Romania: ISA Struggles for LGBTQ+ Rights Across the Balkans

It is no secret that it is not easy being queer in Romania, or anywhere else. Facing discrimination at school, university, and in the workplace, living in fear of being kicked out by their families and facing increasing attacks from the most reactionary forces, LGBTQ+ people have to struggle with multiple hardships.

The pandemic has accentuated these facts. During quarantine we have seen a rise in domestic violence against women, children, LGBTQ+ persons, and with queer kids often the most affected.

With frequent cases of queer people being thrown onto the street by their families, they occupy an especially vulnerable position within society. This, combined with discrimination when looking for a job, makes it very easy for employers and landlords to exploit these vulnerabilities, with queer persons being more predisposed to accepting precarious jobs with lower pay and the more exploitive housing contracts. Many trans people and especially trans women are forced to resort to prostitution on this basis, often facing violence from customers and authorities.

Access to healthcare is hard to come by, partly due to the fact LBGTQ+ people represent one of the most impoverished layers, and partly due to queerphobic stigmas and falsehoods, such as those claiming homosexual people are more predisposed to HIV.

Pride month is over once again and awareness for these issues should be heightened. We have to ask ourselves what needs to be done in order to see a change in our lives, our country and region. For this we often look at the events known as the “Stonewall Riot”, that started the modern movement or struggle of LGBTQ+ rights and the pride month itself.

This shows the inherent revolutionary aspect of Pride Month, it being essentially the yearly commemoration of a full-on revolt demanding queer liberation. Today however, in places like Bucharest, during Pride, we see more commercialization, than revolt. This “pink capitalism” represents the appropriation of Pride by big corporations such as Ikea Romania, which waves the Pride flag around during June in front of some of their stores, bragging on social media about this very small act.

For unity of the oppressed!

Marxist feminists are often accused that, while they fight against queerphobia, they are wrong for being hostile towards “ally brands”. These accusations are portrayed as a breaking of “unity”. But while being present at Pride parades with their commercial floats, changing profile pictures on their accounts with Pride flags or making statements that promote the acceptance of phrases such as “Love is love”, followed by a rainbow emoji, their queer employees experience no actual improvement in their situation, which we can safely assume is dire.

On about 1 May, a draft legislation was “tacitly accepted” by the Senate. This law states that any piece in the media that “promotes homosexuality or gender ideology” would become illegal. Effectively this means it would become impossible to speak about queer people existing on any media like TV, including cartoons or serials. “Tacitly accepted” means essentially nothing, as it means that politicians simply didn’t speak about it, and thus it is considered as “passed” until the other parliamentary chamber finds time to debate it.

The party that proposed this is the “Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania” (UDMR), the conservative party of the Hungarian minority. A similar version of the law exists in Hungary. This is no reason to associate queerphobia with the Hungarian nation or ethnical identity, as there are, needless to say, a lot of queer people who are Hungarian, who would also be affected by this legislation in Romania, or are at this moment affected in Hungary itself. So, we should be in solidarity and aid their fight for queer liberation, by fighting against queerphobia at home, and having an international orientation towards worldwide abolishment of gender and sexual orientation norms that are linked with the church and capital.

Pink Capitalism silent about reactionary policy in the “West”

This obviously anti-queer legislation would affect the already vulnerable position of LGBTQ+ people in Romania, and shows the deeply reactionary character of the bourgeois system, and their politicians who defend capital regardless of what language or in what country their bosses lie.

But a reaction that was deeply disappointing has come from one of the “pink capitalist” NGO’s in Romania, which has shown its position in a post on instagram. “MozaiQ” correctly described the legislation as being in line with Putin’s reactionary regime, without seeing the obvious hypocrisy in the fact that a NATO member country like Hungary has similar laws. Putin’s authoritarian, queerphobic and oligarchical regime is undoubtedly to blame for the countless deaths in Ukraine, but we cannot see NATO as anything else than the other side of the same criminal and capitalist coin, a coin incompatible with the freedom of queer people everywhere. NATO member countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey have anti-queer legislation, while the US has the “Don’t say gay bill” in Florida, and new attacks on queer rights planned by the Supreme Court.

To weaponize this tragic news for the Romanian LGBTQ+ community by transforming it to demonise one geopolitical alliance, whilst ignoring the other is typical of the pink capitalists, who ignore the need for a genuine international struggle to abolish homophobia and transphobia, which are routed in capitalist societies across the world.

Capitalism needs traditional gender roles

Queer oppression is first and foremost a material one, meaning queer oppression is even harder for those who are materially dependent on other people, as it is based on the material power structures of the family as the smallest unit in capitalist society. The traditional family institution itself developed as a twin of class-based social forms. In roman society, claimed by many to be the source of “western civilisation” and one of the earliest examples of a society based on family institution, the wife was simply the slave that had the children. This is where the word “family” comes from, it being the latin plural for “famulus” which means “domestic slave”.

A good example of an alternative social form comes from the Burneshas, a group of AFAB (Assigned Female At Birth) people, who traditionally live their lives as men in Northern Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro. While their number is small today, around 100, this shows that gender is not a binary and that what was labelled later as LGBTQ+, is not a foreign western presence in the Balkans. Such societies and family forms were present in the native peoples of the Americas and elsewhere else. The family as it is known today only developed together with class society.

As long as capitalism is still in power, homophobia and transphobia will never truly disappear, as gender roles are needed to oppress women, and heterosexuality is needed to control the number of children within the country to maintain the workforce. The ruling ideology is that of the ruling class, and that of the capitalists is deeply queerphobic.

