FROM IAN BIRRELL
MICHAL is a mild-mannered 19-year-old. He describes himself as ‘a bit of a nerd’, plans a career making videos and came out as gay before leaving school last year. ‘I did not make a big deal of it and tell everyone, but just started incorporating talk about my boyfriend in conversations,’ he told me as we sat in the sun. His parents were supportive and his classmates seemed unbothered. Yet Michal lives in a small market town in southern Poland that has declared itself an ‘LGBT-free zone’, sparking a furore that has sent shockwaves throughout Europe and even beyond.
Tuchow, a town of 6,500 people that lies 105km east of Krakow, is among a wave of Polish communities making such declarations after the country’s ruling right-wing party ramped up rhetoric against ‘the cult of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] ideology’.
Politicians, priests and popular newspapers have called on people to stand firm against ‘a rainbow plague’ invading from abroad, even comparing its threat to the Communists and Nazis that so devastated their country last century.
Yet as Michal says: ‘I did not choose to be gay. But the ruling party chose to make an enemy of people like me, which is very sad.’
The LGBT-free zone decision, taken by a small commune in the conservative rural heartlands of an overwhelmingly Catholic country, strikes at the very principles of the EU – of which Poland has been a member since 2004 – which was founded on shared values of democracy, freedom and tolerance. One prominent politician called it a ‘chilling echo from previous times in a town barely 140km from Auschwitz’.
‘I learned in history books about Jew-free schools and shops and now they talk of LGBT-free towns,’ said Robert Biedron, a gay MEP from the liberal Left. ‘It reminds us of terrible times in the past.’
In a highly symbolic move, Tuchow and five other towns making similar anti-gay declarations had funding requests for twinning projects rejected last month by Brussels. One horrified French commune has also suspended ties after 25 years. But fears remain that Brussels is avoiding taking tougher action against both Poland and Hungary, despite seeing the two countries’ hardline populist leaders chip away at some core values of democracy such as freedom of the press, human rights and judicial independence.
‘Europe must defend its values,’ said Biedron. ‘But the trouble is our government is Eurosceptic so it will say the horrid West will not protect our children in Poland.’
This issue flared up last year after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centrist mayor of Warsaw, signed a landmark pledge of support for LGBT citizens that included anti-discrimination lessons in schools.
With elections looming, this was seized upon by the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party in conjunction with the Catholic Church. They claimed it was a threat to family values, claiming that it would sexualise children and ‘propagate paedophilia’.
As the issue found traction with conservative voters, the rhetoric became cruder with ‘imported LGBT ideology’ compared with the social engineering of Nazis and Communists.
Marek Jedraszewski, archbishop of Krakow, even used last year’s 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising that liberated the capital from the Nazis to denounce ‘a rainbow plague… born of the same neoMarxist spirit’ as Bolshevism ‘that wants to control our souls, our hearts and minds’.
Then the Law and Justice party made this subject a central issue in last month’s presidential election, with its incumbent candidate Andrzej Duda claiming gay ‘ideology’ was more destructive than Communism and being ‘smuggled’ into schools.
He beat Trzaskowski by a small margin.
Meanwhile, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party leader who really runs Poland, calls homosexuality ‘a threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence and thus to the Polish state’. Others claim Poland – which decriminalised homosexuality almost a century ago – is trying to protect family values against ‘alien’ concepts such as gay marriage and gender fluidity.
‘It’s not fashionable to talk about Christian and traditional values but people see them as being disrupted in a way that is as alien to their country as Communism,’ said one sympathetic analyst, adding: ‘This is not to say that we are antihomosexuals.’
Such thoughts were echoed by party officials in Tuchow. ‘I don’t think homosexuals are worse than other people,’ said Grzegorz Niemiec, 32, a city councillor. ‘But the Polish model of family, with men and women being married, is a traditional one we should defend.’
He said ‘LGBT-free zones’ were designed to protect children in schools, claiming there was international pressure to enforce sex education and inflict gender choice on pupils as young as four.
One man in the town who firmly agrees with the policy is Henryk Trebaczkiewicz, 75. He said: ‘Communism was a plague and now we have the LGBT plague. This ideology is a danger not just to Poland but the whole world.’
The former factory worker, who I found reading in a rosary garden funded by the EU, said Brussels had made a mistake by cutting some of the town’s funding. His solution? ‘We should treat these people medically to help them become heterosexual.’
It was depressing to hear talk of homosexuality as a disease, especially in a state where more than two-thirds of LGBT citizens say they have suffered hate attacks. ‘We are witnessing the manifestation of ignorance,’ said one activist.
The mother of a gay man who killed himself in June warned a newspaper that there would be more victims if political leaders did not desist from hate-filled rhetoric. ‘Such people destroyed my son – day by day and step by step,’ said Katarzyna Koch. ‘Every day I ask myself: What is this country where you have to die to be happy?’
Earlier this year Poland was branded the worst country in the EU for LGBT people by a Brussels-based advocacy group. A gay pride march in the city of Bialystok last summer ended in violent clashes after it was attacked and stoned by opponents.
One Krakow teacher said she could not tell colleagues she was lesbian for fear of being sacked – yet since her partner had come out as transgender, she could start talking about having a boyfriend.
Most people I met in Tuchow opposed the town’s anti-gay declaration. ‘I am ashamed,’ said Magdalena Pawlak, a schoolteacher sitting near the town hall with her daughter Amelia, nine.
‘I don’t know why this hatred has to be spread so much.’
Taxi driver Piotr Wojtanowski said almost all his friends were opposed to the stance. ‘There is so much scaremongering about adoption and sexualisation of children. I know a lesbian couple living here illegally with children and they seem fine.’
He said he had stopped going to church because of anti-gay propaganda from the pulpit.
‘When an archbishop compares LGBT ideology to a plague, that is unacceptable. I’m religious but was taught to love my neighbours, not hate them.’ Equality campaigners argue that the Catholic Church’s stridency on the issue is a cynical attempt to cover up its culpability in failing to tackle appalling cases of paedophilia by priests.
Certainly the eruption of the furore last year coincided with a damning TV documentary that sparked uproar in Poland by exposing how church leaders had for decades buried complaints of abuse and disgracefully moved accused priests to new parishes.
Yet it was also triggered after Trzaskowski – the first Warsaw mayor to attend the LGBT equality parade in this culturally conservative country – entered the presidential race as the candidate for the centrist Civic Platform party and
The Polish model of a married man and woman is one to defend