Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines by Lukasz Szulc (review)

Lukasz Szulc believes, with some justification, that in the minds of Western gays and lesbians (and, presumably, of Westerners in general), Europe’s Eastern Bloc in the years before the fall of communism was a monolith: a drab, benighted, joyless place, untouched and untouchable by the outside world and—despite its mosaic of cultures, histories, languages, and nation-states—a uniform, undifferentiated, homogeneous, and, especially, homophobic mass of oppressed communist bodies. In his latest book, Szulc sets out to dispel these stereotypical understandings of pre-1989 life in his native Poland, as well as in the other Central and Eastern European nations under the sway of the former Soviet Union, in particular as they apply to gay men and lesbians, their personal lives, and their various forms of political engagement.

As the primary lenses through which he explores gay (and, to a much lesser degree, lesbian) life in communist Europe, Szulc uses the development, content, and social effects of two magazines published in Poland during the final decade of the Cold War, supplementing his own empirical findings with insights provided during interviews with the magazines’ founders and editors. The result is an eye-opening and unexpectedly inspiring study of not only a pair of publications but, more important, of a region of the world, and a piece of our shared history, all too often overlooked by scholars of GLBTQ studies.

Szulc’s book is divided into two main parts, each of which comprises three brief but meticulously researched chapters; there are also an introductory chapter preceding Part I and a concluding chapter following Part II. The introduction and the first main part (“Global, Eastern, and Polish Homosexuals”; as Szulc explains, he uses the word “homosexual” despite its outdatedness because “it was the most common word used for self-description” [12] in the magazines he analyzes in the book) bring the reader into the wider world of pre-1989 Eastern Bloc GLBTQ life, while in the second main part, “Transnationalism in Gay and Lesbian Magazines,” Szulc narrows his focus to those publications, their contributions to the development of gay and lesbian activism in Poland, and several broader implications for transnational flows of ideas and cultural practices.

Chapter 1 sets up the book’s framework and its mission: to identify and begin the process of dismantling “the three most persistent myths about CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] with respect to LGBT issues . . . (1) the homogeneity and (2) the essence of the region, as well as (3) the teleological narrative of the CEE’s ‘transition’ after 1989 from communism to Western ideals of capitalism, democracy, and ethics” (5). As Szulc argues, these myths are themselves based on another myth: that of the “near total isolation of CEE during the Cold War,” a myth stemming from “the dehistoricization of homosexuality in the region” (5). The opening chapter also provides the author’s rationales for focusing his study on Poland and for using magazines published in that country as the book’s framing device: as Szulc explains, Poland “has a somewhat special status in the region [as it is] often considered the leader of the bloodless overthrow of communism in Europe” (10) as well as being the European Union’s largest CEE member state; further, Szulc argues, the history of the magazines he analyzes “is inseparable from the history of homosexual activism in the country” (11).

Chapter 2 is devoted to surveying the globalization of sexuality, GLBTQ identity/ies and politics, and the global impact of HIV/AIDS—and also, briefly, to what Szulc refers to as “the forgotten Second World” (42). In this chapter, Szulc builds his case that there were in fact gay activists, histories, publications, organizations, multidirectional transnational flows, and political movements in CEE during and even before the Communist Era—and that these differed substantially from country to country. (As Szulc notes here, and not for...