The cruising past of men seeking same-sex encounters under Albanian communism

Millona, Kristina (2024) The cruising past of men seeking same-sex encounters under Albanian communism. INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS, 10 (3). pp. 24-39. ISSN 2416-089X

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Abstract

Despite the growing sexuality-related scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the history of non-normative sexualities under state socialism remains theorized mainly through totalizing narratives. These problematic discourses have contributed to the theorization of LGBT+ experience in the CEE region solely through narratives of oppression, criminalization, and persecution of homosexuality, therefore emptying the history of CEE from any development of LGBT+ activism and by rendering the existence of non-normative sexualities even more invisible. I argue that in contrast to such essentialist representations, which in turn are juxtaposed with representations of the West as a homoerotic paradise, there were also different forms of political resistance that contributed to sexual emancipation in state-socialist countries. For this reason, I depart from Western-centric understandings of conventional forms of political organizing and take as a vantage point the cruising areas where men sought to fulfill same-sex desires under the oppressive regime in communist Albania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize these urban spaces not only as areas of sexual encounter but as grounds of political resistance, therefore ‘queering’ the forms of grassroots politics within the geo-temporality of state-socialism in Albania.

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