The unspeakable queerness in Romania´s communist period: lesbian and queer accounts beyond gay men´s experiences

Informed by interviews with queer women, nonbinary persons and a trans man[i], this article aims to fill a major gap in the Southeastern European sexuality studies. It does that by depicting and analyzing several microhistories from communism (1947-1989) and from the early 1990s Romania. The 1990s were also marked by the communist legacy and same-sex relationships continued to be criminalized until 2001. Since gay men´s accounts are much more represented in the public space and in the incipient literature on queerness in Romania, the article offers an alternative view beyond this tendency, by bringing forth the particularities and experiences of cisgender women and trans persons and their day-to-day lives within the patriarchal and homophobic society. The article argues that during communism matters of queerness were known, although rarely discussed, and that the accounts of queer women and trans persons were not absent but neglected. Another objective is to offer explanations for the lack of these marginal(ized) accounts in the incipient gender and queer studies literature on Romania.

Keywords: lesbianism in communist Romania, queer life stories, homosexuality in the USSR sphere

[i] While the article is focusing on cisgender queer women, nonbinary and trans perspectives were also included. These are not exhaustive for trans-related perspectives, but since even less is being researched in terms of such accounts from communism, it is important to include the unique perspectives I had access to. Moreover, the author has opted for using the term "queer" in order to encompass the broader spectrum of sexualities in a more concise manner than other formulations. That is, of course, not to say that this term was common during the first transitional decade in Romania. It only became more used during the past decade, still less common than "gay" as the spoken language followed its course and continued to adopt foreign terms. Some might argue using the terms "queer" and "gay"  when referring to communist Romania is asynchronous. The author chose to keep these formulations for a series of reasons. Firstly, the interviewees themselves used "gay" instead of "homosexual" during the interviews – the latter term has been extensively and preponderantly used with pejorative and homophobic connotations in post-communist Romanian media and it is no surprise some queer persons chose to use the less charged term "gay". Secondly, the term "homosexual" is mainly used in Romanian to refer to homosexual men as opposed to English, where it also includes homosexual women.