The San Francisco Dyke March

Hello, beautiful dykes!
To tell you the truth, my lover told me to address you as sexy dykes...She was right...

Anyway, I am so excited looking at your wonderful faces, feeling this incredible lesbian energy, speaking in front of all of you on this beautiful day, in this beautiful city. Thank you for your persistence in protesting on the streets for so many years. Your visibility gives us, lesbians from Serbia, strength for our own visibility. All your achievements empower us in our dreams and give us the knowledge that they are possible.

The question of visibility is a question of our lesbian existence. In the country where I live, Serbia, as well as in most other places in the world, visibility can mean that we risk our lives. Visibility can mean that we are exposed to be insulted or beaten up in public spaces. There are no laws that protect our rights to live lesbian existence, we are still full of psychiatrists and religious leaders who are judging us and telling us that we are sick. Homophobia is in every step we make in our lives.

I would like to talk to you about the fear of visibility, and to tell you about lesbians from one small town in Serbia - when they want to watch lesbian videos, they lock themselves up with a key in their own room inside the house, while husband, children and grandchildren are in the other parts of the house.

One way to be visible is certainly through lesbian/gay parades and dyke marches. Here are some facts: In all the countries in Eastern Europe, the right wing is very much present and nationalism and religious fundamentalism are increasing. There are no dyke marches in Eastern Europe, and they are rare in Europe in general. In some countries, LGBT Pride parades do not exist, because there are no safe conditions for their running. We have a second category of countries where there are Pride parades, but held with a huge police presence, mostly with special police forces. I will give you one example – in Bucharest, Romania, on the 24th of May this year, Pride Parade was held with 200 participants and with more than 1,000 police officers on the streets in order to protect those participants. Countries that are closer to the European Union are pressured by its institutions to have safe Pride parades, even though there is not enough political will to do that. We activists have a dilemma: should we hold the parades, should we celebrate our love, when 1,000 homophobic police officers are on the streets with us?? What would that actually mean?

Also, it’s important to remind ourselves that we all live in patriarchal world, and living as a woman and a lesbian in it is a hard job. We women are especially supposed to be afraid of visibility. Visibility promises harm for women. Fear is the main tool patriarchy has made to control us.

That’s why, for my politics and questioning the world, it is so important to make connections between feminist and lesbian organizing.

All lesbian organizations from Eastern Europe were founded by feminist groups, but it wasn’t possible to establish a feminist movement in all the countries. In almost every country, there is at least one LGBT organization, but lesbian organizations, if they exist, are not visible enough.

Dykes! Today, all of us together have something very precious that we share. So, here is my plan: Let’s finish this day with some new knowledge for ourselves.

Look around you, look at the woman in front of you. Look at the woman behind you. How does it feel to be with them? Now, look deep inside you, what’s your body telling you? What is the main feeling that you will keep with you from this day?

I feel beauty, I feel amazing dyke energy – warm and healing. I feel excitement, a dance in my heart and my whole body.

We all have some knowledge and emotions that we can bring with ourselves from this march, we can keep them and go back to them during every other day – tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, we can remind ourselves of these strengths inside us.

And remember - today, all of us are creating change just by being here – inside us, for ourselves, and for all the other lesbians in the world. Today, we are definitely not invisible! So, let’s keep this power for future days!

Finally, I would like to share with you that coming here, being on this march, was my dream for a long time. In past years, I would often sit with my lesbian friends and watch video files on the internet from dyke marches in the US, especially from San Francisco. I would watch them again and again and again…

So I would like to finish my speech with one beautiful quote that I heard in a short documentary film made by Cathy Cade and Jane Cleland, in the year 2002, showing the amazing segments and dykes from the San Francisco Dyke March. One of the women speaking in this documentary, a woman named Kim, a deputy sheriff from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, said the following beautiful words:

I hope we continue this forever
because we need this...
I want us to carry on until I am part of the dust in the park and I’ll still be here in spirit.


* * * *

Lepa Mladjenovic speech for a San Francisco Dyke March of June 2008

Dear lesbians whose love for women
is kissed by the sun, embraced by the moon
brave lovers of women who were never meant to be,
as our lesbian poet told us 20 years ago,
here we are –
here I am among you -

where do I come from?
My homeland was a small country called Yugoslavia which fell apart through the war into seven smaller countries during the 1990’s.
And I come from one of them, Serbia, whose previous regime started and carried out that war.

In the wartime – what did we lesbians see?

Of many things, we saw that the moment the universal soldier takes a gun to kill - he makes many enemies and lesbians are among them. War reduces one’s identity to only a few symbols, to the nationality of one’s name, to religious or a tribal symbol. War reduces women’s bodies to a battlefield, and leaves zero space for lesbian desire.

what did we learn?
- that we lesbians need to be in the anti-war movement, that we must collaborate, ally ourselves and get together with feminists, peace activists, anti-fascists... and some of us did exactly that. Together with Italian, Spanish, Israeli feminists we created network of Women in Black Against War and many women around the world joined in.

- we learned that women’s solidarity and lesbian solidarity can be a fact of everyday life. Throughout the Yugoslav wars, lesbians and anti war activists were crossing borders, arriving to odd places to support our voice of resistance. I would not have survived all those years of pain if there had not been many lesbians and activists who came to protest with us, who sent us books of poetry and lesbian cartoons, who came to bring us chocolate and coffee and listen to our stories.


The war in our region is over,
Where do I come from?
From Europe and then a little further – South Eastern Europe...
where countries are less regulated by the rule of law, and are less supportive of lesbian rights.

I come all the way from Eastern Europe to agree with you, to say:
- yes, we need dyke marches,
to say:
- we over there need you to be here, so that we over there can feel more powerful and less alone!

We need dyke marches to point out that lesbians are discriminated against as women first of all, and that every discrimination crosses through our women’s bodies - our direness, our disability, our race, our nationality… and makes each discrimination feel specially humiliating, as we still live in a man’s world.

We need dyke marches to remember:
- in the city of Chennai in India, two women, who loved each other from the age of 18, living under hate pressure from their families, on the 17th of May 2008 embraced each other, poured kerosene on their embraced bodies, and set themselves on fire. A week later a group of brave feminists organized a press conference and announced that from January this year six other lesbians have set themselves on fire in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and that in the last 10 years in the neighboring state of Kerala, 35 lesbian couples have committed suicide.

We need dyke marches to support each other:
- in the town of Bishkek in Kirgizstan, on the 8th of April 2008 five policemen interrupted the meeting of the lesbian group Labrys and interrogated them for 4 hours. We who have lived through totalitarism know the only purpose of police in this case is to produce fear in disobedient citizens. Aren’t we those ones? Disobedient Kyrgistani Lesbians, Disobedient Afrikan Lesbians, Disobedient Latina Lesbians….

We need dyke marches:
so that this dyke-togetherness, this fantastic feeling of energy from today’s march can inspire us to invent unconditional friendship for ourselves, so that we create our own best friend inside ourselves who will tenderly accept every emotion that arises, and with an open heart and open mind gently take care of ourselves. So that we can breath out homophobia and cherish the wild amazone in our soul.

We need the San Francisco Dyke March:
... and I will remind you of hundreds of lesbians from small towns on all continents of the world who will be sitting in dark internet cafes, on the last computer to the wall, in a corner, scared & excited, watching all of us here on youtube - celebrating their lesbian desire as we celebrate our courageous love today.