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In the Introduction the authors discuss the research project that resulted in this book (Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures) and introduce major theoretical and methodological concepts that are used to organize the collection of essays.
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This chapter examines how two forms of male sexual non-normativity – homosexuality and sexual deviance – were understood and treated in socialist Czechoslovakia. By analyzing the distinct expert and institutional responses to these phenomena, it reveals the underlying structures that determined their visibility or invisibility across different periods. Drawing on sociological approaches and extensive primary sources, the chapter analyzes how expert knowledge shaped the distinctive trajectory of sexual liberation under socialism.
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The chapter focuses on the development of expert approaches towards homosexuality in Poland. It shows that under state socialism sexologists and sex educators represented liberal attitudes towards homosexuality and educated the public about the need for tolerance to sexual non-normativity. At the same time, they developed a very specific indirect style of writing about non-normative sexuality that limited the possibility of discussing it. The chapter analyzes the legacy of this approach and places it in the context of today’s debates on sexuality and the growth of homophobic discourses in Poland.
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This article examines the surveillance and repression of homosexual men in the People's Republic of Poland from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. Based on documents from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), it explores how the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizen's Militia) and Ministry of Internal Affairs monitored this group, culminating in the 1985 Operation Hyacinth – a mass registration of homosexual men. The study highlights the sociopolitical motivations behind these actions and their unintended role in fostering early LGBTQ+ activism in Poland.
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In this article, I trace the genealogy of the Polish discourse on “otherness”/queerness as a distinct intellectual tradition. To do so, I draw on and connect two key cultural phenomena. First, I examine the interwar discussions on homosexuality in literature and society, particularly those surrounding the works of Witold Gombrowicz. Second, I consider the series of "Transgresje" ["Transgressions"] anthologies from the 1980s, edited by Maria Janion and her collaborators, with particular focus on the 1982 volume "Odmieńcy" ["Outsiders"]. I argue that these two cultural phenomena are linked by their references to Gothic aesthetics. To explore the queer implications of this connection, I juxtapose two approaches to the Gothic: that of Maria Janion and that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
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The chapter investigates and analyzes art created by four non-heteronormative visual artists: Jacek Sempoliński, Krzysztof Niemczyk, Krzysztof Jung, and Ryszard Kisiel, created in the period of the People’s Republic of Poland. Special attention is paid to the diverse ways in which the artists approached their sexuality in the art they created. Furthermore, the ways of writing about these artists’ oeuvre and its – queerphobic in some cases – understanding in Polish art history and criticism are also discussed.
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This chapter explores cruising and gay masculinities in Polish contemporary art practices which engage with the country’s communist past. I set out the landscape with a discussion of Rafał Morusiewicz’s film Uprooting Ghosts, which affectively engages with narratives of communist Poland, seeking out scattered traces of bodies, embodiment, desire, and sex, to create spaces for imagining and fostering possibilities of queerness in Poland today. By making affective and often desiring connections with an archival subject, Morusiewicz’s work offers a reimagining of sexualities in Poland beyond heteronormativity as their compulsory marker.
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The film "Another Way" (1982) was a female love drama of Hungarian production directed by Károly Makk, based on Erzsébet Galgóczi's autobiographical novel "Within the Law and Outside the Law" (1980). The film found its way into mainstream art cinema and gained international recognition in the festival circuit. This article discusses the reception of the film in the cultural press in Hungary and Poland, the latter due to the involvement of Polish actresses: Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak and Grażyna Szapołowska as the main characters. The topic of lesbian love became a theme in film journalism and one of the events that contributed to the groundbreaking changes for the Central European LGBT movement in the first half of the 1980s.
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The article aims to characterize a homosocial Polish-Bulgarian group formed by the Polish writer Wilhelm Mach on the basis of numerous letters left by its members. It is argued here that long-lasting correspondence between friends and brothers helped them exist in a highly homophobic political and social environment. Their writing practices are analyzed as paradoxical strategies of both resistance to systemic oppression and subordination to political power.
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The chapter is an excerpt from Sarah Schulman’s lecture on the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), detailing the organization’s history, strategies, and impact. Schulman recounts ACT UP’s activism against government inaction and pharmaceutical greed during the AIDS crisis, highlighting its successes in changing AIDS definitions and drug access policies. She emphasizes the crucial role of diverse voices, particularly women and people of color, within the predominantly white male organization, and contrasts ACT UP’s approach to other representations of AIDS activism, which stemmed from a unique operational strategy of direct action informed by feminist principles. The chapter also explores the creation of the ACT UP Oral History Project to document the movement’s legacy and counter inaccurate narratives.
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I argue for the need to reintroduce the category “camp” into queer studies approaches to both present-day and state-socialist Poland, including in class-focused critique. Calling on Esther Newton’s discussion of camp practices and on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative readings of camp, I provide examples drawn from oral history and epistolary sources, as well as from work by two Polish queer studies scholars who decide to leave camp out of their analyses despite that category’s apparent relevance and usefulness.
