COLUMN ONE : Out of One Closet--and Into Another : For East European gays, communism’s end has brought new freedom and fears. Both homophobia and homosexuality are more openly expressed.

The day is nearly done, and Lajos Romsauer, a psychiatrist with a passion for men, has seen his last client--at least the last one interested in traditional counseling.

Now it is alibi time, when gay men in a social pinch turn to the after-hours matchmaking skills of Romsauer, a master of faux pairings in the city’s fashionable Castle Hill district.

The smiling ladies in the foyer of his turn-of-the-century residence supply the heterosexual window dressing. They are the alibis, the stand-in wives, girlfriends and lovers who will accompany gay men yearning to pass in the outside world as one of the guys.

A “match” comes as cheap as a decent meal, an evening at the movies, some friendly conversation or, if all else fails, $1.50 an hour.

Romsauer gets paid nothing, just the quiet satisfaction of knowing that angst-ridden gay men will make it through another evening without public ridicule.

Communism has vanished from Eastern Europe, but the trauma of being homosexual has not. In fact, being homosexual here may be more maddening than ever.

The fall of the Iron Curtain brought astonishing freedom for gay men and lesbians in the former Soviet Bloc, a region notorious for its intolerance toward those who are different. But for all the lightning changes of the last six years, many homosexuals say they have been left feeling empty and disoriented by the transformation.

“We were very naive,” said Romsauer, 59, founder of Homeros, a gay social organization. “We thought that with an open society, the change in being homosexual would be dramatic. It hasn’t been.”

As gay men and lesbians in the West have witnessed, the freedom to be openly homosexual has a painful corollary: the freedom for others to be openly hateful. It has been a hard lesson for homosexuals in Eastern Europe. Suddenly the dreaded enemy is no longer Big Brother; it is the guy next door.

“Socialism had taboos, and homosexuality was one of them. You couldn’t hate something that officially didn’t exist,” said Balazs Palfi, a Hungarian radio talk show host who is open about his homosexuality.

“But since the change in the system, a spontaneous hatred has come into being,” he said. “When homosexuality became a public issue, the hatred came out from under the carpet too.”

Being homosexual under communism was not easy. In Romania, getting caught in a homosexual act could carry a death sentence; in Russia, known homosexuals were sometimes given lobotomies. Authorities across the former Soviet Bloc would ruin political dissidents by charging them with the dreaded crime of Sodom. Secret police compiled “pink lists” of known and suspected gays.

“In Communist ideology, the male’s biological function was to serve the state by reproducing,” said a 36-year-old Ukrainian government worker attending a recent gay conference in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. “And homosexuals don’t.”

Today, same-sex couples get “married” in the Czech Republic, their photographs splashed across tabloid covers. Popular socialist “cures” for homosexuality--gender-change operations, lobotomies and long institutional stays--are out of fashion in psychiatric circles. The draft of the new Polish constitution bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Although such constitutional protections are still unusual, international gay groups say that all but three East European countries--Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Romania--have repealed laws banning homosexuality, restrictions that are still on the books in about 20 U.S. states. And steps are under way in Romania to change its laws affecting homosexuals.

From Bucharest, Romania, to St. Petersburg, Russia, there are glitzy gay bars, dating services, hot lines and nightclubs. The corner newsstand in Warsaw sells hard-core gay pornography alongside traditional religious magazines. Entertainment listings in Prague, the Czech capital, are loaded with gay hangouts.

“We stand as a living litmus test of whether democracy succeeds,” said Scott Long of the Brussels-based International Lesbian and Gay Assn. “The recent histories of emerging democracies where gay movements have begun show how defining gays’ and lesbians’ rights can be crucial to creating civil society.”

But the euphoria of going public for many East European gays has long passed; the reality of deep prejudices has set in. Everyday life for some gays is still a search for an out-of-the-way public restroom in which to conduct sexual liaisons, or the lonely, private struggle to overcome shame over their sexual identity.

“In the beginning, we planned to operate a dating service, but after some time we saw from our subscribers’ letters that even after finding friends through our service, people cannot free themselves of feelings of pain, despair,” said Alexei Vinogradov, president of a gay club in Tver, Russia.

In the Czech Republic, where attitudes under communism were among the most tolerant in the Soviet Bloc, a large gay organization, SOHO, provides everything from a monthly magazine to political lobbying. Still, founder Jiri Hromada said, most gay men and lesbians prefer to remain in the shadows.

More than 40 years of totalitarianism produced strange bedfellows. Since almost everyone was oppressed, there was no use differentiating among victims. Gays were not liked, but no one paid much attention. They kept to themselves, as did most homophobes.

