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In April 1984, a student cultural centre in Ljubljana staged Magnus, a festival called "Homosexuality and Culture". It is widely counted as the start of the organised gay and lesbian movement in Slovenia. This walk follows that story from the Old Town to the lesbian club at Metelkova.
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Stop 1: Križanke: Magnus 1984
Trg francoske revolucije 1
From 23 to 29 April 1984 the Magnus festival, "Homosexuality and Culture", ran at venues across the city, including the KinoŠkuc cinema here at Križanke. It brought an exhibition of the gay press, lectures and films. Its film programme is counted as the first gay and lesbian film festival. Today's Ljubljana LGBT Film Festival, which began as part of Magnus, calls itself the oldest LGBT film festival in Europe.
Café Open opened in 2008 as an LGBTIQ gathering place, with literature, music and art programmes. On the evening of 25 June 2009, during a gay and lesbian poetry reading, a group of masked young men attacked it with stones and burning torches, injuring the gay activist Mitja Blažič. The Peace Institute condemned it as a homophobic attack. Three men were convicted, but the Supreme Court later annulled the verdict because police had unlawfully kept DNA data. The café closed in 2013.
Škuc Gallery has worked from these premises since 1978, and it was one of the Magnus festival venues in April 1984. That December, the Magnus section was founded within ŠKUC-Forum. Visit Ljubljana calls it the first gay organisation in the former socialist states. On 6 July 2001, about 300 people unfurled a 15-metre rainbow flag outside to begin the "Bypass around intolerance" march against homophobia, Slovenia's first Pride.
On 8 June 2001, the doorman of Café Galerija, the bar in the City Gallery owned by the City of Ljubljana, turned away the gay poets Brane Mozetič and Jean Paul Daoust. They should get used to it, he said: the bar was no longer for their kind. Activists answered with Friday "protest drinking", sipping mineral water as slowly as possible. On 6 July, the first Pride march took a "bypass" around the bar, guarded by hired security.
In June 2022 this court ruled, in two separate decisions, that limiting marriage to a man and a woman, and barring same-sex partners from adopting jointly, broke the constitutional ban on discrimination. Until parliament acted, marriage was to be read as a life partnership of two people regardless of sex. On 4 October 2022 the National Assembly amended the Family Code in line with the rulings.
Sources disagree: The marriage decision (U-I-486/20, Up-572/18) is dated 16 June 2022 by IUS-INFO and ŠKUC; the decisions were made public on 8 July 2022, which is why International IDEA says they were reached in July.
The Magnus Gay Club met here every Saturday night from June 1984 to May 1985. On 18 May 1989 a gay and lesbian Sunday disco opened in the newly reopened Klub K4, at first split into separate lesbian and gay nights. That August the two merged, and the night was later renamed Roza disko, its crowds growing from about 100 to 250. The first lesbian and gay organisations kept their offices at Kersnikova 4 until 1997.
In September 1993, activists occupied these former Yugoslav army barracks. The lesbian section ŠKUC-LL, founded in 1987, was among them and gained rooms on the ground floor of the Lovci building. On Saturday 26 March 1994 the lesbian bar Monokel had its first official opening here. Klub Tiffany, the gay club in the same building, began as Klub Magnus-Monokel and was renamed Tiffany in 1997.
Sources disagree: ŠKUC-LL's Monokel archive dates the occupation to the night of 10 to 11 September 1993; the 2004 chronology says 9 September. The chronology also says Magnus-Monokel was called Konzulat for a time before becoming Tiffany in 1997.