VLADIMÍR NEZDAŘIL
They are queer, and they are here to keep on making art. The systematic political attacks on LGBTQ+ people in Poland, Slovakia and other countries of the post East-bloc region bring out the educational and activistic context of its queer art. The artist’s identity inevitably influences their work, becoming means of protection from inequality.
“The devil is hiding in these symbols,” Mateusz was told in a pamphlet with pictures of rainbows, unicorns, Hello Kitty and others in one of his religion classes in high school. “When you’re 15 or 17, you’re just trying to figure out who you are…that’s already hard enough,” he elaborates.
It is a warm late-spring Saturday, and the city of Warsaw is preparing for an upcoming anti-government protest. As workers continue closing up some of the main streets leading to the presidential palace, Mateusz Jaskot, a queer photographer and the creator of DUMA – a Polish queer magazine, is on the way to a park next to the botanical gardens.
“There used to be like a rainbow installation on this roundabout, but it burned down multiple times,” explains Mateusz and his friend Jakub while passing their favourite brunch place.
Why should I feel bad?
In high school, the religion teacher preached a homophobic rhetoric and told Mateusz he couldn’t continue practicing martial arts if he wanted to remain catholic. “Why should I feel bad, if these things were what made me happy? These classes were just trying to make you feel like you’re wrong, like a sinner. I told my parents and stopped going to them.” Nearly 93% of Poles belonged to the Catholic Church in 2021. Gay marriage nor civil unions are legal in the country as of today.
Condescending prayers and preaching were not the only things that made young Mateusz feel uncomfortable. He describes how his professors tolerated racist remarks toward his Vietnamese friend and never intervened when his classmates bullied a person with learning disabilities with utmost cruelty.
“In this country, people try to find differences and make themselves feel better through hate,” thinks Mateusz.
Poland’s current government is dominated by the PiS party, characterised by its open anti LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Together with recent events at Pride parades around Poland, their reign mirrors the critical situation of LGBTQ+ in the country. A woman was shot in the head with a BB gun in Olsztyn after participating in an equality march this May. In 2021, a group of Polish nationalists hunted down people after the Lodz parade, dragged one of the participants on the ground and hit his head into a wall. And in 2019 in Bialystok, participants were spat on, beaten and attacked with flares, glass bottles and stones, as Wyborcza.pl reported. According to ILGA-Europe, Poland ranked as the worst country for LGBTQ+ rights in the EU.
Hope for change
Things changed for the better when Mateusz enrolled into a high school with an art class, where he started to feel more free. He was out at that point, both to his classmates and his family.
“I was lucky. When my boyfriend at the time told his family we were dating, they forbade us from sleeping in the same room and told him he should start taking medicine to become straight. So, we ran away together for two weeks,” he recounts.
While Mateusz felt better, his identity and outspoken presence still made some angry. “A group of boys posted a video where they were pissing on posters of my face that were meant for the school-presidential campaign,” he says.
As the school president, he discovered the power of standing up for others, when managing to remove a sex education teacher who was offering students help with fixing their “bad homosexual feelings” if they were to occur.
Fighting for equal rights
Eventually, Mateusz joined the organizational team of Warsaw Pride. “When it started in Poland in the early two-thousands, it was still a big deal to have public representation of gay and lesbian people. It’s only recently that the public is more accepting of other forms of queerness, of trans and nonbinary people too,” he thinks.
“It was dangerous at the time, people going to the streets to fight for their rights. The contra protests were massive, so many were hurt. People were throwing bricks at the parade.” The situation has only calmed down in recent years as some parades were held peacefully.
From Pride to DUMA
The idea behind DUMA (pride in Polish) , the queer magazine Mateusz created, was to show unity in Polish queer communities during the pandemic in 2020. Its first edition summarized major historical Pride moments during the twenty years of its existence. “We’re trying to educate people about queer topics. So that people could maybe understand a little more,” explained Mateusz.
The DUMA magazine covers a range of issues in Poland, from the position of people of colour, to trans issues or the position of women in society. “We’re talking and writing about the young queer movement, but also old people as well, because our current government is weaponizing them. So, we want to show that older people also want to live, to experience.”
Mateusz talks about his friend, an 84-year-old polish drag queen Lulla La Polaca who witnessed World War II as well as the end of communism in the country. Lulla is the star of Polish director and sex educator Bogna Kowalczyk’s documentary Boylesque, in which they navigate life, sex and love.
“Those are exactly the people we want to show to the world. To share this joy with everyone,” says Mateusz.
The Cowboy and the West
“A few months ago, I understood something about my work, about my photography,” he explains as he leans back toward the sun. Mateusz always wanted to document queer people in Poland.
