Queer Lives in Interwar Poland Offer Lessons for Today

Given interwar Poland is a model that PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski often refers to when he speaks about his party's purported restoration of the nation's pride after decades of Nazism, communism and liberalism, this historical fact might give him some pause for thought. The founding fathers of the Second Polish Republic (1918-1939) wanted it to be a modern state, rid of retrograde imperial legacies, including regressive attitudes towards sexuality.

Decriminalising homosexuality was, therefore, one of the ways in which the elites in the young Polish nation wanted to make their political project unique.

Yet by the late 1930s, the tide had turned again, with queer people beginning to face increasing persecution that culminated in them being sent to concentration camps after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939.

According to Kamil Karczewski, a historian at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, that period of interwar Polish history, when the noose began tightening around LGBT people in the 1930s, resembles what is happening in Poland today under the PiS leadership.

Karczewski is the first historian to research the lives of queer people in interwar Poland. Speaking remotely via videochat from Florence, he recounts how, when he began his work a few years back, he was constantly being told that "there are no sources" on LGBT people living on Polish lands in the early 20th century.

Needless to say, queer people were very much part of Polish history in those decades and Karczewski keeps discovering more information about them - even if not in dedicated shelves of archives labelled "LGBT". While in the past few years some literature has been published in Poland on the lives of queer artists or other intellectuals from the...