One basic uncertainty was exactly what was being criminalized. Observers today might assume the acts involved were synonymous with "homosexuality. Provisions ancestral to the new law referred to "acts of unnatural indecency" or to "indecency against nature, either a with animals, or b with persons of the same sex.
The legislators wanted more exactitude: but they were quickly mired in lexicographical quagmires. The term was of recent, and foreign, coinage [3] , though; some parliamentarians doubted its meaning. It was dropped "because it does not include inverted relations between women. However, other legal commentators saw "homosexuality" as including lesbian relations--but as different from "pederasty," which "can also be committed between a man and a woman, when the woman is the passive agent coitus per anum. One might put the question whether a husband who has been mastered by this vice [pederasty], and has exercised the act through violence on his wife, can be found guilty of the act of sexual inversion--sexual relations between husband and wife being obligatory.
Doctrine in general agrees that the husband does not have this right and is guilty of the offense of inversion. These terminological quandaries had a significance beyond the dictionary. The penal code attempted to classify sexual behaviors, so that for instance "sexual inversion" could be understood to include "homosexuality" and "pederasty," while bestiality fell into a different column. Sexual acts previously conflated were differentiated, described, placed in categories.
Those behaviors were then used to define the identities of and sometimes to segregate legally and medically individuals and groups who engaged in them. The same process by which the category of "homosexual" had been invented in Western Europe was recapitulated in Romania. While in Vienna and Paris the work of physicians and scientists largely drove the process, however, in Bucharest those discourses were silent. This vacuum of supporting discourse created confusion. There was no clear sense of what "sexual inversion" was: commentators could still invoke "pederasty," "sapphism," and "tribadism," assigning meanings to them almost at will.
One closed his notes by falling back on an ancient term and penalty , almost with relief: "In the old law, sodomites were punished with mutilation and recidivists with burning at the stake. If reticence and privacy prevented a full description of the incriminated acts, there was further uncertainty about when they were incriminated. One legislator pleaded: "Do not make this offense depend on provoking public scandal! What interests us is the proven offense, and the prosecutor should prove the offense by any means.
The committee presenting the text to the two chambers observed, "The law cannot go further in its rigor, penetrating with transparent beams the secrecy of rooms where two accused persons may meet. Yet questions persisted about how far "public scandal" impinged on either the citizen's body or the "secrecy of rooms. A court decision of suggested that in becoming known at all, "sexual inversion" automatically became culpable: "Acts of sexual inversion fall under the provisions of Article if knowledge about the act is divulged, as in such a case they provoke public scandal.
Rather this element must follow from the manner in which the persons between whom these relations took place comported themselves: namely, that they provoked public scandal through their attitude, either by betraying themselves in a positive act of ostentatious depravity, or by engaging in a negative act of imprudence and negligence in [not] taking measures necessary to conceal these relations. Even if "provoking scandal" necessarily entailed public behavior, its perimeters were still wide. Asked to clarify the term during debate, the text's authors replied, "For example, many persons may be accustomed to meeting in a certain place, and, because the entire world knows that they assemble there, a disturbance of public peace is produced in the vicinity.
Scandal is public when the actors, looking to win or to search for clients, no longer make a secret of their relations, and in publicizing the disgusting vice the general moral sentiment is assaulted and public opinion is with good cause alarmed. Clearly association and expression were targeted by the language from the first. Indeed, the reference to "clients" in these comments, and the invocation of pornography as a cause of same-sex attraction, strike notes which would reverberate for many years in both legal discourse and the popular imagination in Romania.
Inversion merited suppression less as individual vice than as the characteristic of an emergent group. The debates raised lasting issues. They show legislators grappling to delineate both privacy and the public sphere. And this attempt moves in uneasy but inextricable tandem with the effort not just to control but to define sexuality--to make sexual behavior intelligible in juridical terms.
It was sufficiently private to seem unfamiliar, even indescribable, to most of the legislators. Yet even when it took place behind closed doors, it was not defended by the near-absolute immunity which enshrouded the family. Instead it was always on the verge of becoming a public concern. The code was an attempt to maintain and extend the half-fact, half-fiction of the rule of law in a country already shaken by a fascist insurgency, government corruption, and endemic abuse of power.
The uncertain limits it drew around the state's legitimate zone of control were part of this attempt; but the boundaries it tried to sketch between the "secrecy of rooms" and the public square would soon be even less intelligible. Within two years, King Carol II set up a royal dictatorship. Over the next five decades of first fascist and then communist rule, legal and social protections for privacy and the public sphere would disappear completely. The code was not fully revised until , when the Grand National Assembly of what was now the Socialist Republic of Romania adopted a new version.