For two years, he has been photographing people in his Dirty Cowboy series. “It started as my idea, my fantasy of gay people in the West. My interpretation of the gay cliché cowboy.”
His early work referenced Tom of Finland and other masculine and body image-oriented artwork of the past century. “Then I realized that it’s a bit of an illusion, these body-building boys who looked so erotic in front of the camera.”
He started questioning his early images and invited people with other body types to his shoots, ones that directly contradicted the stereotypical, muscular, manly image. This process resulted in questioning of the Western Cowboy image altogether, so recently Mateusz started reimagining the series with Polish signature relics – like putting the model in a typical Polish soccer fan hat, which resembles the one of a cowboy.
New way of life
The “Western” theme, the dream or illusion of it. But also disillusion and a fascination with the (un)attainability seems to be a reoccurring theme, specifically in artwork by men for men. In the purely gay subculture this copies the introduction and import of western gay lifestyle to the former East bloc.
Some of Jakub’s and Mateusz’s friends described the boom of cruising bars, gay saunas and the trendiness of polyamorous or open relationships in Poland – a characteristic of the gay lifestyle which has been present in the West for years now.
Nostalgia for the unlived
While in the gay sector of queer art the fascination with western nostalgia can generally appear quite sexualized and ever so present, it spills over into the entirety of the spectrum. The motive of a cowboy, a lonesome solitaire, a vagabond, a rebel is historically relatable for queer people with its symbolism in queer cinema.
Today, it also appears in some of the film works by multidisciplinary nonbinary Czech artist – Ezra Šimek. In their work, the trans cowboy embarks on an adventurous journey of self-realization and transition. The Jindrich Chalupecky Award laureate points out the importance of cowboy roleplay and the idolisation of the theme within the trans community.
Dreaming in Detva
Nostalgia, loneliness, the melancholy of a small town and a sense of isolation are elements captured in the lyrics of a number of alternative American singers like Lana del Rey or Ethel Cain. In a Slovak town so distant geographically to rural Alabama, where Cain drew her musical inspiration from, the meaning behind the lyrics of her song Teenager felt intensely close to home for Vojtech Klinec.
“Gimme 3 minutes, I’m listening to I really like you by Carly Rae Jepsen,” texts Vojtech Klinec — to his fans now known as Vojtik. He appears on the screen, smiling shyly. “Today I graduated from Slovak and History,” says the nineteen-year-old.
At first sight, it could seem as a completely generic call with a high school senior. But in Vojtik’s case, there might be much more on his mind, as the release of his song and homemade videoclip caught the attention of the Czech and Slovak public and media just a few days before his exams.
“For my blood and my rainbow heart,” echoes the autotuned voice of the young student of acting and singer in the video that quickly became viral.
A Tesco, a miniskirt, and a soccer field
Vojtik comes from Detva, a Slovak town of roughly fifteen thousand citizens. The song Detviansky sen (The Detva Dream) is filled with emotions and experiences Vojtik went through growing up as a queer and Roma person in a small, isolated community. The videoclip shifts from the singer in a miniskirt and a modified soccer dress back to a Tesco sign, only to reroll back to Vojtik provocatively covering himself up with a Slovak flag.
“I’ll always be sitting in the back desk,” “I lay, screaming, crying” or “My boy doesn’t want me, he’s already shouting on guard” (a fascist greeting adopted by the Slovak neonazi youth, author’s note) are just some of the other verses of the song praised by critics for its authenticity.
Sudden visibility
“People are stopping me now and want to take pictures, which is strange,” says Vojtik, who is planning to create his full first album now. “I don’t even have my streaming platforms yet, we’ll see in what form the album will be,” he adds.
But so far, his life hasn’t changed drastically. “I wake up at four in the morning, go to school, come back home at seven and go to sleep. Normally it’s about two, two and a half hours to get to school,” he explains.
The exposure he received recently enabled him to have his first concert as Vojtik, but Klinec is an experienced performer, stepping in front of audiences ever since he was little. “I’m not a skilled person. I think I was made to do this because I don’t know what else I’d do,” he says humbly.
Singing out what he feels
“I’ve always shown my identity in my work. But this time I think it was more general and more people could really identify themselves with it” says Vojtik about the very direct message encrypted into his song. “I always write for myself, for my friends,” he says.
“Everything kind of just happened in the moment, all of it. It was bottling up for years in me, these feelings – but the attack on trans rights in Slovakia was the last drop. Then I just wrote everything in one day,” he explains.
