ABSTRACT
The chapter looks at two personal testimonies: a 1986 letter sent by Dariusz Prorok, an early gay activist living in Poland, to Andrzej Selerowicz, another activist based in Vienna, and an oral history interview with an anonymous pensioner living in Warsaw who identifies as a homosexual man. Both Prorok and the interview partner draw on literary translations to speak about their experience. Prorok invokes Selerowicz’s recently completed and not-yet-published translation of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, while the other man references Henry de Montherlant’s Boys, published in Poland in 1973. In addition to looking across the Iron Curtain when they bring up these literary models, both men understand their social engagement and relationship to other men—including outright political activism in Prorok’s case—as motivated by a kind of intergenerational empathy, an affect confirmed by other interviewees in similar contexts. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term homosociality seems appropriate to describe those feelings, as does her discussion of queer transformational energy released by an interest in one’s younger self and its relationship to shame.
