Cetiner was freed by presidential decree March 18 after being adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience.

The letter, dated April 1, reads: "I would like to thank all of you for being by my side. Thank you for your letters and I am sorry that I wasn't able to reply from prison. Now, being free, I will try to keep in touch with you.

"As for me, I can tell you that, with the help of Amnesty International, The Romanian Helsinki Committee and the lawyer Monica Macovei, I intend to take my case back to court, so that the truth comes out. ...

"At present, I do not have a house or a job. Due to the detention, it is very difficult to find, in general, any sort of support here. It seems that being a lesbian in Romania is worse than being a criminal. The detention affected me a lot. The beatings, the treatment in prison affected me. The reality is tough, but that's it.

"At present I am living in Sibiu, Romania, with a girlfriend -- the only person who offered to help and shelter me for a while. I need a lot of help for the moment and the ones who in the past expressed their intention to help me can do it now. If you want to send me letters or parcels please use the address below.

"I can receive funds in a bank account in Austria. I can withdraw money in Romania with a bank card. It is impossible to open my own bank account in Romania because I do not have an address here. Please send my gratitude and this letter to others who stood beside me and whose addresses I do not know."

Cetiner's address is Post restant 1, Sibiu 2400, Romania. Her telephone number is 011-40-69-445-408. Her bank-account information is: "Cont bancar pe numele Peter Opris, Raiffeisenbank Bischofshofen Austria, Cont nr. 00003036324, Card nr. 100254N."

In January, Romanian President Emil Constantinescu promised foreign gay activists he would pardon all gays and lesbians jailed under the nation's anti-gay laws.

"Homosexuality is the last remaining human-rights problem we have to address in Romania, and we will address it," he told the visiting activists.

Romanian law bans gay sex between consenting adults "if the act was committed in public or has produced public scandal." It is also illegal "to entice or seduce a person to practice same-sex acts, as well as to form propaganda associations, or to engage in other forms of proselytizing with the same aim." The penalty is one to five years in prison.

Appeals for the release of persons jailed for being gay – and for repeal of the laws under which they were convicted -- can be sent to:

President Emil Constantinescu,
Excelenti Sale,
Presedintele Romaniei, Palatul Cotroceni, Bd. Geiuli 1, 76238
Bucuresti, Romania.

JAPANESE BOOK THAT OUTS YUKIO MISHIMA RECALLED

A book that outed the late famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima was recalled March 30 after his family secured an injunction from the Tokyo District Court.

The family argued that the author of the book, writer Jiro Fukushima, violated copyright by publishing letters to himself from Mishima -- letters which confirmed Mishima's homosexuality.

The family's lawyer denied a charge from Fukushima's publisher that the injunction was not really about copyright but rather about concealing Mishima's gay relationships.

"What the bereaved family is saying is that it is wrong to publish the letters without their consent," the attorney said. "They do not take issue with the homosexual relationship."

Fukushima claims he and Mishima were lovers for four months in 1951, when Mishima was 26, and again for five years in the early 1960s. When the book first appeared last month, Mishima's biographer, Henry Scott-Stokes, commented to reporters: "It's astonishing it's taken nearly 30 years for this [outing] to happen. There's probably 100 elderly Japanese men here in Tokyo now who were his lovers."

Mishima committed harakiri in 1970 after breaking into a Self Defense Forces building in Tokyo, taking the general hostage, hailing the emperor, and calling for a revision of the Constitution to permit Japan to re-arm itself. He ripped out his guts with an 80-centimeter blade and a colleague then sliced off Mishima's head with an antique sword.

Mishima's more widely translated books include Forbidden Colors, Runaway Horses, Confessions of a Mask, The Sound of Waves and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

Contributing to this week's report: Brett Shephard

Rex Wockner's weekly international news reports dating back to May 1994 can be searched at http://www.wockner.com. The reports in their original form are archived at http://www.qrd.org/qrd/www/world/wockner.html, which also archives Wockner's Quote Unquote column and some of his longer gay-press articles.