In 2015, the newly elected president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, immediately announced that he was against marriage equality and, when asked if he would employ gay people in his office, replied: “I can’t imagine half-naked people parading around the chancellery.” His father, Professor Jan Tadeusz Duda, has said he views homosexuality as an acquired affliction that the state should do all it can to prevent.
In his illuminating introduction to OUT: LGBTQ Poland, journalist Robert Rient provides the cultural and historical context for these kinds of views. “The concentrated contempt for non-heterosexual people in Poland,” he writes, “is the product of a medieval, patriarchal culture reinforced by the state and the powerful Catholic church, to which the vast majority of Poles belong. It is a culture where chauvinism and misogyny, and therefore homophobia and transphobia, thrive.”
And yet when the photographer Maciek Nabrdalik began to document the LGBTQ community in Poland, he was “very positive”, given the existence of pride parades, workshops and clubs in the major cities. On the surface Poland seemed to have travelled far in the 30-odd years since Operation Hyacinth in the mid-1980s, when state police raided homes, schools and workplaces to arrest people suspected of being gay. Each of the estimated 11,000 people detained were registered and then given the option of renouncing their sexuality or being forced to carry a so-called Homosexual Card.
On his travels beyond the cities, Nabrdalik’s positivity soon waned. He encountered a country in which the old prejudices had found a new voice amid the rising rightwing populism of our turbulent times. “The longer I stayed,” he recalls, “and the farther I went from the major cities, I could see the rainbow begin to fade.” The resulting book is an intriguing response to a new Poland that, beneath the surface, is much like the old Poland.
Nabrdalik’s creative response is simple and effective: stark, monochrome portraits of his subjects are paired with their personal testimonies. Inspired by passport photographs, which serve as proof of an individual’s identity and citizenship, the portraits are shaded to various degrees to reflect “how comfortable that person was when we met with revealing their sexuality to the public”.
The amount of shading alone speaks volumes, but it is the accompanying testimonies that bear witness to the depth of Poland’s enduring conservatism. All of the personal accounts here are matter-of-factly expressed, which only adds to the poignancy of each tentative journey. Often family members and friends emerge as understanding and supportive, yet the weight of living day to day as “other” in a deeply orthodox society is always apparent, sometimes painfully so. “I wonder why I am so worried about the opinions of people I don’t know – my neighbours, for example, who I pass when I walk my dog,” says one young woman, revealingly.
For all that, in 2011, Anna Grodzka became the first openly transgender member of parliament in Poland and Robert Biedroń the first openly gay member of parliament – though he has been the victim of homophobic vilification and violence on several occasions since. OUT, then, is a portrait of a deeply conservative country in which sexual difference is still viewed with suspicion and, increasingly, outright hostility. It is also an oddly hopeful book and, reading it, I could not help but think of Ireland, another Catholic, conservative country, that in 2015 became the first country to legalise gay marriage by popular vote. On this evidence, it may take some time for Poland to follow suit, but as Nabrdalik concludes: “How these individuals feel and what they are afraid of is not only about them; it is about all of us.”
• OUT: LGBTQ Poland by Maciek Nabrdalik is published by The New Press (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
