Also I'll end here because it's 2 am here.

pix or it didn't happen

Wow, cool! I want to hear all about it!

I'll side with desjardins on this one - pics or it didn't happen!

OK! This is probably going to venture *way* into GYOFB territory, but I think this was a pretty big news event for my part of the world, and I don't have my own FB...plus you can all blame Serazin for asking to hear "all" about it and pictures being demanded. :)

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I went down to Warsaw originally for a walking tour put on by a group within Poland's Campaign Against Homophobia organization called Antyfobia, which seeks to connect and discuss the links between homophobia and anti-Semitism in Poland. The tour visited a number of historical sites linked to the Jewish experience in Warsaw, both before the war and afterwards, and speakers and guests from the Jewish community offered walkers a really great perspective on the links between the shame they have faced here - how do you tell your grandmother that you're angry that she lied to you about your religious background and origins? how do you deal with the loss of friends when you decide to convert to (or, in many cases, go *back* to) Judaism? - with the experience of coming out of the closet and dealing with the struggle to assert "new" parts of your identity.

The walk was incredibly well-done, and took almost four hours. Afterwards we met at Pride House (above) where we had a shabbat dinner after a trilingual blessing - something most Poles today have never participated in or seen - and I met up with a number of cool people hanging out at Pride House's beer garden...Hilda from Norway, Wei from Atlanta, Mateusz from Tarnobrzeg! All had come to Pride for their own reasons: Hilda on a bus from the Netherlands where she's living with her girlfriend and encountering an ever-more conservative political atmosphere; Wei on his way to California "the long way" to start working at a tech company; Mateusz, 19, staying with his aunt who thinks he's here to go shopping with his friends for the weekend, only partially out to his family.

The next day, the day of the parade, I ventured out early to scope out the route, and ran into a counter-protest by people on the far right, and which seemed to be entirely composed of young, angry-looking skinhead types from these organizations. There were only about 300 of them, and they didn't directly confront anyone...until they marched right past Pride House on Nowy Świat - Warsaw's trendiest shopping street and a huge epicenter for tourists - and were, well, rather unpleasant. (Video clip from Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.) (Also, my Polish isn't really good enough to know what they're shouting, but I doubt it's something I'd really want to know anyway.)

There were more confrontations later in the day, but these were much more controlled (everyone in a green vest in this video is a police officer!) and mostly ignored by the much-happier pride marchers.

After dodging the counter-protesters, I made it to the National Museum's Ars Homo Erotica exhibit, the staging of which is a major, major milestone for such a massive and important institution here, and in the region - the Muzeum Narodowy is the largest museum in the country. The exhibit featured art connected to homosexuality, from Croatian posters featuring lesbian couples to photographs of Argentinian graffiti.

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Leaving the museum, I had the absolute best luck possible and ran into Tomek and Łukasz, two people I'd met on the walking tour the day before, and we proceeded to walk to Plac Bankowy, where the parade was about to start. On the way there, a guy crossing the street tried to shoulder-check me and knock me down as we passed each other, but he just kept walking and so did I; to my mind the incident was more shameful for him than for me. :)

It was at Plac Bankowy that I realized that this was going to be way bigger than what I'd expected.

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The march took well over three hours! Our official route had to be changed because of the massive turnout (and possibly some construction en route? I never actually found out why), and though there was one police officer for every four or five marchers (!), they were overwhelmingly friendly and helpful. Floats paraded by, music thumped, onlookers gaped or applauded or just took photos.

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What amazed me the most, though, was the huge number of people from Poland and other parts of central and eastern Europe. As you may know, Warsaw's own pride parade in 2005 was banned by the then-mayor of Warsaw Lech Kaczyński (the same person who went on to become the president of Poland - and die in the Smolensk disaster this April). You may know that gay pride marches in Moscow have been consistently shut down by the mayor and the police there. Belarusians faced arrest just two months ago for their version of Gay Pride - details here.

So seeing Lithuanians...
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and Ukrainians...
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and Belarusians (umbrella guy!)...
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and even some Americans...
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really made it a more political event than any pride parade I've been to in the past. There was a relative absence of commercial/corporate swag and a much larger presence of local groups - gay teachers from a certain part of Germany, gay police officers from Sweden, some folks from regional centers in France, and so on. To add to that idea, this is, for many people, the *only* place within hundreds of miles of where they live to peacefully march and demand their rights. There were also very few people, uh, flaunting it - most people had their shirts on despite the heat, there were lots of kids around...it was very mellow by Western European/American pride standards. Seeing western Europeans out in force was great to see.

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Poland has a bit of an inferiority complex when it comes to its place in Europe, and seeing other Europeans here supporting Poland's gay population was a hugely satisfying part of the parade for me and my Polish co-marchers. This is the first time the EuroPride event has been held in a post-Communist country, and everywhere in town we went that might possibly deal with tourists was quite supportive of the gay visitors - Gazeta Wyborcza had an article on how gay tourists could become a much larger part of the economy here after this week's events.

At the end of the day, we staggered back toward Nowy Świat Street for some food and rested our very tired legs. Overall, I'm ecstatic that I went, and also thrilled that from now on, even if EuroPride is moving on to Rome next year, real groundwork has been set up for the organizations which helped host the event here in Poland to work within society here, and with Poland's neighbors, to be more able to lobby for rights and freedoms for gay people here.

So, so exciting! I loved the photos.

There are a few more photos on Facebook here (no sign-in/account required, I think).

Looks like you had a great day.
It's great that middle european societies are moving in this direction. :-)

It's great that middle european societies are moving in this direction. :-)

It is great. And I bet dollars to doughnuts that they get "there" before the U.S. does.

Super-late followup: Poland just elected its first trans and gay parliamentarians last weekend!