Holding hands with your partner as gay men in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest or Bucharest is likely to attract at least a few disapproving looks. In some European countries, living openly as a homosexual requires a lot of courage. About half of the population of Poland (52 percent), Romania (54 percent), Hungary (44 percent) and more than one-third of Bulgaria (36 percent) would not grant equal rights to LGBT people, according to a 2015 Eurobarometer survey on discrimination in Europe.
The Romanian photographer and LGBT activist Tiberiu Capudean believes that hatred and fear are fueled by ignorance. His new project "Naked" is meant to give more visibility to the LGBT community. The artist has taken black and white pictures of more than 200 nude gay and bisexual men from different countries around the world and from a wide range of professions: medical doctors, biochemists, shop attendants, lawyers, tailors, students and engineers. "I want to help those who are not part of the LGBT community understand us, I want to give a face to those whom the homophobes hate without even knowing them", Capudean tells DW. [...]
There is also a connection between religion and homophobia in central and southeastern Europe. In Romania, the "Coalition for the Family," a group strongly backed by the Orthodox Church, has gathered 3 million signatures seeking to change the definition of family in the country's constitution through a referendum. Romania's Civil Code bans same-sex marriages and civil partnerships, but currently the constitution defines marriage as "the union between spouses," which leaves room for interpretation. The goal of this initiative is that the constitution should define family as "the union between a man and a woman."
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