The working-class however, is only divided by such relations. It is as weak and vulnerable as its most vulnerable members, that is LGBTQ+ people. Unity on the basis of class would mean a strengthening of the most oppressed within the workplace, at schools and in day-to-day lives. It is the queer people who are suffering the most from homelessness, being kicked out of their homes by unaccepting families, joblessness, or being discriminated in the workplace by their bosses, and many other problems.

Queer struggle in the East

In Eastern Europe, the relation between church and state is an especially close one. The restoration of capitalism in Romania and the Balkans in general was achieved with huge help from the churches, who exploited indirect mechanisms for using taxpayer money. This is why the Romanian state has such an intimate relation with the Church, whose massive power, often used for promoting gender norms and demonising anyone who goes against the “traditional family institution”, will not be overthrown while capital still rules.

This leads some people to say that the inherent “backwardness” of Balkan countries makes it impossible to fight against systemic queerphobia. Often placing all their faith in western entities such as the European Union, or sometimes pointing even at the US, they see the victories of queer persons in western countries through struggle, and interpret them as a result of the higher “cultural level” of said countries. While this view vulgarises movements such as Stonewall Riot, it also points into a deeply xenophobic view of people from the Balkans, and anything associated with “eastness”. While there are the similar numbers of queer people in Eastern and Western countries, it is the bourgeoise class that is reactionary and backward. So, what need do we have of “pink” western exceptionalism? Why not replace it with a revolt movement against queerphobia in Romania, the Balkans and the broader “East”?

Long struggle for Pride in Serbia

One example is what has happened in one of our southern neighbours! Serbia has, since the break-up of Yugoslavia, been at odds with western countries. Young people during the 1990s had strong illusions in the European Union, wanting a Serbia closer to the west. These were shattered as Milosevic came to power in 1997. In the early 2000s, he was removed by a west-friendly government. Some people started to regain hope and continued to struggle for queer liberation. In 2001 the first attempt to hold a Pride took place. Football ultras and neo-nazis quickly shattered the hopes for a peaceful parade, while the government used the excuse of “fear for peoples’ safety” in order to shut down all further attempts to organise.

Only after 9 years of campaigning against the government’s decision and bravely going on the streets every June, defying the authorities’ decision, the queer people of Serbia have managed to force the state to send police to at least pretend to defend the crowd against the ultras who have harassed them each year. After long and intense street fights, the Pride crowd managed to repel and survive the attacks for the first time in all these years. But as the person who made a movie about the event (Parada 2011) noted: “The few hundred of us are “guarded” by 5000 policemen, tomorrow they will beat us on the street again”. He showed a mistrust in the state that opposes the interests of the queer community and sympathises with the neo-nazi ultras. Under pressure even they found themselves forced to police their own reactionary flock.

This was the result of a long and vibrant struggle of the queer people of Serbia, who chose to fight in their country and in the Balkans for a better life, and not have illusions in a “better” place where queerfobia has already been defeated, because there is no such place yet, nor can it exist while capitalism stands.

This event has created a precedent and many more have taken up the banner of the queer liberation struggle. It was never meant to be a one-time event, but the start of a fight that cannot stop until oppression is no more. The fight has to go on to tackle issues such as the strong power of the Church and the ruling class that discriminate against those who are vulnerable, and suffer worse economic conditions caused by both foreign and domestic capital.

This year’s pride in Cluj — Romania

The Pride in Cluj this year was filled with youth hungry for a fighting plan, for a radical and comprehensive message, for a socialist alternative. The message we carried on our poster was “Take money from the Romanian Orthodox Church, build social spaces for refugees and queer people” on one side, and “No trust in EU or NATO, we need a Pride of revolt” on the other. These demands were very well and enthusiastically received, especially by the youth.

On the other end of the spectrum, we had the older people, and even young adults, who seemed to believe that war is “natural” and that the Pride shouldn’t be “political” as it is no more than one day a year when everyone just says “love is love” and then moves on. The organisers themselves, most of them from NGO’s, used the time after Pride to play music (while others pointlessly tried to talk about how to continue the struggle), held speeches of appreciation for the police, allowed someone to advertise their business, and at one point, someone even suggested that our response to queerphobia should be simply “love”.

It is of no surprise that most of the people left after the march, leaving just a small group around the stage where the speeches were held, and where the music was played. This shows that by far the most people who come to Pride are there for the march on the streets, and only a few for the music, party and “inspirational” speakers.

It is clear to us that the majority of people in Transylvania and in all other parts of the Balkans are looking for a change, a solution to the problem that is the system, and the youngest are ready and willing to fight for an alternative. This struggle must be a united one to succeed, because it is in the interest of all the oppressed people to unite and fight on a class basis against the common enemy. The working class en-masse will stand in defence of those who are weakest such as queer people, Romany or other minorities when they realise that bigotry serves the ruling class, which is our common enemy.

Pride needs to fight capitalism

We should have no confidence in NATO, which bombed Belgrade in 1999, making the lives of people there, including the ones that fought for the aforementioned Pride, significantly harder. Nor in the European Union, who is pushing people from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia into poverty. There is no such thing as an “ally government” under capitalism or an “ally corporation”, and those who argue there is are not strengthening the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights, but are castrating the fight for queer liberation by diverting it from the real problems.

We need concrete demands and the organization of a mass and popular movement against queerphobia, indivisible from those against imperialism, poverty, sexism and any other type of oppression that derives from capitalism. What we need is a fighting movement based on international solidarity, linked in our case with a Balkan-wide orientation, that would put an end to the rule of the capitalist systems of oppression, against war, homophobia, transphobia, and for a socialist alternative free of all these!