3 - Transnational movement: Opportunities, actors, and mechanisms

Summary

When the late Polish president and former then-mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczyński, banned marches for LGBT equality in 2004 and 2005, LGBT organizations began organizing to hold the event illegally and generating press by contacting international authorities and media outlets. What was unique about the Parada Równości (Equality March) of June 11, 2005, compared to similar gay pride events in major cities where LGBT visibility had become common, was that a transnational group of activists organized the event from both Poland and neighboring Germany. Many of these activists were expatriate Poles who used resources made available to them in Berlin. Prominent European politicians were among the roughly 5,000 illegal marchers who took to the streets of Warsaw that day to demand the right of assembly for sexual minorities in Poland, and more than one-third of the marchers came from foreign contexts (interview no. 125). According to Tomasz Bączkowski, the activist who organized the march:

It was organized in Berlin because I lived there ... I had a lot of experiences in Germany, I knew how to do this – or how one should do it – and I thought, in these times ... it shouldn't be a problem organizing from the outside. Naturally, through the personal contacts with [German parliamentarian] Claudia Roth and others, it was much easier for me to organize it from [Germany] than for Polish activists in Poland, where the environment in general is very hostile. In retrospect, these international political pressures were much more important than if I would have just done this in Poland.

(interview no. 124)

The illegal march provided the political opportunity to link the social situation of Polish sexual minorities to Poland's recent accession to the EU through the frames of democratic values and human rights. Many activists remember it as one of the most important public assemblies for the rights of LGBT Poles and as a turning point for Polish LGBT activism.