The problem with European men...

...is that they all look gay. (Remember that early Internet game, Gay or Eurotrash?) The reason Polish men look gay is basically that they wear clothes that fit and they look like they spent at least a few seconds paying attention to their hair before going out in public. They may even have used styling products. "Metrosexuals" aside (and I love 'em), I think I often forget how easy most American straight men make things for us fags.

The actual gay scene in Poland, however, is not so impressive. In certain respects, it's like going back in time to pre-Stonewall American cities:

(1) You really have to look for it. That's why little guidebooks to the gay locales of various cities, Bob Damron's the most famous and successful one, were so important to gay Americans in the 1960s. Today, the Internet serves the same function, in that various people have assembled English-language lists of gay bars and cafes that I have consulted. Gay stuff just isn't listed in the tourist information, with the exception of one tourist booklet I picked up in Warsaw in which a couple of gay venues had placed advertisements.

(2) The club I went to, at least, had an unobtrusive entrance and no windows. It was one of the places that advertised in the Warsaw tourist rag (see #1), and was described on the net as among the biggest and most interesting places to go and even has a (Polish-language) website. However, when I got there---admittedly on a weeknight---there was nobody there. Or, rather, there was a group of five young hipsters, five guys and their female friend. And the bartender. Two of the group of five were clearly a couple and intermittently, cutely, held hands. By the time I left (after ordering a Polish beer and later a glass of white wine, which was definitely a mistake), a couple more people had shown up: another young male hipster with a female friend, and a guy who was friends with the bartender and got involved in an intense conversation with him. The place was pretty swank, actually, and the music (dance) and sound system were good, but there was nothing going on. This is perhaps the most exciting gay bar (apart from one that is apparently now filled iwth more straight hipsters than gay people) in a city of 3.5 million people. Ann Arbor does better on a weeknight.

Oh: (3) In Krakow---fittingly, the city that Pope John Paul II comes from---the first-ever pride march, last month, was met by religious protestors in just about equal numbers to the marchers. According to one young woman I talked to today, the religious-right folks regard themselves as "arch-Poles" or "super-Poles," keeping out harmful foreign influences. (It's an old story, of course: just about every society has regarded homosexuality as a foreign influence, or blames it on some neighboring group. And indeed the name of this blog references the Cold-War notion that homosexuals were, like so many others, un-American.) Even the first gay rights marches in the US, in 1970 and 1971, weren't met with this level of hostility. But Poland is far more homogeneous than the US, and it's not surprising (and it's disturbing) that homosexuality is being represented as anti-Catholic and anti-Polish.

The thing is, though, that religious-right antigay activism is at least as much a foreign influence as queerness is. Some obnoxious American Catholic antigay group has not only created a website praising a few Cracovians for heckling and throwing eggs at gay marchers last month, but also literally takes credit for "inspiring" Polish antigay activists to mail out hundreds of thousands of leaflets protesting recent efforts to create gay pride events in Poland.

I suspect, although I don't really know, that there's a generational divide in Polish attitudes toward homosexuality. Quite a few young people in Poland, at least in public places in prosperous cities like Warsaw and Cracow, are pretty devoted to being hip, and they pull it off pretty damn well. The whole country is structured by a pretty extraordinary generational divide, actually; people under 25 really don't remember much from the Communist age, and they often studied English in school, rather than the Russian that their parents had to learn.

Krakow's two Nobel laureates, Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, apparently spoke up for the gay march, and I have confidence that Western styles of "coming out of the closet" will become increasingly popular among young people. Yes, we don't have same-sex marriage in the US, but all in all I'd guess it's easier to be gay in dozens of American cities than in Poland's largest cities.

In the next couple days I'll be interested to check out Krakow's bars. One of them is even said to have a lesbian party on Wednesdays!