Ludmiła Janion. Central Europe. Volume 15, Issue 1-2. May-November 2017.
Polish political and economic transformation from state socialism to capitalism and democracy is usually imagined as an opening to the West: the fall of the iron curtain made it possible for Poland to cast off its Soviet yoke and catch up with the West by joining the world of personal freedoms, free market and economic prosperity. This article analyses how gender variance of homosexual, male-bodied persons was inscribed in this process. Democratization enabled the Polish gay rights movement to develop, while newly established contacts with Western countries resulted in the emergence of the word ‘gay,’ soon polonized into ‘gej’, which has become the main identity category for homosexual men in Poland. Based on critical reading of the gay press from the 1990s, this article shows that in Poland ‘gay’ was constructed as more gender normative than its Western equivalent due to an easily drawn contrast with medicalized transsexuality as well as associations with Westernization, capitalism and progress that were established in the early 1990s. On the other hand, ciota, an identity which involved gender variance, was linked to state socialism and degraded, but also positioned as more authentic and noble.
Gender, Homosexuality, and Westernization
People’s Poland (1944-89) was characterized by homophobia and the closet. While contrary to many European countries homosexual acts have been decriminalized in Poland since the 1930s, they bore a strong social stigma. In Polish culture, homosexuality was linked to social deviance, especially the criminal underworld, prisons, prostitution and the demoralization of youth. Any alleged homosexual person might have been blackmailed, and this opportunity was actively pursued by the state against political dissidents. Moreover, social conservatism and the strong position of the Catholic Church hindered emancipation.
In urban areas around parks and restrooms, a subculture of homosexual men developed that linked homosexual public sex with feminine traits, such as manners, looks and sexual role. Members of this subculture were known as cioty (singular ciota), a derogatory name stemming from the Polish word ‘aunt’. In the understanding of the word ciota, gender roles were crucial as they distinguish it clearly from today’s concept of being gay. The most suitable sexual partner for a ciota was a heterosexual, masculine man, not another effeminate homosexual. While the Polish subculture of cioty has not yet been thoroughly researched, the studies of Dan Healey on the Russian tetki subculture in St Petersburg and Moscow show numerous similarities with the literary, cinematic and journalistic images of Polish cioty. Importantly, however, there is nothing essentially Eastern or Soviet in cioty, and comparable subcultures have been found in Western cities since the Enlightenment. In the title, I say ‘Soviet’ queen not because these individuals were in any way Russian or Soviet, but because, as it will be argued, in the gay press of the 1990s this identity was imagined as homo sovieticus: a person influenced by Soviet mores and unable to adapt to the new realities of capitalism.
Following Healey, I use the word ‘queen’ in the title of this text to make it clear to an English-speaking readership. However, I decided to stick to the Polish word ‘ciota’ in the article. While both terms indicate gay men’s femininity, ‘queen’ connotes aristocratic flamboyance, while ‘ciota’ remains purely pejorative. Importantly, the second meaning of the word is menstruation, and thus ‘ciota’ has misogynistic connotations of femininity as pollution, flawed sexuality and uncontrolled physiology. By using the untranslated word, I want to emphasize this double meaning, which will be significant in the Polish discourse. Since the word ‘ciota’ is grammatically feminine in Polish and is consistently used as such in the gay press, feminine English pronouns will be used, even though cioty were male-bodied persons.
