March On

The sun’s flawless rising at 4 a.m. promised a clear, hot day, perfect for everything but especially for marching through the streets of Warsaw.

This was not the usual and ordinary GLBT pride parade. We were warned. We were given security guidelines. We were told to avoid certain gay bars and clubs. We were given every phone number we could possibly need to use in order to get out of jail or another type of jam. We were not encouraged to participate.

This parade was much like the other in which I’ve participated for the past 30 years. Whether in New York or San Francisco, in Amsterdam and Zurich, there’s a certain festivity to pride parades that is peculiarly gay. It’s like walking a long way with your entire social network…family and extended family really dear friends, social acquaintances, business colleagues, community members you don’t know well but work with, people you’d like to know but haven’t ever met…and as you walk the three or four or five miles…taking photos…getting acquainted with new people, cruising the crowd for hotties…you talk and talk and talk and laugh and it’s fun. And the EuroPride March in Warsaw was all that.

This is Eastern Europe, which is precisely why EuroPride chose to stage its annual celebration in Poland. In this very modern city and in other parts of the region, there is very real repression of GLBT people. Poland is a member of the European Union, which mandates the equality of all people in civil society. But LGBT people experience discrimination and violence here is reminiscent of the country’s repressive history and is replicated in Russia, the Balkan states, and other countries in Eastern Europe.

EuroPride was prepared. But I wasn’t. The police presence was very visible and very large. It included uniformed cops in riot gear, plainclothes cops (some in very gay outfits0, mounted police, motorcycle cops, and enough community members volunteering as security monitors to line the entire parade route. I was glad for their presence, because the protesters were also out in force, making ugly comments, throwing eggs and graffiti-ing visually disturbing graphics and messages about gay people on sidewalks and buildings. I watched three big cops tackle one very, very angry young man who was threatening a group of gay men as they walked through the park en route to the parade. I watched other cops surround a mob-like group of protesters, who were screaming Christian epithets and threatening to pray for our souls.

I never felt unsafe today, but I certainly got a dose of reality that is everyday life for many LGBT people in the developing world. I’m grateful for the planning, the police and the precaution. I was happy to be visible. As one of the young, smart, activists who had attended the conference said, "we were acting as a surrogate for some Polish queer who couldn’t be visible." It’s a privilege to live openly…I hope our visibility today served a purpose, perhaps giving someone an opportunity to rethink their beliefs about LGBT people.