Recently, a Dutch friend told me that he couldn’t imagine a world where you’re not able to hold hands in public or lay down in a park with a same gender partner. I’m from Romania and moved to the Netherlands last year. That world he talked about was all I knew and was my reality because you always have to be cautious, always have to look over your shoulder when you’re a queer person living in a very conservative place, with very little or no access to information about who you are. It’s a reality I grew up with and very different from the one I’m currently experiencing and enjoying. The lack of information, of human contact with members of your community and seeing almost no queer representation, drives people apart and underground, and it’s a very difficult mindset to get out of. But I personally feel lucky that when I came out, I had nice people around who supported me and I also had lovely boyfriends. It taught me that a relationship between two guys was possible and I would not hide in the closet forever.
I was born in 1990, when homosexuality was still illegal in Romania. After communism fell in ’89, homosexuality would still be outlawed 12 years later – it was decriminalized only in 2001. Until then, you could still go to prison for being gay with a sentence from 1 to 5 years. Before that, the communist regime had free range for over three decades to arrest, investigate, blackmail, torture and incarcerate gay people. That drove queer life in Romania extremely underground and very little is known about it from that time. We still need to recover our own history.
Bucharest had its first gay march in 2005. I come from a city called Iași, one of the most conservative in Romania and the second largest. There I founded the first LGBTQ non-profit organization and, in 2021, organized the very first Pride festival in the history of the city. This year will be the third, which I’m going back for. The Pride march in my hometown still feels like a fight and sometimes a bit scary because of protesters, and not like a big party. That’s when you realize that Pride is most needed in a place like this. Romania needs to catch up with the rest of Europe and legalize same-sex marriage, actively combat hate speech and hate crime, make access to HIV testing and medication easier, and also make the transition process safer and easier for trans people. And I hope one day Romanian queer people will get to feel accepted and secure in their own country.