It would be interesting to know what "role" the jokers and bojans had before the Eurovision Song Contest? Has apparently used gender-neutral terms before. Apparently in Slovenia these girlfriends are talked about and asked more than I can't imagine such a thing in Finland anymore. It just feels a little bad if someone receives such comments and can't be themselves completely. Or would this whole K&B pattern also be influenced by culture? Or sometimes I wonder if it would be just as easy in the Balkan region to openly be in something other than a hetero relationship? How many role models are there and such. I don't know if LadySLO has ever answered this before, and if so, you can certainly shed some light on the matter for me
Yeah, we talked about this before but I don't mind.
I'm probably not the best person to answer since I honestly don't watch a lot of TV or follow media that much and especially not interviews and other Slovenian entertainment shows, I usually fast-forward just to any music clips that I like and ofc I try to catch anything JO related but I'll try to answer.
The way I see it, there's a bit of a difference how things are in the media and how it's in real life. In "real life", I know plenty of people in non-hetero relationships and I live in a very small town. Some of them are married and a few have children as well. The laws have improved significantly in the last 10 years or so as well. Do these people have the same lives as hetero couples? Well, probably not, I would say you still have to have a thicker skin to deal with town gossip and crap like that. Kind of like single moms had to a several decades ago.
There is also a transgendered student in the local high school whose dad made a very honest public FB post about this (with the child's consent) and a lot of people reacted really positively and with a lot of support which was great.
When it comes to Celebrities and other "known" people - to my knowledge, there has never been a politician that would publicly disclose that they are not straight. Same within the group of top athletes who are worshiped more than any singers, actors etc. When it comes to entertainers, to my knowledge, Sestre talked about this very openly (the drag queen trio which also participated in ESC years ago) There's a girl rapper Masayah (B shared one of her songs a few weeks back) who has mentioned in the media that she's a lesbian but she just mentioned it casually. There's been a few others, make up artists, fashion designers, Dancers that have been open about their orientation. Then recently that journalist who got fired came to my attention and the guy from the Jerč interview. Oh and that Amaro guy who asked B those stupid sex questions is apparently also openly gay (I never watched his show so I only learned about this recently). I don't recall ever being some kind of big public coming out story with anyone though but of course I might have missed it.
To answer your initial question, JO as you know are super young and if we sort of "delete" the corona period when everything was stuck, they were basically college kids. So of course their audience was very young before ESC and it was mostly female.
I agree that the interviewer should have chosen her words better, especially that part about guys liking him in a different way or something she mumbled, that was so awkward. It's also easy to get confused or forget to be inclusive when speaking in Slovenian. (G used to get in trouble because of this as well) In English you simply say "fans", in Slovenian it can be pozalci (for male) and pozalke (for females), you leave one out, the other gets offended.. even legal contracts have a Disclaimer saying that the text is written only in one form but both are equal blah blah blah...
And if you want to speak in gender-neutral forms, you better have strong coffee first, as verbs, nouns and adjectives are affected by gender...
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