In today’s supposedly post-truth and post-historical age, the past is less and less treated as an archive of collective memory (based on facts) and more as a kind of compromise solution for the lack of imagi-nation when it comes to self-determination. Thus, contemporaries compete in futile culture wars over which version of the past should be endowed with power and legitimacy — to constrain our future (in the local variant, crudely reduced to the eternal conflict between the Chetniks and the Partisans, with all the political, ideological, religious, cultural, and other baggage that this division entails). What all sides share, however, is the mere transplantation of (apparently never sufficiently) trampled historical narratives into the contemporary cultural and political milieu, with little regard for the demands of the present. Moreover, our present is regularly perceived through these nostalgic optics of all political and ideological persuasions as somehow “unworthy” of its models (read: resistant to being forced into predetermined molds). Yet, every step forward — every departure from what is already known — requires a revaluation of the existing heritage.

For that reason, and in the spirit of the Center for Queer Studies, I have created another flag — one that represents the Yugoslav tricolor with a five-pointed star in rainbow colors. This flag is obviously not the flag of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but rather a reference to the more versatile aspects of our shared regional history. Thus, this is not a matter of restoring heritage (for daily-political idolatry or identity shortcuts), but of its advancement — conditionally speaking: if we once had a flag representing all our nations and nationalities, today we can actualize that same spirit of internationalism (though not necessarily the former state itself) through all our genders and sexualities. Hence, the five-pointed star is not red, since this is not about ideological (communist) doctrinism, but about recognizing and nurturing a political continuity of equality, with a clear rejection of any homogenization. In other words, this flag is a bridge between yesterday’s and today’s understandings of cosmopolitanism — and a lure for tomorrow.