The Unbearable Lightness of Pre-1989 Eastern European Periodicals

Eastern Europe, that liminal land straddling the first and third worlds, is not a place anyone would associate with LGBT rights, before or after 1989. Growing up in Bulgaria, I never met anyone who openly self-identified as gay or lesbian. Apparently, however, the silence was less than complete in places like Poland and Hungary, the first countries in the Eastern Bloc with zines that became gathering spaces for gay men and a handful of women.

This argument is the premise of Lukasz Szulc's book Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland. Although the volume was inspired by Szulc's discovery of the existence of pre-1989 gay and lesbian zines, only the second half of the book offers a qualitative content analysis and interviews with the editors of two such periodicals. Both began as one-man projects—typewritten, photocopied, and mailed to contacts or distributed at events. The first was the somewhat-restrained, in both content and tone, Byuletin (later renamed Etap), published by a Polish citizen in Vienna from 1983 to 1987, which served as the impetus for the creation of the Wrocław-based group Etap. The more libertine Gdańsk-based Filo, published from 1986 to 1990, added a lesbian section in later years and became the virtual gathering space of another eponymous community.

The entire first part of the book details the history of Central and Eastern Europe's homosexuals under communism. (Fully aware of the medical connotations of the term "homosexual," Szulc chooses to use it as the agreed-on signifier of gay and lesbian identities in the analyzed periodicals.) Although the book is not about magazines per se, the two spotlighted publications happen to offer the evidence Szulc is looking for. His goal is to dispel the simplistic narrative that gay and lesbian activists in the region were, and are, "behind" their Western counterparts and that they were completely isolated from the outside world until 1989. He points out that his native Poland decriminalized same-sex acts in 1932, before most sexually libertine Scandinavian countries, and that many in the Eastern Bloc had access to sexuality-themed books, films, and magazines.

The most thought-provoking part of the book, at least for me as a magazine scholar, is the notion of "information activism." We are used to thinking of lifestyle magazines as dispensers of heteronormative advice—about anything from pleasing your man to walking off some pesky pounds to baking the cake of the century to making your girlfriend agree to anal. But Szulc makes the argument that in the context of post-Communist Poland, dispensing information about how to assert one's legal rights, how to come out to friends and family, where to meet other homosexuals, how to practice safe sex, where to find quality condoms, what to use in lieu of water-based lubricants, and even "how to remove sperm stains from clothes" (202) constituted nothing short of vital service to an oppressed and invisible community. It therefore represented a type of "internal activism … directed at homosexuals themselves" (206–7). Some of the information was not intended to be practical—for example, covering the activities of the gay liberation movement in the United States or commemorating gay people who died in Nazi concentration camps—but it nonetheless supported individual processes of self-awareness and self-acceptance, as well as group processes of establishing communities and seeking visibility and social tolerance.

Some of the fascinating tidbits in the book concern the practices that the pre-1989 alternative press in Communist Europe used to evade censorship. In Poland at least, anything self-published with a circulation of less than one hundred copies was not of interest to the state censors. For this reason, one of the analyzed periodicals (Filo) routinely listed its circulation at one hundred copies, even though some issues may have been copied up to one thousand times.

Another interesting line of information deals with the so-called "third-circulation" tier of publication...