This article is informed by sixteen in-depth interviews with LGBT + activists in Romania, my archive and notes during my involvement in feminist and queer activist circles, as well as archival materials of an LGBT + NGO. It proposes the concept of lesbian anonymity as a means of investigating the way in which marginal positions within mainstream movements are anonymized and their contributions to the movement dispersed within the generic queer/gay activism. By looking at specific case studies from Romaniás transition period (1989 to mid 2000s), I analyze how matters of representation were tackled within the LGBT + mainstream movements in relation to grassroots activist circles. The article explores what happens when queer gatekeepers fail to engage with internal criticisms concerning the selective erasure of certain categories of voices such as queer women, trans people, racialized people, sex workers. I argue that lesbian anonymity offers another angle of analyzing the clashes between and within different LGBT + groups in post-socialist spaces. How does lesbian anonymity shape the queer movements and why is it important to keep representational issues in mind while working on non-normative sexualities, gender, and women´s reproductive rights? This contribution offers a necessary critique of the representational gaps within queer movements.

Informed by interviews with queer women, nonbinary persons, and a trans man, this article aims to fill a major gap in the Southeastern European sexuality studies. It does that by depicting and analyzing several microhistories from communism (1947–1989) and from the early 1990s Romania. The 1990s were also marked by the communist legacy and same-sex relationships continued to be criminalized until 2001. Since gay men’s accounts are much more represented in the public space and in the incipient literature on queerness in Romania, the article offers an alternative view beyond this tendency, by bringing forth the particularities and experiences of cisgender women and trans persons and their day-to-day lives within the patriarchal and homophobic society. The article argues that during communism matters of queerness were known, although rarely discussed, and that the accounts of queer women and trans persons were not absent but neglected. Another objective is to offer explanations for the lack of these marginal (ized) accounts in the incipient gender and queer studies literature on Romania.

This chapter builds on the diasporic status the authors acquired once relocated from Romania to Sweden. It marks the reference point and position for a self-reflective study constituted in the form of vignettes that stem from personal experiences on belonging and un-belonging in queer spaces, migration and community forming in a new space from a comparative perspective based on the authors’ experiences in both countries. This adds to the existing literature on gender, diasporas and migration. Furthermore, it offers an insight into the construction of certain elements with regard to a “queer Romanian diaspora” and how the transformations experienced in terms of losing certain aspects of an “activist self” become relevant within the transnational research frameworks. This contribution thus frames the authors’ de-construction and re-construction of activist and migrant identities by refusing and rethinking the usual binaries operating within the methodological nationalism predominant in migration studies and see “identities” more as “as a process of multiple relationalities”. Focusing on concepts such as “diaspora”, “solidarities”, “opting out” and “homonationalism”, the authors use queer retrosexuality to construct a fragmented critical story by using the mechanism of “looking back” to their shared past, finding connections within the present, often interrupted by small but meaningful glimpses of interactions in different life situations. One purpose is to understand the borders of queerness in the chosen contexts. The other is to explore and make sense of the different configurations the authors’ activist selves have taken over time.