This code embodied not only the realities of a socialist regime in place since the Second World War, but also the shifting intentions of Nicolae Ceausescu after his first three years in power. After a brief liberalization, the regime was beginning to restrict renascent freedoms and resharpen its instruments of control. The code revised and recategorized all laws on sexuality. A chapter on "infractions involving sexual life" fell within a larger section on "infractions against the person. Article dealt with "sexual corruption" of a minor defined as performing "acts of an obscene character" on the minor or in the minor's presence.
Article , based closely on the former Article , punished "acts of sexual perversion which cause public scandal" with one to five years' imprisonment. The article defined sexual perversion as "any unnatural act in connection with sexual life, other than those provided in Article Thus, reference to "public scandal" was dropped, and the penalty drastically increased. In a sense, in , "homosexuality" came into existence in Romania, specifically recognized by the law: but only to be banned completely.
If the language drew restrictions around the public sphere, the code seemed intended to abolish the private. It paralleled Ceausescu's pro-natalist decrees--which compelled women to undergo periodic and compulsory gynecological examinations and severely punished abortions--as a draconian restriction of bodily freedom and an excuse to invade the intimate realm. To a regime which predicated its authority on its surveillance of every detail of existence, any privacy immune to social supervision was a threat.
Lesbian Singles Dating in Galati
Article was diplomatically useful to the Ceausescu regime as, with the advent of the s, it tightened virtually every screw of social control. Since Amnesty International and other organizations did not yet recognize persons imprisoned solely for their homosexuality as prisoners of conscience, the dubious and disloyal could be charged under Article without attracting international attention--allowing Ceausescu's human-rights record to remain cosmetically clear.
A law wielded sporadically against ideological nonconformists, though, was enforced severely upon sexual dissidence--amid virtual indifference abroad. In , I was arrested for the first time. I brought a man home to my apartment, we had sex, and then he left. I don't know who reported us but they moved very fast.
In the morning, before dawn, four policemen came to the apartment, broke in, and picked me up. I was sentenced to four years. In , when I was twenty-six, I went to see a friend who was renting a room in Bucharest, near Piata Rahova. There was another man who was living in the apartment. The three of us all had drinks; then my friend started showing us some porn magazines, gay and straight, which he had got from abroad.
Public Scandals: Sexual Orientation and Criminal Law in Romania
The third man left. Eventually my friend and I took our clothes off and got into bed, naked, in separate beds, looking at the magazines. We fell asleep. When we woke up, there were police, seven or eight of them, breaking down the door.
The other man in the apartment had reported us. We were taken to the Section 17 police station and beaten over and over until we signed confessions that we had had homosexual sex. I was sentenced to two and one half years' imprisonment, and my friend--who owned the magazines--to three years.
In imposing a total ban on private sexual activity, Article suppressed not just any public development of gay or lesbian identity but the very acts and desires on which that identity might be based. Unlike measures restricting already extant ethnic or religious groups, Article was a comprehensive effort to keep a new minority identity from breaking forth. The subterranean invisibility into which gay and lesbian sexuality was thereby driven--and in which, in large part, it continues to languish--renders documenting human rights violations based on sexual orientation extremely difficult.
But in itself that invisibility violated basic rights, denying its victims voice, community, mutual contact, and self-understanding.
Same-sex sexual activity continued to take place in Romania, amid matrices of secrecy and mistrust. In the absence of bars or any other legal meeting places, gay men met surreptitiously, in places where they could go unnoticed, either in darkness or in a crowd. In almost every town, a park or railway station was quietly reclaimed as a cruising area. As one man explains, "Stations and parks were places where you could wait around, loiter, and speak to strangers, without arousing undue suspicion.
The same man says that taking a partner home could be dangerous:. It wasn't just that your neighbors might see or hear. If you took someone home, he knew where you lived.
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If he was an informer, he could report you. Under bushes or in a toilet stall, even if you were caught, there was the chance that you could make a clean getaway. And if you did, maybe no one could find you. Few lesbians enjoyed even this measure of mobility.
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Both economic and social pressure constrained most women to marry early; nor, for most, were models or images available through which a lesbian identity could be constructed. Indeed, both women and men wrestling with homosexual feeling relied, to comprehend themselves, on any scraps of information they might find, building a mirror from shards with the glue of desperation. At the time, I did not even know that words such as 'lesbianism' or 'homosexuality' existed. In a closed society like pre Romania, the issue was more than a taboo: it simply did not exist. But I had been attracted to women from a very early age and was wondering.
I was lucky enough to get hold on the black market of a magazine featuring two women making love. I realized then that this was what I wanted, but I knew it was hard to get in a society where you have to pay with your freedom for being attracted to someone of the same sex as you.
The regime made its own paranoia come true. Anathematizing homosexuality as a foreign influence, it ensured that chance flotsam of information from abroad was one of the few sources of identity left for lesbians and gays.