While the gay rights movement started in Poland in the late 1980s, it could not develop until the transformation, when the formal registration of gay and lesbian rights organizations was allowed. The 1990s, the period researched in this paper, was called the first wave of gay emancipation in Poland by Sypniewski and Warkocki. Then, the demise of censorship and the blooming of the market economy triggered the development of gay clubs, organizations and magazines. First-wave gay activism primarily concentrated on positive identities, networking and socializing in cafes and bars. The aims were strictly assimilationist — they focused on self-acceptance, struggles for tolerance and shedding the stigma of perversion. Assimilation required a positive image of homosexual people, and, in the context of misogyny and transphobia, this demand proved to be directed against gender-variant people. This turn against gender-variant homosexual men repeats the trajectory of the American gay rights movement. David Valentine claims that in the US gender and sexuality were clearly differentiated under the influence of the post-Stonewall gay movement, which aimed at establishing a positive social image of homosexuality. To achieve this goal, it distinguished between sexual orientation, which is an invisible and private matter, and gender variance, which is much more socially stigmatized due to its visibility and public status. Valentine asserts that, in the early stages of the gay movement, transvestites and transsexuals were at least partially incorporated in the term ‘gay’, but they were gradually excluded as ‘gay’ became gender normative and implicitly white and middle class. By comparison, in Poland establishing ‘gay’ as gender normative was less problematic, because the term no longer carried links to male femininity when it was borrowed in the late 1980s.
Research into the cultural transfer of ‘gay’ identity was initiated by Dennis Altman, who indicates that one of the main aspects of globalization is the world-wide dissemination of the American model of homosexual identity, seen for example in the global popularity of the word ‘gay’. An important feature of this process is the distinction between gender and sexuality; in many cultures, Altman claims, ‘gay’ ousts local identities, which link sex between men with feminine gender expression and imposes a non-typical identity only on the feminine person in a homosexual relationship. Altman, a neo-Marxist, underlines that the growing importance of gay identity is linked to economic and political factors: commodification of sexuality and global phenomena such as the porn industry, sexual tourism, the Internet and international HIV/AIDS policy. The class aspect of sexual globalization is thus important — international gay identity is closest to urban middle-class people, who have access to international cultural capital. As anthropologist Tom Boelstroff critically summarizes the perspective of Altman, ‘The proletarian becomes the new indigene’, thus drawing attention to the fact that global gay theory limits the agency of local, ‘traditional’ identities and posits them as more authentic. Other critics of Altman indicate drawbacks of the theory: (1) it stabilizes the simplified division between the West and the rest; (2) it is unilateral, which means that it does not imply any impact of the peripheries on the centre; (3) it reproduces the myth of the wealthy Western gay man who follows the latest trends of the ‘gay lifestyle’ and destabilizes local sexual identities. Despite this criticism, global gay theory provides an insightful framework to analyse the Polish sexual transformation of 1989; indeed, the nascent Polish gay and lesbian movement drew inspiration and language, as well as organizational and personal help, from the West. Moreover, in Central and Eastern Europe, Western identity categories were attractive due to the relative similarity between the East and the West. As sociologist Barry D. Adam writes, numerous social conditions that allow for the dissemination of Western sexual identities had already been met before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Factors such as wage labour, working opportunities for women and state-provided social services allowed citizens to lead lives that were relatively independent of kinship ties, and industrialization and urbanization made it possible to migrate to the cities, where new contacts could be established without familial supervision. Thus, according to Adam, the liberal turn of 1989 added just one missing element, and as a result the gay and lesbian movement could develop in a mode similar to the West. It is also important that the emergence of the ‘gay’ category came together with economic transformation: it functioned as one of the aspects of Polish openness towards the West. In the 1990s, when the West was associated with economic and cultural advancement, transformation to capitalism seemed not only indispensable, but also inevitable, and — as Magda Szcześniak shows — meeting European standards became the main aspiration of the nascent middle class, for whom anything Western seemed modern and progressive. This predominantly optimistic image of the transformation in the 1990s gave ‘gay’ a cultural chance. On the other hand, the end of the Polish People’s Republic meant the end of the ciota identity, which, as will be shown, took on the discursive role of an autochthon that disappears into historical obscurity.
