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No. 23 TRONDHEIM STUDIES on EAST EUROPEAN CULTURES No. 23 TRONDHEIM STUDIES ON EAST EUROPEAN CULTURES & SOCIETIES Barbara Törnquist-Plewa & Agnes Malmgren HOMOPHOBIA AND NATIONALISM IN POLAND The reactions to the march against homophobia in Cracow 2004 December 2007 Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is Professor of Eastern and Central European Studies at Lund University, Sweden, where she is also the director of the Centre for European Studies. Her publications include a large number of articles and book chapters as well as The Wheel of Polish Fortune, Myths in Polish Collective Consciousness during the First Years of Solidarity (Lund 1992) and Vitryssland - Språk och nationalism i ett kulturellt gränsland (Lund 2001). She has edited a number of books, the latest being History, Language and Society in the Borderlands of Europe. Ukraine and Belarus in Focus (2006) and Skandinavien och Polen – möten, relationer och ömsesidig påverkan (2007). Agnes Malmgren is a freelance writer, with a BA in Eastern and Central European Studies from Lund University. In 2007 she received the award of the Polish Institute in Stockholm for the best reportage about Poland. She has been coordinator of the annual festival “Culture for Tolerance” in Krakow several times and has also been involved in other kinds of gay and lesbian activism in Poland and Sweden. © 2007 Barbara Törnquist-Plewa & Agnes Malmgren and the Program on East European Cultures and Societies, a program of the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Translated by Margareta Faust. Edited by Sabrina P. Ramet. ISSN 1501-6684 Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies Editors: György Péteri and Sabrina P. Ramet Editorial Board: Trond Berge, Tanja Ellingsen, Knut Andreas Grimstad, Arne Halvorsen We encourage submissions to the Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies. Inclusion in the series will be based on anonymous review. Manuscripts are expected to be in English (exception is made for Norwegian Master’s and PhD theses) and not to exceed 150 double spaced pages in length. Postal address for submissions: Editor, Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies, Department of History, NTNU, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. For more information on PEECS and TSEECS, visit our web-site at http://www.hf.ntnu.no/peecs/home/ Homophobia and Nationalism in Poland The reactions to the march against homophobia in Cracow 2004 by Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Agnes Malmgren Lund University, Lund, Sweden Introduction In the spring of 2004, i.e., the same year that Poland joined the European Union, the organisation ‘Campaign against Homophobia’ organised a cultural festival entitled ‘Culture for tolerance’ in the Polish town of Cracow. The aim was to strengthen the position of gays and lesbians in the public sphere; to give them right to exist outside gay clubs and private homes. The culmination of the festival was a march for tolerating homosexuals.1. This march caused a tumultuous debate in the Polish press and it ended in riots as counter-demonstrators prevented the participants from reaching the castle of Wawel where the march was supposed to end. About 300 people participated in the counter-demonstration. Among them were a number of football supporters from two rival teams who on this day united against an even greater enemy. Others belonged to the ultra-nationalistic, far right-wing party Liga Polskich Rodzin (‘League of Polish Families’)2 and its youth organisation All-Polish Youth3, self- proclaimed ideological heirs to the inter-war associations with the same names, closely connected to the nationalistic Endecja party and its leader Roman Dmowski4. They formed a wall at the foot of the Wawel Hill and prevented the march from advancing. They shouted: ‘You won’t get Wawel. Deviants! Murderers!’; ‘Gays for the gas chambers’ and ‘Do away with the disease’. Stones and bottles were thrown, forcing the representatives of the Campaign to disperse. Some of the counter-demonstrators later headed for Cracow’s Main Square, where they further pursued the demonstrators and attacked a number of policemen. About twenty people were arrested in conjunction with the counter-demonstration and the violence in the Square. In the history of the Polish gay and lesbian movement this festival and the march have generally gone down as ‘the Cracow events’. These ‘Cracow events’ can be seen as the first big open confrontation between advocates of and opponents to the right of gays and lesbians to a place in the public sphere in Poland. ‘The Cracow events’ to a large extent also became a starting point for the ongoing (and recently also intensified) debate on the attitudes to gays and lesbians in Polish society. Therefore we would like to analyse the reactions to the march 1 A. GruszczyĔska ”WĞciekloĞü i wrzask”. (”The Cry and the Fury”) in Sypniewski, Z, Warkocki, B (red), Homofobia po polsku. (Homophobia Polish-style) (Warszawa:Wyd.Sic! 2004), pp. 139-149; See also http://tolerancja.gej.net/2004/) 2 Liga Polskich Rodzin (’League of Polish Families’), further abbreviated LPR. 3 See the website for MáodzieĪ Wszechpolska (All-Polish Youth) www.wszechpolacy.pl 4 For more about Dmowski’s and Endecja’s ideology see B. Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 1 in Cracow in 2004. In our view the debate on the place of homosexuals in society can be seen as a sign of the ongoing social and cultural changes in Poland. Homosexuality, and human sexuality generally, are certainly not marginal issues, since the organisation of sexual difference and biological and cultural reproduction are central in every culture. They are connected to core existential issues like life and death, but also to the organisation of the society; therefore the debate surrounding the march can be used to show the tensions in the changing Polish society. In our analysis we will argue that the march raised questions concerning Polish identity: Who gets a place in the national community and who is excluded? Which are the basic national and cultural values and who will have the power to define them? The debate can be interpreted as an expression of the conflict taking place today about the reformulation of Polish identity. This process occurs in the interplay between Polish traditional cultural values, reasserted after the end of forty years of communist rule, and the influence of liberal ideas from the West, leading to a conflict between advocates of and opponents to the modernisation of Polish culture with EU liberal democracies as models. This analysis of the debate is based on a corpus of articles in newspapers and periodicals published between 2 April 2004, when the debate on the march started, and 16 May, when it petered out after the march itself on 7 May. We are of course perfectly aware that the press is not a pure reflection of public opinion. However, in a country like Poland where the freedom of the press is constitutionally guaranteed, the press is both a forum for expression of different opinions and a channel used by political and intellectual elites to influence public opinion. Thus the debate in the press can be seen at first hand as representative of the views of the opinion-forming elites in Poland. Striving to cover as broad a spectrum of opinions as possible, we have chosen on one side major papers with various ideological sympathies such as Gazeta Wyborcza (social liberal)5 Rzeczpospolita (liberal- 6 7 conservative) Trybuna (left-wing, the former Communist party paper), Nasz Dziennik 5 The Polish daily with the largest circulation, with about 660 000 copies (http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/gwreklama/1,54941,1112654.html), according to their own information. The paper reported on the march in its Cracow supplement as good as daily, and several times in the national edition. 6 Daily with a circulation of 240 000 according to its website (http://www.rzeczpospolita.pl/rzeczpospolita.html#rwl). On economic matters the paper is liberal-oriented and on other issues more conservative as to values. However, the debating pages are open for people of different opinions; the paper has no supplement for Cracow and wrote much less on the march than Gazeta Wyborcza. 7 Daily with no Cracow supplement. Its circulation is according to its website 76 000 copies on weekdays and 120 000 at weekends (http://www.trybuna.com.pl/n_oglosz.php?id=inf_wyd). It wrote relatively little on the march and was decidedly in favour of it. 2 (nationalist, Catholic-fundamentalist),8 as well as three periodicals oriented towards specific circles: Tygodnik Powszechny (an established intellectual, liberal-Catholic weekly)9 Zadra (the only feminist periodical)10 and Inna Strona (a Cracow-based website for the gay community). Catholicism, Nationalism, Communism and the views on homosexuality Before proceeding to analyse the debate around the march in Cracow we would like to present its cultural and historical context by briefly discussing those traditions, ideologies and historical developments that have influenced the attitudes to homosexuals in Poland. Catholicism is obviously one such a factor to be mentioned. The Catholic Church’s view on homosexuals is part of this institution’s view on human sexuality in general. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church “human sexuality (…) is naturally ordered to the good of spouses and the generation and education of children”.11 Extra-marital sex is a sin. Furthermore the absolute goal of marriage as a holy and indissoluble union is to carry life further, i.e. procreation. For this reason, wilful childlessness is for example one of the few accepted reasons why the Catholic Church may annulate a marriage. In the view of the Church, sex in accordance to natural law is aimed at procreation. Preventing procreation through contraception or abortion is a sin.
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