“No one talked about it”

This chapter tackles the question of lesbian existence and lesbian identity in the final decades of the People’s Republic of Poland and briefly comments on the post-1989 political transition. It examines the experience and self-identification of non-heteronormative women, some of whom do not identify as lesbians and others who identify as lesbians today but recall a time when they did not. What does it mean to live a life that is “not one’s own”? What does it mean to reminisce about such a life decades later? And what does it mean to examine such memories in a cultural context that is dramatically different from the one being remembered? The chapter is based on oral history interviews with non-heteronormative women and on early LGBT press. The life-stories in question are marked by ambivalence about the cultural meaning of “lesbian” as an identity label. Hence, the chapter proposes a reconceptualization of the question of lesbian identity in pre-1989 Poland: a shift from thinking in terms of visibility versus invisibility to a frame focused on cultural intelligibility versus unintelligibility.