The data that I will use to illustrate how in Poland ‘gay’ discourse was established as ‘global’ and ‘queen’ as Soviet comes from the gay press, which flourished in the 1990s after years of censorship and being cut off from the Western flow of information. The gay press played a crucial role in the construction of the identities of homosexual people: it promoted self-acceptance by publishing homoerotic literature and images, printing letters that shared experiences of being gay and lesbian, and discussing various aspects of the lives of homosexual people. For this article, I analysed the Polish gay press from 1989 to 1999, looking for representative examples of the discourse on the gender variance of male-bodied persons. The periodicals included Filo, Okay, Inaczej (in a different way), MEN! and Nowy Men (New Man). It turned out that gender variance was discussed mainly in columns written by three journalists, Elżbieta Pastecka, Jerzy Masłowski and Miras Soliwoda; thus, the majority of examples come from their writings. It should also be noted that this article discusses male-bodied persons only. Female-bodied persons used separate identity categories which were not widely discussed in the gay press. This case requires a separate study, based, due to the scarcity of sources in press, on a different methodology.
Global Gay
In the gay press of the 1990s, the term ‘gay’ was associated with the West. For example, here is how the columnist Miras Soliwoda explains the term ‘gay’ in 1992:
The gay was born several years ago as a bastard of post-solidarity changes and the fact that Poland has come closer to Europe. The gay entered his adulthood in times when the first gay groups, magazines, and discos already existed. He boosted his self-confidence in bars and clubs in the West […] When he felt the need to identify with the gay community, he joined Lambda [one of the first gay and lesbian rights organizations in Poland]. He is easier to find in a bar or with the help of an advert than in a public toilet.
In this ironic passage, the term ‘gay’ and the gay rights movement are imagined as Western and progressive. A paradigmatic gay man is supposed to be young and well-off; he prefers activism and contact with Westerners to cruising public spots. In the gay press, it was universally assumed that this model should be followed by homosexual men. Szcześniak analyses how the term ‘gay’ became a tool of Westernization and normalization; these two terms, as she also shows, were synonymous in the 1990s. Gay men were supposed to look ‘normal’, which meant looking like a middle-class heterosexual. In the gay press, they advised each other to avoid conspicuous appearance so that the heterosexual majority would accept them. Reluctance towards gender-variant behaviour was also expressed in letters published in the gay press.
The fact that gender variance was highly problematic for the early gay movement is reflected in how the gay press of the 1990s avoided the topic. It was discussed almost exclusively in magazines such as MEN! and Nowy Men, which generously published overtly sexual content (erotica and pornography) and did not aspire to respectability. On the other hand, magazines with political and cultural ambitions that aimed at assimilationist politics, for example Filo and Inaczej, hardly ever mentioned male femininities or presented pictures of gender-variant men, in this way constructing the meaning of ‘gay’ as distant from gender variance. In the assimilationist Okay, columns that discussed gender variance turned out to be too controversial and disappeared from this monthly after readers’ protests.
Establishing ‘gay’ as gender normative was facilitated by the fact that Polish sexology was deeply concerned with the differences between transsexuality and homosexuality. Since the 1980s, Polish sexologists have researched and treated transsexuality, providing sex reassignment surgeries for patients diagnosed as ‘true’ transsexuals (not, for example, feminine gay men). As a result, both sexologists and their patients were invested in the differentiation between the homosexual and transsexual. In the media, transsexual persons repeatedly insisted that they were not homosexual, but had a rare, congenital illness that could be cured with surgery, and gay activists in the 1990s eagerly agreed with this stance, in this way distancing themselves from any association with stigmatized gender variance and medical pathology. Thus, the gay press occasionally dealt with transsexuality, mainly using the discourse of sexology to draw clear lines between gender identity and sexual orientation. ‘How often it happens that ignorant adults confuse transsexuality with homosexuality!’ sighs a gay press journalist. Moreover, sexological books were quoted and sexologists were interviewed to scientifically explain the difference. While the articles assumed there is a shared experience of intolerance, discrimination and everyday suffering between gay and transsexual people, they emphasized that ‘homosexuality and transsexuality are something entirely different’. Even more, as the journalist maintained, the confusion of homosexuality and transsexuality may have tragic consequences. The strong theoretical grounding of a narrow and heteronormative concept of transsexuality in medical discourses when gay identity was still being shaped made it possible to posit homosexuality as a phenomenon that has nothing in common with gender variance.
