allowed to be called that. We accepted even that. It mattered more to us to exist in law at all than what the law would call us. No one has forbidden you from saying your word. I still weigh mine carefully. When, in front of whom and how.
We were left without a single word of support in that chamber. Instead, we were met with ridicule. You repeated those tavern-style labels twice. Once at the beginning and once at the end. To make sure they would be remembered. And you succeeded. For the umpteenth time, you made your colleagues laugh at the expense of people who are simply trying to live their lives.
Only then did I realise that your speech was not really yours. Radomir Konstantinović wrote it long before you entered politics. He wrote that the provincial spirit rejects everything that contradicts it with inexhaustible brutality and that it has an almost instinctive need to ridicule everything that deviates from its pattern. Had he known about “furundžije” and bridal bouquets, he would probably simply have added them to a new edition. Because the provincial spirit does not err out of ignorance. It errs out of necessity. It always needs someone to stand outside the norm so that it can know where its boundaries lie. For years, that someone has been us. But we are not behind some hill, as the provincial spirit likes to imagine. We stand in the same queue as you at the post office. We pay the same electricity bill. We endure the heat of the same Podgorica asphalt. We were born in the same country and into the same families.
And so, let me finally tell you what I truly felt after that day. It was not anger. It was exhaustion. Exhaustion from having to explain, over and over again, that we are human beings. But exhaustion is not surrender.
We are not asking for anything you do not already have. We are asking only to stop having to beg for what belongs to us under the law.
And we will keep asking, however many times it takes.
Because we pay your salary too.
Miloš Knežević, Development Coordinator at the Centre for Civic Education (CCE)