ABSTRACT
The chapter examines three circles of male homosexual social life in the People’s Republic of Poland, focusing on their specific spatial organization and the different types of contacts, socialities, and intimacies established in each circle. Because of the invisibility of homosexuality in the official public sphere, homosexual men were forced to create their own queer spaces in urban environments, resulting in the establishment of three distinct, sometimes overlapping, circles of contact: first, the cruising spaces used for anonymous same-sex sex acts (public restrooms, parks etc.), second, the public bathhouses (ascribed with homosocial and homoerotic meanings and practices), and finally, the specific counter-institutions of “gay parlors,” that is, the space of private apartments used for socializing, networking, and alliance-building. Based on a number of oral history interviews conducted with self-identified Polish homosexual men, the chapter discusses the social and cultural practices connected with each “gay circle,” showing how each type of queer spatial organization is affectively remembered as a site of non-normative expressions of identity, desire, and (proto-)political organization. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the overall impact of these distinct modalities—the influence of queer spatiality and sociality on different identity-forming processes—on the emerging gay urban culture in pre-emancipatory Poland.
