Abstract
In Poland between 1970s and 2010s, the discursive landscape involving issues of religion and homosexuality radically changed, which influenced the possibilities for combining religiosity with non-normative sexuality at a personal level. This paper draws on biographical interviews with Polish Roman Catholics who experience homoerotic desire. It shows that the shift of homosexuality from being a phenomenon surrounded by silence to becoming a ‘gay’ identity has produced new silences and new problems in integrating the religious and the sexual spheres of life. The paper is concerned with the integration at both the cognitive level and in the context of social interactions, highlighting possibilities and limitations specific for the past and the present, respectively. However, it tells a non-linear story of gay and lesbian experience that complicates a clear division between the communist past, customarily seen as totally restricting sexually non-normative individuals, and today’s democratic conditions, seen as decidedly beneficial for their self-expression.
Highlights
This paper addresses the tension between religion and non-normative sexuality in biographies of those living both lives, that is, those adhering to Roman Catholicism and experiencing homoerotic desire
I highlight how homosexuality was scarcely commented on in public debates between the 1970s and the new millennium in Poland, and the impact this silence had for the gay Christian experience, I discuss the work of silence after homosexual discourses entered the public realm in the first years of the 2000s
Since more than 90 per cent of Poles declare their affiliation to the Roman Catholic Church (CBOS, 2017), those experiencing homoerotic desire live in social environments where religion plays a significant role, and if they define themselves as religious, they typically adhere to Roman Catholicism
Summary
Many social studies discussing the intersection of religious and sexually nonnormative engagement focus on ‘cognitive dissonance’ and its resolution (e.g. Mahaffy, 1996; Gross, 2008; Meek, 2014), that is, the individually experienced tension between religion and homosexuality and how that tension might be resolved. Thumma’s (1991) publication on a gay Christian organization called Good News, followed by Mahaffy’s (1996) study of lesbian Christians, and Rodriguez and Ouelette’s (2000) discussion of the experience of members of the Metropolitan Community Church, consolidated a typology for managing the tension: rejecting the religious identity, rejecting the homosexual identity, compartmentalization, identity integration. By focusing on inner struggles for harmonious integration of one’s sexual and religious identity, and sometimes on the experience of gay Christians in mainstream religious, gay religious or secular gay activist communities, the studies typically leave aside the issue of living religion and homosexuality in everyday life, especially at home and the workplace. Nor do they discuss the fact that these social settings are governed by dominant religious and homosexual discourses which translate into the increase or decrease in gay Christians’ well-being. My presentation below is informed by such a broader perspective
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