#Old gay skype archive

“But in the eight years that the liberals were in charge, nothing really happened either. “As long as Law and Justice is in power, we shouldn’t have to expect positive change,” Sulwinski says. He is the spokesman of Stonewall Grupa, a gay rights group founded in 2015 to counter the Poland of right-wing conservatives. It also doesn’t offer a registered partnership to gay couples.īut we shouldn’t have to expect any better from less conservative politicians when it comes to LGBT rights, says Matheusz Sulwinski.

Poland is still one of the few countries in the European Union that have a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The current leader of Law and Justice once defended a ban on ‘gay propaganda’ in schools and stated that homosexuals should not be teachers. THE EUROPEAN UNION AS A PROGRESSIVE BOGEYMAN Szulc says it’s a pity that Poland doesn’t look toward its own history when fighting homophobia at home, but looks instead, to the American or western past. The current public debate about gay emancipation looks a lot like the debates that we find in the gay magazines of the 80s. The history of the gay rights movement in communist Poland is all the more relevant, now that the very conservative Law and Justice Party is in power, Szulc thinks “We could learn so much from our own history. The founding of the first gay rights organization of Poland, the Warsaw Gay Movement, was a direct response to Operation Hyacinth. “There may not have been a brawl or demonstrations, like in New York, but Operation Hyacinth compelled the gay community to reflect on itself and get organized for the very first time. “’Hyacinth can be considered the Polish ‘Stonewall’’, Radziszewski says, referring to the police raid on a New York gay bar in 1969, an incident that is seen as a catalyst for the birth of the modern American gay rights movement. The unintended consequence of Operation Hyacinth, as the policy was called, was that it gave gay people in Poland more self-awareness. In reality, the men were blackmailed and forced to cooperate with the regime. Gay men were registered in a database, supposedly to prevent the spread of HIV. In 1985, Polish gay people were first confronted with outright hostile policies from the authorities. Even the term coming out was used.” Operation Hyacinth “In Filo, homosexuality was sometimes denoted with the English word gay, rather than the Polish homoseksualista.” When it came to the content of the magazines, the western influence could also clearly be seen: “The emphasis was on the visibility of gay people, there were calls to ‘fight for you rights’. Szulc was surprised at the knowledge that the isolated communist country had of western life. The long articles of Filo and Etap were alternated here and there with erotic drawings of male nudes. It was only later that the editors wrote their own stories,” according to Sculz. “ Filo used to translate and print entire articles from smuggled gay rags from France, Germany or England. Just like today, the influence of the western world on gay consciousness in Poland was big back then. This history had completely been forgotten,” Szulc says about the simple magazines called Filo and Biuletyn, which was founded in 1983 and later renamed ‘Etap’, Polish for phase. “When I found the magazines, I was in shock. For instance, they were discriminated against in housing.”Īs an academic specialized in media, Szulc dove into the history of the first Polish gay magazines. Moreover, they were faced with all kinds of obstacles. “In the 1980s, gay men were often robbed, beaten and even killed in cruise areas by groups of straight men. He thinks that when it comes to gay rights, Poland’s communist days should not be romanticized. Lukasz Sculz did research into homosexual media in communist Poland at the University of Antwerp. “Homophobia came mostly from the church.” “A lot of gay men were married, but had sex with men on the side,” Radziszewski explains. It wasn’t so much that homosexuality was accepted as it was ignored.

It gave the gay community a certain measure of freedom. Poland de-criminalized homosexuality in 1932, decades before many other European countries did. Since then, he has organized expositions on this subject around the world.

#Old gay skype archive

In 2015, Radziszewski also founded The Queer Archives Institute, an archive for queer history in Eastern Europe. The artist is the founder and publisher of DIK Fagazine, an artistic gay magazine on the former Eastern bloc, in which arty pictures of (semi-)naked men are alternated with in-depth interviews and features. “A lot of older gay men considered Poland to be a safer environment for them during the communist era than in the current day,” he says in fluent English via Skype. Karol Radziszewski worries about the position of gay people in Poland.