The Queerest of Nations? The Sexual History of the Interwar Poland

“Who doesn’t have this desire?” – asked Nobel Laureate in literature Czesław Miłosz rhetorically, when he reflected on “a gay milieu in Warsaw” in the interwar period. Miłosz wrote these words in the 1990s in Berkeley, California with the benefit of hindsight of more than five decades. He replaced Polish terms, some of them pejorative, used by (and for) men loving men and women desiring women before 1939 with the English word “gay” (gej). One of the most prolific writers of the previous century revealed a whole hidden world and rephrased it in the Polish language with one sentence from the distance of another continent.

In 1932, newly independent Poland introduced a pioneering Penal Code that decriminalized homosexual acts. It was a time when queer men and women played an ever-greater role in the country’s public life. Queerness was visible in the press, novels, and poetry. However, apart from the groups of men frequenting cruising points and women meeting in rather closed circles of friends, unlike Berlin, Warsaw did not have a separate gay scene. Although some of these people felt that they were different from the rest, others did not attach too much meaning to homosexual acts. Separate gay and lesbian identities were only emerging, and same-sex desire was often tolerated in the mainstream culture, publications, bars and cafes.

My poster, “The Queerest of Nations?” is a historical tapestry woven from a myriad of microhistories, linguistic curiosities, as well as legal, medical, and literary sources. It will place the queer history of eastern Europe within the global history of sexuality. The poster will demonstrate that interwar Poland was a space where modern essentializing categories of sexuality competed with more fluid and ambiguous ways of experiencing and expressing one’s sexuality. In this sense, in 1932 Poland was a place of sexual revolution that headed in a new and unknown direction. When Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR were about to crash their queer communities and destroy lives of many queer men and women, Poland seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.

The visual part of the presentation will attract viewers with a collection of photographs and maps depicting newly discovered sources, the microhistories’ protagonists, and queer spaces, such as private apartments, bars, and gay cruising points. The poster will invite viewers to venture intellectually beyond the usual narratives about Europe’s West and East by giving voices to several queer subjects. Among others, it will include stories of a Ukrainian girl in love with her female teacher, two Polish male lovers hiding in a multiethnic borderland, a group of German medical experts, a Jewish male sex-worker travelling across several central European countries, and a transgender woman who chose Cracow over Berlin as a place to live.

With this poster, I would like to invite the AHA members to look at an interwar eastern European city from a new perspective and discuss with me the directions which this research could now take.