Queers in State Socialism

Cruising 1970s Poland

Tomasz Basiuk, Jędrzej Burszta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000200966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Social Sciences

This short collection of essays engages with queer lives and activism in 1970s Poland, illustrating discourses about queerness and a trajectory of the struggle for rights which clearly sets itself apart, and differs from a Western-based narrative of liberation.

Contributors to this volume paint an uneven landscape of queer life in state-socialist Poland in the 1970s and early 1980s. They turn to oral history interviews and archival sources which include police files, personal letters, literature and criticism, writings by sexuality experts, and documentation of artistic practice. Unlike most of Europe, Poland did not penalize same-sex acts, although queer people were commonly treated with suspicion and vilified. But while many homosexual men and most lesbian women felt invisible and alone, some had the sense of belonging to a fledgling community. As they looked to the West, hoping for a sexual revolution that never quite arrived, they also preserved informal queer institutions dating back to the prewar years and used them to their advantage. Medical experts conversed with peers across the Iron Curtain but developed their own "socialist" methods and successfully prompted the state to recognize transgender rights, even as that state remained determined to watch and intimidate homosexual men. Literary critics, translators, and art historians began debating—and they debate still—how to read gestures defying gender and sexual norms: as an aspect of some global "gay" formation or as stemming from locally grounded queer traditions.

Emphasizing the differences of Poland's LGBT history from that of the "global" West while underscoring the existing lines of communication between queer subjects on either side of the Iron Curtain, this book will be of key interest to scholars and students in gender and sexuality studies, social history, and politics.

1
Introduction

Queers in the People’s Republic of Poland: an uneven landscape

Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta

The history of non-normative sexuality in twentieth-century Poland is both little-explored and different from that of other European countries, especially in the non-penalization of same-sex acts (see, for example, on Hungary: Kurimay and Takács 2017; on Czechoslovakia: Lišková 2018; on East Germany: McLellan 2011, 114–118; on Russia: Healey 2001; on Western Europe: Cook 2007; Herzog 2011).¹ From the late eighteenth century until 1918, Poland was under partition by its neighbouring countries, each of them imposing its criminal jurisdiction. In 1807, a small part of the former Polish territory was briefly given autonomy under Napoleon. Partly as a legacy of this interlude, in 1932 the newly independent Poland adopted a progressive penal code which did not prohibit same-sex acts. The code used a broad definition of sexual violence, which made same-sex rape a punishable offense, and it set the same age of consent for homo- and heterosexual intercourse.

This liberal law was reinstituted post-1945. Since 1932, the code penalized homosexual prostitution but not the heterosexual kind, yet the bias was removed in 1969 (Płatek 2009). With regard to statutory regulation of homosexuality, the People’s Republic of Poland was one of the most liberal countries in Europe, including in the Communist Bloc. Homosexuality was illegal in the Soviet Union, Romania, Albania, and in some parts of Yugoslavia (Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina). In countries which did not prohibit same-sex acts, harsher penalties were sometimes imposed for sex-related offences involving same-sex activity, as was the case in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, and consent was set at a higher age for same-sex acts (see Szulc 2018, 72–76 for more on the complexity of the legal status of homosexuality in the region).

After 1945, queer life in Poland continued because the mostly underground informal institutions which enabled it, such as cruising grounds and unofficial gathering places, survived the war and the geopolitical transition which followed. Public baths and certain bars and cafes were frequented by the initiated at certain times, some theatre performances drew those in the know, and private parties provided the space for social interaction and networking (Ryziński 2017). Those participating in such informal queer gatherings were not necessarily aware of other such practices or groups. Grzegorz Niziołek applies Michael Warner’s concept of counterpublics (2002) to the various queer communities functioning in this manner in the People’s Republic of Poland; rather than in terms of sexual identity, they are defined “in terms of their relation to the public sphere, within which they expose areas of affective disruption, dissatisfaction and resistance” (2016, 288).

