Queer Lives: Part III
Tirana, Albania
In 2010, Albanian civil rights activist Xheni Karaj was outed to her parents. She had given an interview, with her face concealed, about her work for queer rights. Her aunt had recognised her voice and confronted her with her parents. There was no question of Xheni stopping her activism, but she did vow to continue doing it anonymously. Two years later, on live television, she found herself breaking that promise in a way that would change her life, and the lives of those around her, forever.
Earlier that year, she had worked to organise Tirana’s first Pride-related public event. They had decided to do it on bikes. This had the advantage of allowing participants to move on quickly if confronted. Their plans were received with threats of violence from prominent conservative figures. The media, previously relatively subdued on LGBTQ+ issues, started to take notice, organising a TV debate that included Xheni’s friend and colleague Kristi Pinderi, a pioneering activist who has since claimed asylum in Canada.
“If my son became gay, I would put a bullet in his forehead”. These were the words of Murat Basha, then a representative of the Legality Movement Party. Xheni, who had accepted an invitation to sit in the audience, felt unable to stay silent. She condemned Basha’s words and decided to come out, there and then. In this moment she became, incredibly, Albania’s first publicly out lesbian.
The impact was immediate: she was recognised and ostracised on the street, family members lamented her ‘mistake,’ her parents faced abuse and ridicule. It felt overwhelming. “It was tough, but overall I won more than I lost,” she reflects. “It was the last step I had to take to liberate myself. Finally I felt free in my own identity.”
If you google LGBTQ+ rights in Albania, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is one of the more progressive countries in the Balkans: consensual same-sex relationships are legal and anti-discrimination legislation protects people on grounds including sexual orientation and gender identity. But Albania does not recognise same-sex marriages or civil partnerships.” However, as Xheni points out, such laws are only as good as the extent to which they are enforced. She describes them to me as little more than an attempt to reinforce Albania’s credentials as they apply for EU membership, rather than as a genuine attempt to protect minorities. Neither, sadly, do they seem to reflect a genuine change of sentiment within wider society.
Xheni’s parents came to terms with the earthquake they experienced as a family back in 2012. Their support has been crucial as she has navigated the exceptionally challenging landscape of queer activism in this part of Europe. Sadly, she is in the minority of queer people to benefit from their family’s support. Part of her work in forming these supportive communities has helped queer people rejected by their own families find a new one. Something Xheni says has stuck with me ever since I heard it. “One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned during years of activism… is that families don’t love their kids in an unconditional way”
Albania’s recent history is extraordinarily complicated and painful. For much of the twentieth century, it was a communist state that came to attain North Korea-like levels of isolationism. When democracy finally came in 1991, Albania was frighteningly underdeveloped, its economy in ruins and with an infrastructure decades behind that of its neighbours. Its people, encouraged to spy on one another during the appalling final years of Enver Hoxha’s regime, were still reeling from the atrocities he visited on his own people: a violent purging of religion, leaders and perceived political foes imprisoned, tortured, murdered.
Homosexuality, according to the regime, was not a legitimate phenomenon in Albanian society. And yet it was criminalised by the state, with those convicted facing up to ten years’ imprisonment.
In 1997, six years into Albania's democratic transition, a crisis akin to civil war erupted after the collapse of nationwide pyramid investment schemes. At their peak, the schemes' liabilities had reached almost half of Albania's GDP, and their collapse wiped out the savings of huge numbers of Albanians. Violence was widespread. Though new elections gradually brought stability, the country was beset by trauma and distrust.
It was against this backdrop that early attempts to advocate for queer rights emerged. The climate was appallingly difficult. Early organisations were fragile: activists were arrested and beaten, some organisations collapsed, and prominent activists left the country. By 2009, when Xheni first started tentatively coming out to trusted friends, there was still almost no visible public LGBTQ+ movement, representation or mainstream discussion. “I thought I was the only lesbian in Albania,” she tells me, matter-of-factly.
Now, she runs Aleanca, an organisation not only that offers advice and support including psychological, legal, housing and medical assistance to Tirana’s queer community, but also advocates for queer causes and the raising of public awareness on behalf of a group that still faces extraordinary discrimination in Albanian society. She is powerfully visible, appearing regularly on television and in interviews. Where once she sought to avoid the public eye, she now sees how her profile can be used to advance the causes she is fighting for.
To what extent a new generation inherits the trauma of those that have gone before seems particularly pertinent in Albania. It’s hard to imagine many places that have undergone such a seismic societal change in such a short space of time. Xheni is typically eloquent on the subject. “You know, the problem with Albania is that we never dealt with our past… we never reflected on what happened. When democracy came, we were so eager to run towards it, that we never turned our eyes back, and never recovered from the trauma, and that trauma was passed down the generations. Being afraid that someone is going to f**k you from your own family/community - we have been raised with that kind of paranoia… This fear of the system, or the state, the feeling of fear in general is passed on from our parents. The difficulty of understanding freedom and the respect for human rights comes from an era when there were no rights and no humanity.”
What does this mean for gay rights in modern Albania? Can this country, running from its traumatic past, looking to the West for support and influence, find acceptance in its younger generations? Change is slow but palpable. With each new generation, the shadow of communism seems to gradually lighten. Young people, Xheni tells me, are more confident in themselves and in their identity, less able to imagine their freedoms being taken away.
The language itself has changed, too. Even in 2009, the only word Xheni heard in relation to gay people was ‘pederast.’ (I am astonished now, as I was then, to find in Europe this parallel with Cambodia.) Now, non-judgemental terms that start to encompass different sexual orientations and gender identities are commonly used. Around her, Xheni sees the transformation of queer individuals, finding a home in this growing and increasingly confident community: from isolation and depression to confidence, determination and optimism. It’s a transformation that entirely echoes her own.
Xheni seems quite uninterested in taking credit for the remarkable contribution she has made to the cause she has dedicated her adult life to, and she won’t thank me for taking a moment to marvel at her extraordinary courage in the service of her community. As queer people look fearfully to parts of the world in which progress has halted or even regressed, her story serves as a reminder of the debt we owe to the bravery of activists and how much work remains even within Europe for rights and freedoms to become universal.
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