Is that possible in Albania?

During the last month Pro LGBT in collaboration with The Alliance against Discrimination has started a challenging voluntarily deep survey at the State Archives after we had a very collaborative discussion with the general director of the Archives, Dr. Nevila Nika.

 

I should admit: This effort to understand more about the past of LGBT community is becoming very hard to manage: we spend several hours every day at the Archives, most often trying to manage the emotions while reading extremely horrible facts and at the same time we try to understand more, pages after pages and files after files, although in our group only me has a academic background in History.

 

We were shocked to discover how the Penal Code of the Republic was amended on 1925 in order to include at the article that condemned pedophilia also the homosexuality. From that moment and on, you could see and read all possible witch hunt cases against male homosexuals and especially state officials or teachers or other lower semi-officials working for the state.

 

While everything looks pretty easy to discover among the files belonging to the period from 1912-1944, it is much more difficult to research everything in the archives belonging to the communism period. This period looks like a more complicated labyrinth and in order to discover it we need more time to spend.

 

What we intend to do is to push out from the dusty underground places of the archive all these documents and to publish them in a special bibliographic book. We cannot and at this point, we are not able to make a full historical study because we will need specialized contribution about it. Publishing a data base on the issue will be a first step that will help, first of all, all the scholars in Albania who are eager now to study more either in the law or in the social issues, the LGBT past of this country.

 

A very important moment are those hundreds of rape cases with vulnerable perceived male homosexuals as victims: Very hard to explain either the phenomena was a general product of hate crimes or isolated cases around the country (the second part seems not so true as we find these cases in a very high number all over the country and regions).

 

Quite interesting looks the involvement of religions in trying to lobby for law amendments in the filed of what is known as the honor crime. There is a very important document that appears soon after the first incrimination of homosexuality and is a suggestion from the Muslim community to give amnesty to all the males who commit crime (killing) their daughters, mothers, sisters, or wives, after they doubt their morality. This suggestion was soon accepted by the authorities.

 

A moral persecution towards young boy teenagers who are caught in masturbation during communism was spread through the entire communism period, this was a real organized bullying. Thousands of perceived male homosexuals were imprisoned; everything was documented but not publicly reported. The same methodology was used for divorces: For instance if they were 37 percent of divorced couples in reality, to the public was reported the percentage of 3.7! In some other archives we think we might be able to check documents revealing how these gay men were forced to co-work with the security, in order for them to protect their dignity... Much interesting looks the period of 80s when young boys were eager to take pictures of different females in erotic positions and then to sell those pictures to their peers, because as you might now, pornography was illegal in the country.

 

We don’t intend to victimize our cause. We stand in front of this challenge with a victorious position: We have courage enough to see eye-to-eye our past and to understand it, to present what was either told wrong, or never told and to learn in order not to repeat it.

 

We have agreed with the State Archives never to mention names, identities or identifying pictures, in order to protect the dignity of everyone who was directly or indirectly involved in stories of LGBT and than archived. Next phase will be the signing of an official agreement with the State Archives for this purpose.

 

Pro LGBT, Albania