Gay Performance in Pre-Emancipation Times

The early ethnographic research into male homosexuality in the great cities of North America, undertaken before and after the Second World War, was considered by Gayle S. Rubin a major shift in the approach to this phenomenon. These studies completely changed the language of writing about homosexual behaviours: a cultural discourse replaced the medical and legal discourses that had been dominant since the 19 century. Ethnographers entered bars and clubs, discovering a new topography of cities, where parks and public toilets served as important meeting places. They learned about the codes of communication, social behaviours and the models of social and sexual relations. Studies of homosexuality uncovered the little-known gay subculture, secretive and hiding from the sight of the heteronormative majority and the guardians of public order. But the consequences of those studies were much wider. As Rubin convincingly argues, it was the work of ethnographers, especially in the 1960s, that revolutionized thinking about human sexuality. These discoveries laid the basis for the modern gender discourse, which took as its basic premise and focus the cultural construction of gender and sexual identity. The ethnographers’ findings were taken over in subsequent decades by more powerful philosophical and political discourses and their contributions were largely forgotten. It is these strong discourses that constitute the dominant methodological field of gender and queer studies today. When examining the developments in male homosexual culture in Poland, we almost uncritically situate them in the framework of a strong discourse developed in another culture, in different ideological dynamics. We often adopt ready-made concepts and cultural models describing gay identity and gay communities, without in-depth knowledge of the specific social background against which the gay emancipation movement in Poland developed in the eighties, lagging behind the West by two decades. Following in Gayle S. Rubin’s footsteps, it is necessary to carry out a large-scale ethnographic project that combines fieldwork with theoretical innovation. A regressive gesture needs to be made. Failure to do so will result in the colonization of uncharted territory by gender and queer theories transplanted from the West.