ABSTRACT
The inheritance of the communist regime in Romania includes, together with the centrality of national values in the public discourse (Verdery, 1993), a very unstable separation between the public and the private spheres. In the case of sexual minorities, this separation was manifest in the criminalization of same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults until 2001. A certain reluctance to decriminalize such relations was due to essentialist nationalist assumptions which denoted them as alien and threatening to the family- and religion-oriented Romanian way of life.