“We had so many other enemies, we didn’t need the homosexuals,” said Jirina Siklov, a sociologist at Charles University in Prague and a specialist in gender issues.

But when freedom arrived, gay men and lesbians stopped keeping to themselves. Now they hold festivals, run counseling centers and appear before parliamentary committees. They distribute literature to schools and demand equal rights and partnership laws--and, in some cases, have begun talking about the freedom to adopt children.

In March, Hungary’s constitutional court struck down a law barring homosexuals from entering into common-law marriages, the closest any East European country has come to extending such rights to gays.

“If you continue to be silent, you will be considered deviants. We don’t regard ourselves as deviants,” said Monika Benesova, who is among a generation of newly outspoken gay men and lesbians.

Benesova said that although lesbianism is less of a social taboo and lesbians have generally faced less public discrimination than gay men, lesbians still often feel victimized.

Benesova “married” her partner of six months in a traditional ceremony last fall at the old Prague Town Hall. Although the union is not legally recognized, it created a sensation. Benesova and her partner became celebrities.

Benesova’s family, however, stayed away.

“It hurt that they didn’t come,” said Benesova, 30. “But it was still too new for them.”

The adjustment has been difficult for others as well:

* In Budapest, the Homeros group has moved its office four times--finally settling in Romsauer’s living room--because of harassment from neighbors and landlords.

* In Bucharest, a gay cultural festival was closed last year by the district mayor, who dispatched police with dogs to enforce his order.

* In Kiev, the city administration banned Ukraine’s first gay pride march and display of an AIDS quilt recognizing people who succumbed to the disease. Meanwhile, a regional conference of gay men and lesbians was adjourned early after attendees were evicted from a suburban Kiev hotel. In exchange for access to the conference, the management had required signed statements from journalists pledging not to reveal the hotel’s name.

* In Tirana, Albania, three members of the country’s first gay organization were rounded up by police last fall and beaten--allegedly because the organization was considered illegal.

* In Warsaw, respondents to an opinion poll last year ranked homosexuality just behind collaboration with Communist-era secret police as grounds for disqualification from high public office.

“Three or four years ago, more than 20% of respondents said that homosexuals should be killed, 30% said they should be arrested and 40% said they should have forced medical treatment,” said Vladislav Ortanov, a gay biochemist from Moscow, citing an unpublished survey in Russia. “Now only 10% to 15% say gays should be killed. This is progress.”

With no tradition of organizing public-interest groups--gay or otherwise--inexperienced gay leaders in Eastern Europe have sometimes made the bad situation worse. Some are bickering publicly, breaking into competing splinter groups. Others have stumbled into public relations blunders.

In Poland, a pamphlet about homosexuality intended for teen-age boys was adapted by a Warsaw gay group from a German publication. But no one bothered to soften its tone to reflect more conservative sexual attitudes in Poland. What passed as educational material in Germany was deemed near-pornography in Poland.

“Beginnings are always difficult. Don’t lose your spirit. Being gay is beautiful. Sex gives you pleasure. Enjoy it. Be happy. And above all, have courage,” advises the brochure, titled “Boys in Love” and printed with a grant from the Council of Europe.

The glossy handout, complete with pictures of boys embracing in bed, gives practical advice about using creams and condoms.

“A lot of people think that freedom means that everything is allowed, that you can also impose certain things on other people,” said Tomasz Sakiewicz, a child psychologist who writes for Gazeta Polska, a right-wing Polish newspaper that was flooded with complaints about the brochure.

“Irrespective of all the discussion going on whether it is good or bad that there are homosexuals, inducing someone at a very early age is really harmful to both the moral and emotional life of the child.”

Romsauer, the Budapest psychiatrist, said Eastern Europe’s gay men and lesbians are beginning to understand that success comes slowly--with many such pitfalls--and at a high price.

These days, success simply means having the freedom to live openly as a homosexual, he said. The price is accepting the emotional burden of such openness, the same trade-off that Western gay men and lesbians have anguished over for years. Today, one-third of Romsauer’s therapy clients are gay men overwhelmed by their predicament.

“I tell them that we are like a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly,” he said. “Right now society can only see how ugly the caterpillar is. It has no idea how beautiful the butterfly will be.”

The men mingling impatiently in Romsauer’s foyer have grown tired waiting for the butterfly. For the time being, at least, they’ve decided that life is safest in a cocoon.

Murphy was recently on assignment in Budapest. Times special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev contributed to this report.