Szcześniak claims that while ‘gay’ was normative, political resistance to assimilation centred around the term pedał (fag), which in the gay press coded the rejection of heterosexual norms, affirmation of sexual difference and more confrontational politics. Szcześniak does not analyse gender variance in her book: importantly, the pedał might have been visible, but similarly to ‘gay’ he was also masculine. For a pedał, flamboyance was a political strategy of resistance. Gender-variant homosexual men were portrayed in an entirely different way.
Soviet Queen
Ciota was the main concept that was used to signify gender-variant homosexual men. The term was pejorative and hardly mentioned in the gay press in any context other than insults. The most important writer who dealt with the term despite the taboo was Elżbieta Pastecka, a satirical columnist, female choreographer, and dance theorist popular among gay men. In her monthly columns that appeared throughout the 1990s in Okay, MEN!, and Nowy Men, she commented on current events and criticized stereotypical flaws of homosexual men. Pastecka depicted the caricatured image of ciota — a homosexual man who is affected, camp, quarrelsome, averse to women and work, and who chases young men despite his age and ugliness:
And your talent for gossiping and plotting intrigues! Nobody can tangle things as you do! One against the other! One crow does not peck the other’s eyes out — but a ciota does — even both eyes! […] In addition, you are so hysterical that even the most advanced menopause can’t compete with you.
Taking into account the aversion of the majority of cioty/ciotki to real work, for many of them these days will be — as every year — grey and monotonous, spent on the dole and senseless thoughts about a charming prince who will knock at their door one day and completely change their worthless queeny fate.
Logic suggests the 8th of March should be Your Day. It is not important that something hangs between your thighs. What matters is the psyche and behaviour. Your mothers passed you genetic femininity, creating you in their likeness and image. Therefore, as every woman you feel the irresistible need to put out, preen in tulle and frills, wear jewellery, shed bitter tears at any opportunity, and faint at the sight of a little dead flea.
Pastecka’s writings illustrate the misogyny of the gay press — in her columns, any link with femininity is always univocally negative. Femininity stands for nature, physiology, uncontrolled sexuality, effusiveness and insincerity. Thus, Pastecka draws on well-established associations developed by numerous philosophers such as Aristotle, Jean Jacques Rousseau or Otto Weininger, and which remain crucial for Western gender imagery. The columns are written in camp aesthetics: the journalist uses excess and exaggeration, and she plays with enumerations and exclamations. Pastecka writes with distance and eloquence — being affectionate and indulgent, she positions her criticism as friendly remarks. The columnist often uses a diminutive, less offensive form of the word ciota and signs many columns Ciocia Ela (Auntie Betty), marking her closeness to the described persons. Still, this is an assimilationist camp — her columns mock cioty, laugh at their flaws in order to normalize and discipline the gay reader. Importantly, her columns were controversial, but also very popular among their readers, some of whom claimed Pastecka’s satirical writings had an emancipatory potential and helped them accept their sexuality.
A similar vision of ciota is sketched by Miras Soliwoda in Okay in 1992. The author proposes a typology of homosexual men in which ciota is described as follows:
‘The true ciota’ spends the majority of her time in parks and public restrooms, where, surrounded by dirt and the yells of the lavatory attendant she persistently waits for the biggest love of her life, in which she does not even believe any more. This is why she has learnt to derive maximum pleasure from merely standing near a urinal and peeking at soldiers’ willies. She is easy to recognize, because apart from her constantly desiring eyes, she distinguishes herself from the crowd with a grotesque combination of a coat, scarf, hat, white socks, and a little, pseudo-masculine purse called a ‘faggy’.
In another tongue-in-cheek typology of homosexual men published by Nowy Men in 1995, the columnist Skorpion describes cioty in a similar vein:
If you see something which hangs around by a bar counter, camp as you like and drunk as a skunk, then for sure you see a ciota. You should not approach it, talk to it, or pick it up, because it will neither fuck you nor blow you, but only bring shame and embarrassment.
