Polish LGBT people leaving as post-vote mood grows hostile

By VANESSA GERA
August 6, 2020

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — When a right-wing populist party won the right to govern Poland five years ago, Piotr Grabarczyk feared “bad things” might happen to gay men like him and other LGBT people. He sometimes considered leaving the country, but waited.

Friends and a job bound Grabarczyk to Warsaw, the relatively liberal capital city. He trusted that Poland’s membership in the European Union would protect his community. Yet his dwindling faith finally fell away as President Andrzej Duda campaigned for reelection on an anti-LGBT platform - and won.

Duda, who repeatedly described the LGBT rights movement as a dangerous “ideology,” is being sworn into his second term Thursday. Grabarczyk, 31, is now gone, along with other gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Poles who have emigrated to escape what they consider homophobia promoted by the highest levels of government.

“Like where’s the line? Is there a line they are not going to cross? I don’t know,” Grabarczyk said after landing last week in Barcelona, Spain, where both same-sex marriages and adoptions are legal. “That was kind of scary.”

He spoke to The Associated Press alongside his boyfriend, Kamil Pawlik, 34, who left Poland three days after Duda beat Warsaw’s mayor in a runoff last month.

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