By the very nature of our Fellowship program, we as fellows are constantly called to step out of our comfort zone when it comes to intellectual and intercultural discussion and experience. Wednesday June 15 was no exception to this rule. Our discussion topic for that day revolved around the experiences of the LGBTQ community in Poland. Tackling the issue of LGBTQ rights in this country required an understanding of both past and current context. Looking at the issue through American lenses, I was blind to the hardships that this group of people currently face in light of the power and the presence of the Roman Catholic Church in Polish political society. Contrary to the current situation in the United States, where there is a discernible absence of an unquestionably dominant religion and the problems faced by this community revolve around the paradigms of various divisions in the American population, the situation in Poland is markedly different. Here, where law and politics are so tightly entwined with the ever-present, ever-dominant Catholic religion, the LGBTQ community faces a slightly similar yet arguably even more complex set of issues.
On June 15 we had the privilege to hear from Ewa Tomaszewicz, an openly-declared member of the Polish lesbian community. Of particular note were her views on the internal divisions within the LGBTQ community as well as her insights regarding being a “double minority” in that she is both a woman and a lesbian, and as such she faces discrimination on two fronts. She answered our questions to that extent with an interesting mix of evident discontent combined with a reluctant acceptance of the current state of affairs here in Poland.
Ms. Tomaszewicz also discussed her campaign for legislation permitting civil unions for homosexual couples despite her open acknowledgement of the fact that she would prefer to be fighting for legalized marriages; it was made evident that, in her opinion, change in Poland will be slow to come. Her comment regarding the recent LGBTQ Pride Parade, which took place throughout the streets of Warsaw on June 11, was that the number of people who partook in the parade (including a number of our HIA Poland Summer Fellows) was not nearly enough, especially when compared with the parades in neighboring European countries where participants numbered in the tens of thousands.
As always, following our speaker’s lecture and presentation, we were encouraged to engage in a dialogue of questions and answers, critiques and comments. I found that our group of habitually chatty and eager-to-speak students had become slightly hesitant when it came to the questions posed and even the phrasing and framing of those same questions. I might even be so bold as to say that the aforementioned dialogue was slightly strained with something akin to a sense of the ‘forbidden’, that the air was laced with the taste of tension (possibly because this important issue seems to be such a taboo subject here in outwardly Catholic Poland). Regardless, after a few initial moments of icy apprehension, our group of intelligent and forward-thinking students was able to grapple with the fact that the best way to break down barriers like these is indeed through the very dialogue which at first felt so uncomfortable. It became evident that the best and perhaps the only way to break awkward silences like these is to be brave enough to step out of one’s comfort zone and to face these issues head-on through constructive dialogue and intellectual discourse. I was quite proud of our group that day and quite proud of myself for learning to embrace a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing the world and all its people.