As the citations show, the only language used to describe cioty was the language of the majority, the homophobic language of disdain and degradation. Two derogatory meanings of the word ‘ciota’ — an effeminate homosexual and unwanted menstruation — clearly merge together in the misogynist discourse which invokes hysteria, menopause, tears and urine, and thus refers to the idea of the flawed, permeable feminine body. Parody and satire reproduce homophobic repression and dismiss the opportunity to understand a ciota or even feel paternalistic pity for her. In the gay press of the 1990s, ciota identity is never seriously discussed: cioty were neither interviewed, nor taken as potential readers. The only categories used to describe them were negative clichés.
Importantly, ciota is inscribed into processes of political change. It is assumed that feminine male homosexuality is typical of Poland, while in the West more masculine men dominate:
Cioty […] love to complain, regardless of the circumstances. And even if you smeared honey onto their asses, they would always sigh, moan, and groan. Because groaning is the norm of Polish queenery […] The behaviour of Polish cioty (the imported are completely different) leaves a lot to be desired […] Therefore, Dear Cioty, think about this column and start to behave in a more European way.
Polish cioty seem to be all hysterical girls, old maids, fishwives, migraines and menopauses, plotters, hypochondriacs, fairy-tale princesses, and other paranoid creatures that do not resemble men. I cannot understand why in other countries gays emanate masculinity, even more than the so-called real men. They are well-built, well-mannered, and intelligent.
In the two passages above, ciota functions as a Polish native, while gay is Western. The contrast is rooted in the easily recognizable Orientalizing discourse, in which Subaltern masculinities are presented as tainted with femininity. Therefore, ‘gay’ connotes the West, masculinity and culture, while ciota is equated with femininity, weakness and dependency. Gay identity brings cioty civilization, which they cannot resist as they are situated as pre-emancipatory, pre-modern primality. Hence the frequent references to the physiology of cioty and their irrationality, emotionality, irresistible drives and instincts. The mission of Polish gays is to catch up with the West, which requires rejecting compromising Eastern femininity. Ciota in the gay press also bears the stigma of homo sovieticus — a label, as Michał Buchowski indicates, frequently inscribed on working-class persons by the intelligentsia in the 1990s, meaning a character supposedly spoilt by Soviet influences and thus showing features such as passivity, helplessness, tendency to complain, excessive expectations and inability to adapt to the demands of free-market capitalism. The Soviet nature of cioty is inscribed onto their flawed bodies, which makes the naturalization of their inferiority complete. Also, the essentializing typologies emphasize the conviction that cioty are faulty by nature. They imply that one cannot change from being a ciota to gay and one cannot be both at the same time.
While cioty were stigmatized for bad conduct, they were also nostalgically recollected as a cultural model going into demise. Nostalgia for a pre-emancipatory subculture may seem paradoxical, but it is an unavoidable consequence of Altman’s logic of the supposedly authentic indigene ousted by the global gay. For this reason, it should not be surprising that, for example, in a talk show interview (1994) a homosexual artist recollects the times before 1989 as better, more truthful and authentic. Similarly, Pastecka wrote in MEN! in 1993: ‘The turn of the ’70s and ’80s. The happiest decade of my life — my queeny years […] I was dragged towards cioty, as only they knew how to party’. In the same year, she wrote in a similar vein:
Cioty were different: cheerful, friendly, and dancing. They set the tone to all social, artistic, and political gatherings. In the company of cioty, the atmosphere was always joyful, playful, festive, jubilant. And today? There are no true faggots any more […] Frustrated, busy, stressed, always irritated either with the lack of a guy or the money usually needed for the guy, they change into buzzkills or imitate hysterical old maids.