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This article examines the surprising continuities between public male-to-male sex culture in pre-Second-World-War, German-administered Breslau and its Polish successor, the city of Wrocław. Despite a practically complete population exchange after the war, male cruising occurred mostly in the same settings, which is argued to provide evidence for the fact that urban public male-to-male sex does not occur in random places, but in highly specific spatial contexts. It is possible to talk about a certain topography of cruising: one which, admittedly, is not based on absolute laws, but a set of patterns and regularities.
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The 1980s marked the rise of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the German Democratic Republic. This article discusses attempts to publicly commemorate lesbian victims of Nazi persecution at the memorial site of the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the mid-1980s by the East Berlin-based group Lesben in der Kirche. Their aim was to make lesbians and their history more visible. For the self-proclaimed anti-fascist state, commemorating the victims of Nazi persecution was central to its political identity. Making visible that there were more victims of Nazi persecution than communist resistance fighters was a way for activists to attract public attention. At the same time, it was a strategy for forming a shared collective memory as part of their identity politics, which went hand in hand with an understanding of homosexuality as a political identity.
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The chapter examines the history of gay male culture in Poland in the People’s Republic of Poland. The author argues that a distinct “queer apartment civilization” emerged in major cities like Warsaw, where private homes provided safe havens for clandestine gatherings, parties, and social interaction among homosexual men. This “civilization” served as a pre-emancipatory form of gay subculture, facilitating the formation of identity and community amidst a restrictive societal environment. The author analyzes this phenomenon by focusing on the experiences of Mariusz and Marek, two men who met in the mid-1970s and became deeply involved in Warsaw’s homosexual social scene. The text explores the diverse experiences within these private spaces, including the distinction between elite gatherings and more informal parties, highlighting the interplay of class and social stratification within the male homosexual community.
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This essay explores methodological dilemmas emerging from research on the experience of non-heterosexual women, as narrated by them in interviews. Their self-identification is the subject of reflection here: some, but not all, self-identify as lesbians. It is argued that the concept of “invisibility”, which has dominated scholarship on the topic, needs to be re-examined in light of these self-narratives and replaced with “illegibility”, a category derived from the analyzed interviews, thus responding to calls for epistemic justice. It implies that, in a given culture, not only is the representation of a given experience lacking, but that it remains unrecognized even when it is visible.
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The narrator (author?), drawing inspiration from the books of Joe Brainard ("I Remember") and Georges Perec ("Je me souviens") presents (in third-person narrative) a series of idiosyncratic reminiscences from his teens and early twenties relating to his evolving sexual orientation. The location is Poland and other countries in Europe and Asia.
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In this section we present excerpts of six oral history interviews conducted by members of the Cruising the Seventies research team.
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The paper presents different approaches of preserving valuable historical data using modern technologies. The IoT paradigm can easily be applied to the field of cultural and historical heritage. Static cultural places can greatly benefit popularity from intelligent objects, sensors, applications and services. Software architecture of an innovative tourist guide is presented.
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The creative format "Art Retreat" points to an opportunity for making effective decisions in a nature-friendly environment, regarding personal and professional development. It is oriented towards specialists from the helping professions who need internal motivation to practice their chosen profession, as well as for students seeking meaning in their studies in the field of humanities. It is recommended that the event be in contact with nature, where participants can turn to themselves and formulate clear goals.
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The text presents the author’s work on the project Life transition in the self-transforming village, articulating the theoretical context of the socioanalysis of self-inheritance with the empirical context of the Bulgarian village, through an analysis of life transitions and biographical strategies in a concrete empirical case. The first part presents the accent of institutional politics related to Bulgarian villages as well as the specific focus of the project and of the text – the local com- munity as the acting subject of practical strategies of self-inheritance. The theoretical framework of the study, namely the post-Bourdieusian socioanalysis, is succinctly presented, as well as the methodology used and the design of the research undertaken. The second part enters the subject matter itself, thematizing the main research problem – the dialectic between the transformations of the inhabited locality and the transformation of the people who inhabit it. Special attention is given to the life transitions undertaken by the analysed person and the strategies of becoming an inside dweller of the new places and positions that the person has deployed, guided by her practical sense of regularity and correctness. The last analytic step presented in this text is the outlining of the socioanalytic profile of the personal Who-identity of the analysed person by making explicit the ‘strategy of practical sense’ that is characteristic of the studied person. This time-persistent, repetitive investing structure is the foundation of a multitude of statements, decisions, actions, and has the functions of a symbolic nerve which, permeating the rather diverse biographical episodes, in fact links them together into the unity of a seemingly discordant but in fact internally consistent and coherent life trajectory.
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