In Warsaw’s New York: Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Queer Interventions

Abstract

In 2013, two figures in Polish public life made homophobic claims that caused a scandal on a national level. The fact that both of these figures, one from politics and the other from the professional repertory theatre, are directly and intimately connected to 1989 as a transformative political moment in Polish history should not be divorced from the significance of their statements nor from the outrage that followed their publication. The events began when Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity Movement and a key player in the Round Table Talks that led to the establishment of liberal democracy in Poland, stated that homosexuals as minorities have no right to a prominent role in politics and should not be entitled to a front-bench position in the Sejm, the Polish parliament.¹ Walesa further claimed that this injunction should be carried out in spatialised terms wherein non-heterosexual politicians should be placed on the backbenches or even outside the Sejm chamber. In short, the former President of Poland suggested no less than the implementation of a gay ghetto in the seat of the country’s main legislative body. This was soon followed by the actress Joanna Szczepkowska’s (2013) assertion that, not unlike in the Vatican, a powerful homosexual lobby (or ‘homolobby’, homoprawda) dominates the Polish theatre, an elite group who privilege fellow gay artists in casting and force heterosexual actors to publicly undress in order to attract gay audi-ences.²