In the passages above, Pastecka draws on the stereotype that in the artistic circles and cultural elites of those days male homosexuality was widely accepted. The political change — first, capitalism, which brought marketization of intellectual work and financial and class degradation for many artists, and second, the overt homophobia of the Church and conservative politicians — spoilt the characters of homosexual men, who became even more feminine.
Soliwoda (1992) also adopts a nostalgic tone, but he offers a different explanation for the changes in the models of homosexuality:
The ciota is the noble species of the Polish fag that is becoming extinct. He matured and became shaped in a more distant, rather than close past. Brought up in an intolerant, communist, and Catholic society, he perfected the skill of the double life — hetero on the outside and queer for the community. In order to signal his sexual preferences and find partners, he acquired ciota-like, this is to say, quasi-feminine manners in moves and gestures.
Here the portrayal of the ciota is explicitly linked to relations of power, which are deemed the reasons for gender variance. Male femininity is a strategic reaction to heteronormative oppression; it is considered an element of a strategy to adapt to pre-emancipatory living conditions. The political conditions that imposed secrecy on homosexual men turned male femininity into an implicit sexual code. As violence against homosexual men diminishes — which is supposed to happen with Westernization and politicization of gay identity — references to femininity would no longer be necessary and naturally disappear. In this way, sexual orientation will become the only mark of homosexuality. Therefore, in the passage above, the journalist proposes a discourse of progress which assumes that homosexual people originally did not differ from heterosexuals in terms of gender and that, with the progressing emancipation, behaviours and identities that are non-typical for one’s gender lose their significance and become out-dated.
This perspective allows the journalist to present the ciota as a victim of homophobia. As Soliwoda explains the emasculation of the ciota through structural conditions, he evokes understanding and compassion. This attitude is expressed in grammatical gender: the author uses masculine forms in the passage above, only to switch to feminine ones later, when, in the very same column, he starts to deride the ciota. As soon as ‘the true ciota’ is presented as a sex-obsessed loser, she becomes grammatically feminine.
This nostalgia for a vanishing phenomenon is not neutral. First of all, it posits the change as inevitable and naturalizes it: the object of nostalgia is situated as pre-modern, and thus doomed to extinction due to seemingly inescapable progress. Nostalgia is also comforting. This is a discourse of solace, which apparently ennobles phenomena that inevitably but, in the end, deservedly become obsolete. Nostalgia functions thus as a pseudo tribute, which hides and legitimizes violence. Unsurprisingly, then, the ciota is called ‘noble’ and ‘extinct’, and just after that she is described as a grotesque loser lurking in a public restroom. The mix of criticism and nostalgia continues in Polish discourse in the twenty-first century; the best-known examples are the literary works of Michał Witkowski that posit a dichotomy between Westernized and successful gays and post-communist, destitute queens. His bestselling Lovetown (2004) centres on the colourful past experiences of self-proclaimed cioty. The book can be interpreted as a literary attempt to reclaim the contested term. However, Bartek Lis’s sociological research (2015) indicates that this attempt was not successful: the term remains derogatory and no Polish homosexual men currently identify as cioty.
The dichotomy between ‘gay’ and ‘ciota’ can be inscribed into the more general process of Polish transformation. The fact that cioty were equated with the fallen communist regime and gays with blooming capitalism, as well as the use of nostalgic ‘vanishing phenomenon’ rhetoric, legitimated the change from the embarrassing Soviet queen to the respectable global gay. Moreover, this imagery was inscribed into the intelligentsia discourse on Polish economic transformation, which divided people into Westernized winners and Soviet losers of the political change. One’s place in this classification was assumed to depend on inner qualities, not structural factors: the winners were imagined as brave, hard-working, self-efficient, masculine, while the losers were deemed weak, inflexible, excessively demanding. Analogically, the Soviet queens were blamed for their alleged personal features, especially bodily qualities, while the structural reasons for their marginalization, which include class inequalities, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, remained largely unnoticed. Thus, the contrast between global gay and Soviet queen constitutes one of the dimensions of how inequalities were naturalized in the 1990s in Poland.