Thickening political climate
In Slovakia, several drafts of laws limiting or directly endangering trans people were introduced recently, only five months after the domestic terrorist attack in front of an LGBTQ+ bar Tepláreň in the Slovak capital, in which a nineteen-year-old shooter murdered two people and wounded another. While LGBTQ+ people in the region have been requesting better protection, their rights and existence are still the target of populist and conservative political attacks.
“My friends knew the victims of the attack on Tepláreň really well. It was quite emotional for me. It’s still surreal,” says Klinec, who realizes the unplanned activistic undertone of his song which has been deemed the hymn of Czechoslovak outsiders by music critics.
Vojtik describes that growing up queer and Roma felt strange.
“Elementary school was hell. That’s all I want to say,” he laughs. The lack of friends in his surroundings and his introverted nature were some of the factors behind the feeling.“I definitely have found a lot of ease on the internet, some forums and Tumblr. And I am more of a stay at home – homey person so, that was my safe space.”
While there were queer people around him, he describes a certain disconnect, mostly because of the big age gap between him and them. The nineteen-year-olds grandmother is a Roma activist, who also led a musical group.
Supported at home
“I always kept thinking I don’t want to be a part of grandmas music world. But look at me – I am now. She gave me a lot of strength. And my parents always kind of knew [that I am gay]. There were moments when they got scared – but it was always out of love. They knew that people could hurt me, so they told me to be careful,” he says about his family.
Klinec’s musical style was influenced by his heritage, Slovak and Roma folklore but also hyper pop and modern Slovak and international artists. He balances between genres, but what really stuck with the critics who reviewed his breakthrough song was the honesty of it.
The struggle for visibility
The personal experience, identities and struggles naturally project into the works of queer artists as their worlds are shaped by it. Be it the queercoding hidden in some of the pre-revolution works, the documentarian nature of the photographs of queer nightlife in communist Prague captured by Libuše Jarcovjáková or the continuations of restoring the lost histories of queerness in the former East-bloc done by Polish artist Karol Radziszewski and the Queer Archives Institute –all of their art is characterized by expressing and defending, glorifying or mystifying one’s identity.
In times in which the freedom and safety of queer people is in danger, the very existence of queer art can become means of defence or visibility, an activistic manifesto.
Unplanned activism
“Because now people made my identity into something political, it will always be. All of the lyrics I write, everything I sing about is about me. I will never hide. I will not pretend I’m a white straight boy playing the guitar. No, I’m Roma, I am queer. And I’m unapologetic about it,” concludes Vojtik.
A few days ago, he called out the Slovak media-outlet refresher.sk for diminishing his presence at a music festival only to the words a “queer Roma” — pointing out the importance of knowing the difference of embracing and exploiting people’s identities or heritage. Refresher.sk has not commented on the situation as of now.
“Because now people made my identity into something political, it will always be. All of the lyrics I write, everything I sing about is about me. I will never hide. I will not pretend I’m a white straight boy playing the guitar. No, I’m Roma, I am queer. And I’m unapologetic about it.”
The never ending fight
“I’m not sure if I want to stay in Poland. I don’t know if there is a future for me here,” says Mateusz back in Warsaw. “I’d really like to have a husband one day. So that we can share a flat, a bank account,” he gets dreamy for a moment.
And while Mateusz claims he feels safe in Poland, he does point out that some of his friends were arrested after participating in the Rainbow Disco flash mob protesting Polish president Andrzej Duda signing a discriminatory law targeting LGBTQ+ people two years ago.
“I left when we learned the police is coming. The people who were arrested were showing signs of dehydration, they were not allowed to use the bathroom and were insulted by the police verbally.”
The most well-known case from the incident is the arrest and pretrial detention of nonbinary activist Margot Szutowicz, which was widely medialized and criticized by groups like the Human Rights Watch, the Council of Europe’s SOGI Unit and others.
Protesting for change
On Sunday, 4th of June, the entire city of Warsaw freezes in motion. The streets are filled to the brim, the traffic is paralysed, people do not fit in the cars of the metro anymore. Thousands of Polish people are coming to the capitol to protest the reign of the current government. People are chanting and slowly begin to march toward the presidential palace.
While the organisers report around half a million people attended, the police – experts point out its connection to political leaders – estimates only around a hundred thousand people attended.
Ambulances are coming to help the people who suffered a heatstroke. People are holding up flags – Polish, EU, but also the trans and rainbow ones. Amongst other issues, the organisers demand better rights for LGBTQ people in Poland in the speakers. It is impossible to see past the crowd.
“To jest Polska (this is Poland),” the speaker screams at the crowd. And as it finally sets into movement again, Mateusz and Jakub move with it, a Polish flag of one of the protesters gently hugging Mateusz’s back in a gust of wind.
Ignite Change, Embrace Continuity