With some quotidian queer practices continuing from the prewar years and despite the absence of penalization, Poland’s homosexuals under state socialism nonetheless suffered prejudice and discrimination in everyday life. Homosexuality was rarely spoken about in public and was often denigrated in private, including by families of origin and peers.² The Roman Catholic Church, which remained a formidable force also under Communism, restricted sexual mores, albeit without specifically focusing on homosexuality up until the 1980s (Hall 2016). Its approach meshed, in this respect, with that of the state authorities, which had no official policy on homosexuality but regarded it with suspicion. The prevailing perception was that homosexuality was antisocialist and antifamily, often associated, as in the USSR (Healey 2001), with prison culture (Szulc 2018, 98) and considered criminogenic (for an example of this sort of perception, see Giza 1970; Kopka 1985).

Homosexual men in particular were deemed both likely victims and likely perpetrators of criminal acts. As a group, they were kept under close surveillance by the state police (dubbed Citizens’ Militia) and the secret service (Fiedotow 2012, 271–272). In the wake of a martial law imposed in 1981 to suppress the ten-million strong protest movement known as Solidarity, and with the onset of HIV/AIDS, this surveillance assumed a massive scale and became openly intimidating (Szulc 2018, 106–110; Kościańska 2017, 230–237; Majewska 2018). Police activities culminated in the infamous operation “Hiacynt” (Hyacinth) begun in November 1985, in which homosexuals already known to the police were apprehended, brought into precincts, and questioned about their sexual partners, roommates, and friends. This nationwide operation was carried out over just two days (and later repeated), indicating the extent of the state’s knowledge about and determination to control those engaging in same-sex acts. Unintended by the authorities, the clampdown had the effect of spurring the fledgling gay and lesbian movement to action.

The lack of a movement prior to the 1980s was partly due to the absence of penalization, which took away a major motive for political struggle. Moreover, the People’s Republic of Poland curtailed free assembly and civic institutions. Organizations were outlawed unless licensed by the state, which had the effect of blocking official gay and lesbian activism (Szulc 2018), as was also true of other East Bloc countries (McLellan 2011; Kurimay and Takács 2017). Understandably, scholars and writers investigating the queer history of state-socialist Poland focused on the mid- to late 1980s, when the first gay magazines came on stage and early political organizing was in evidence (Fiedotow 2012; Szulc 2018; Szcześniak 2012, 2016; O’Dwyer 2018). Although some have looked at a more distant past—notably, Krzysztof Tomasik provides an exceptionally comprehensive survey of popular representations of homosexuality in the People’s Republic of Poland (2012)—fragmentation of available histories remains a problem, with relatively little said about the earlier decades (see, however, Nastulczyk and Oczko 2012 for a study of homosexuality in the Middle Ages and Modern era). Our choice has been to look at the 1970s, which we see not only as an interval neatly bracketed by a change in the ruling party’s leadership in 1970, resulting in partial relaxation of Communist rule at the start of the decade, and by the emergence of the short-lived Solidarity movement in 1980 at its end, but equally as “the long 1970s,” that is, a decade determined by earlier developments, such as the ongoing evolution of sexology in Poland (Kościańska 2014), which had a markedly positive impact on transgender rights, and a period in which the ground was laid for a more overtly political gay and lesbian movement emerging in the mid- to late 1980s and post-1989. It was a time of intensified cultural and knowledge exchanges, as the Iron Curtain temporarily became less impermeable, of diminishing anonymity in same-sex contacts, and of a gradual lifting of the silence veiling homosexuality. For these reasons, Magda Szcześniak has referred to a “proto-gay” era (Szcześniak 2016) and one of the editors has described the 1970s and early 1980 as “proto-political” (Basiuk 2019).

These positive developments were limited to urban centres, however, and were marginal even there. A number of interview partners contributing to our project have reported that they had little sense of a bigger queer community in the 1970s and 1980s, and that finding another queer person was sometimes a challenge. This was especially the case for women, who did not have informal queer spaces at their disposal, the way men did as a group, and who were often unaware of the very existence of other lesbians. Women seem to have met partners and lovers in coincidental encounters taking place in otherwise heteronormative contexts, such as the workplace. As one interview partner put it: “in the 1970s I was so lonely, I didn’t know any other lesbian, except for one, who also only knew me.”

