The 'silent' sexual revolution of men seeking same-sex desire under Albanian communism

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 invisibilizing

further the existence of non-normative sexualities. I argue that in contrast to the framing of the West as

a homoerotic paradise, there were also differing forms of political resistance concerning sexual

freedom in the Eastern Bloc’s republics. 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