No doubt one reason for this painful invisibility was that the Western sexual revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s had limited resonance in Poland. Despite efforts by experts, journalists, literary translators, and others who depicted the shifting sexual mores, and despite some representations being made available in the popular media, Poland did not undergo a comparable social and cultural change. A very marginal hippie movement was all but inconsequential, while the Polish 1968 student revolt had an entirely different trajectory than in France or West Germany (Garsztecki 2008, 184). It is altogether unsurprising that Poland is mentioned only in the narrow context of access to abortion and of condom use by contributors to Gert Hekma’s and Alain Giami’s Sexual Revolutions (2014) and only in the former context in Dagmar Herzog’s study of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe (2011).

Like any history of sexuality, this collection faces the challenge of shifting terminologies. Contributors use a range of terms to render social and epistemological contexts and to build bridges between the past and the present, as well as between the Polish and the English language. Expressions common nowadays, such as osoba homoseksualna (a homosexual person), osoba nieheteronormatywna (a non-heteronormative person), transpłciowość (transgender), and homoseksualność, rather than homoseksualizm (both words refer to homosexuality but the latter is openly medicalizing, similar to the difference between “homosexualism” and “homosexuality”), are recent coinages. In the 1970s, the word homoseksualista (a homosexual) was used but many chose euphemisms or camp terms, such as feminine endings applied to male persons, to refer to themselves and others (Burszta 2019; Nowak 2019). A common, offensive term for a homosexual man was pedał (a near-homonym of the French pédé but literally meaning “pedal”), while the nominally neutral lesbijka (lesbian) doubled as a slur. The terms transseksualista (transsexual) and transwestyta (transvestite) functioned as near-synonyms. The word gej (gay) was introduced in the 1980s and became common in the 1990s, popularized by gay and lesbian activists (see Szulc 2012, 73–79).

Contributors to this volume occasionally use “gay” with reference to the 1970s in a consciously anachronistic way, analogous to such word choice made, for example, by historian John Boswell (1980). (Of course, in the 1970s, the word gay did function in English with the meaning used here; for more on the entangled chronologies of queer discourses in Central and Eastern Europe see Kulpa and Mizielińska 2016.) The word “queer”—sometimes translated into the Polish as odmieniec, meaning one who is different or transformed (Basiuk 2000)—is used here polysemically. It is an umbrella term for a wide range of gender and sexual nonconformity, a partly archaic and/or offensive term for a male homosexual (e.g. Paweł Lipszyc translated William Burrough’s Queer as Pedał), and, crucially, the term used by Douglas Crimp in his “queer before gay” project (the original title of Crimp’s study of Andy Warhol’s films, published as Our Kind of Movies, 2012; see also Danbolt 2008). This last usage, “queer before gay,” most closely approximates our project and corresponds to the meaning of “queer” in the title of the present volume. This sense of “queer” is also implied in the subtitle of the international study from which our volume stems, “Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures.” The word pikieta (cruising grounds), which continues to be used and which derives from the picket line, thus implying dissent, participates in something like the “queer before gay” paradigm suggested by Crimp.

Those of us “cruising” the 1970s in Poland faced the particular challenge posed by the relative dearth of archival material and its physical dissipation, as well as the absence of a comprehensive history of homosexuality and transgenderism in Poland, including in the postwar years. The first kind of challenge required us to scout for archival material and conduct more than 40 oral history interviews. Contributors to this volume rely on various archives, including court documents, state police papers, expert discourses on sexuality, literary criticism, epistolography, visual arts, and oral history interviews. The second challenge meant we had to begin in medias res, without an authoritative historical account on which to build our argument. While a number of excellent studies have been produced to date, many of them already mentioned, the historical landscape they jointly paint remains fragmented. Researching the queer past of state-socialist Poland has therefore had the distinct flavour of “cruising” in the sense given this term by José Esteban Muñoz (2009): we were finding—and are offering here—glimpses of a queer utopia, or perhaps, queer heterotopia (Foucault 1986). Unexpected and often surprising, they inevitably complicate and partly bely the era’s largely dystopian image.

Part I, “Socialities a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: queers in the People’s Republic of Poland: an uneven landscape
• PART I Socialities and their literary models
• PART II Expert discourses
• PART III Queer intelligibility and unintelligibility
• Index