2004 was a year of homophobia in Poland. On May 7 in Cracow, skinheads of a parliamentary party League of Polish Families attacked a peaceful demonstration of gays, lesbians and their supporters with slurs and stones and caustic acid. On November 20 in Poznan, skinheads of the League fired teargas at the feminist and anti-homophobic March of Equality.
Other prejudices mounted, too. Gays, women and Jews were othered and abjected in Poland.

Poland’s Phobias 2004: The Passion of the Christ, Prejudices and “Conversion Therapy”
by Tomek Kitlinski

“Would you please give me ten million dollars and I’ll heal homosexuals,” said in Polish Parliament a self-styled “ex-homosexual” Richard Cohen, American “conversion therapist” and president of the International Healing Foundation. Cohen’s mincing voice and anti-gay message was intended to rebaptize Poland before its debate on the bill legalizing same-sex civil unions.

Mel Gibson’s Passion and Richard Cohen’s “conversion therapy” hit Poland, hurt minorities and harmed the fragile efforts to do away with prejudices in the ultra-traditionalist country. On March 5, 2004 The Passion of the Christ had its European premiere in the National Theater of Poland; on March 17, 2004 Richard Cohen who preaches gay-to-straight change had a presentation in Polish Parliament. Gibson and Cohen recycle and reinvigorate anti-Semitism, bigotry and homophobia.

“The reason I ask for ten million dollars is because we need to create social organizations to help homosexuals to change. If you want to push legislation, somebody introduce a bill for the healing of homosexuality. That should really screw up homosexual activists.” Richard Cohen called Polish Parliament to reject the bill legalizing same-sex unions. In a country of twenty per cent unemployment and new poverty, Cohen pleaded for ten million dollars to fight homosexuality.

“The Promotion of Homosexuality in Social Life and Its Effects for the Human Person, Family and Culture” was the title of Cohen’s presentation in Polish Parliament where he was invited by the League of Polish Families that promotes heterosexism and xenophobia. The leader of the League of Polish Families, Roman Giertych (b. 1971) wants to change the penal code. He introduced a bill to the speaker of parliament to penalize (fine or even imprisonment) those who publically promote the change of the traditional definition of marriage as union between man and woman. The Green Party of Poland granted Giertych the title of the Homophobe of the Year. Activist of the League of Polish Families and father of Roman, Maciej Giertych (b. 1936) participated in the Parliament meeting with Richard Cohen. Specialist in the biology of trees (dendrology), he boasted during the meeting that he had translated Homosexuality and Hope statement of the U.S. Catholic Medical Association on “possibilities of change and the negative consequences associated with homosexual activity,” but complained that he could never obtain copyrights for publishing it in Poland. The grandfather of Cohen’s host Jedrzej Giertych (1903 – 1992) was a scout activist, politician, author of a book O wyjscie z kryzysu (1938) where he called for the expulsion of Jews from Poland. Because of rabid chauvinism, the books of Jedrzej and Maciej Giertych were withdrawn from the Poland-special stand of the 2000 Frankfurt Book Fair, Europe’s biggest publishing industry event.

“Mr. Richard Cohen will speak on the understanding and cure of homosexuality as help for the human person, family and civilization” came a priest’s countertenor on Poland’s mass-audience Radio Maryja which furthers fundamentalism. A campily sweet voice of a priest on Radio Maryja advertised an interview with Richard Cohen throughout a fortnight. The program took four hours. When Cohen was on air, he burst with “yuck” to express, what he perceives, universal disgust for gays. In the radio program he was coupled with Ludwika Sadowska, professor of medicine, who swallowed the “u” in homoseksualizm (Polish for “homosexuality”) and equated it with abnormality, pathology, disease. Sadowska’s unsophisticated elocution matched her simple medicalization of homosexuality; she sounded like a chatterbox of stereotypes of 1950s sexology. The Polish priest who hosted the radio program condemned “easy and cheap toleration which is in fact a way of death.” Cohen accused gays of a world conspiracy, likened it to Communism and exhorted: “I challenge you, Poland, to be a world leader in solving homosexuality!”

On Poland’s Radio Maryja Richard Cohen asked a rhetorical question: “one is not born homosexual - who would like to be born a leper in the society?” Gays, according to him, can renounce their unfortunate attraction and only then do they become fully human. Cohen’s fallacious thinking was never called into question in the Polish media. Fundamentalist Radio Maryja and Nasz Dziennik newspaper worshipped him. Other media made bare mentions of Cohen, without endorsing or questioning his method. Among them, Poland’s most influential mass-circulation newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, posted the Catholic Press Agency story on Cohen’s visit, without commentary: “Richard Cohen experienced himself a change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation. The decisive moment was, as he indicates, his meeting of Christ. Cohen who had professed Judaism became a Christian.”

In fall 2003 Gazeta Wyborcza featured in its section “Science” the research of Robert L. Spitzer, Columbia professor researches into a “reparative therapy” of sexual orientation change. In February 2004 Gazeta Wyborcza broke on its front page the supposed positive HIV status of Wojciech K., who is on trial with allegations of pedophilia. Gazeta Wyborcza deprived Wojciech K. of his rights and dehumanized him in its coverage. This was criticized by Poland ombudsman, Professor Andrzej Zoll and Father Arkadiusz Nowak, activist for the rights of HIV/AIDS persons. To defend its move, Gazeta Wyborcza interviewed a nun spearheading charity work in Poland and used passages from the Gospels in its questions.

Gazeta Wyborcza’s coverage of the case of Wojciech K. reinforced Poland’s popular confusion between pedophilia and homosexuality. A mass circulation news magazine Wprost followed Gazeta Wyborcza in tearing the rights and dignity of Wojciech K. to shreds; moreover, the magazine branded homosexuality with infamy: it claimed to have disclosed an international conspiracy of gays to spread HIV. Yet when Zycie Warszawy and TVN network reported a real dramatic rise in HIV infections in Poland in 2004 (70 per cent of them in heterosexuals), Gazeta Wyborcza and Wprost remained silent – in a country without sexual education at schools or safe sex campaigns in the media. Gazeta Wyborcza returns to its prejudices of the 1990s, it dissuades from “political correctness” and neglects the grave crises of the Polish society: exclusion, unemployment, poverty, discrimination against women and gays.

The ideas of Gibson and Cohen invade and indoctrinate Poland as religion-turned-ideology. Catholicism is used to confirm the hatreds of “otherness.” Gibson’s Passion became the favorite of the Catholic clergy and congregations. The faithful are bused in to movie theaters to weep throughout The Passion of the Christ. Head of the Polish Church, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, assessed the picture as “pre-eminent”, director of Radio Maryja, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, as “arch-beautiful.” Film critic Bartosz Zurawiecki was taken in, too. In a popular Przekroj magazine, he proclaimed “Gibson did not sin.” Zurawiecki began his journalism in Catholic Weekly (Tygodnik Powszechny). Then in a prominent Film magazine he questioned a movie Amen, Costa-Gavras’s critique of a compromise between the Vatican and Nazism. In the fall 2002 Zurawiecki came out of the closet in militant atheist magazine Bez Dogmatu with an angry essay, initially welcomed but eventually rejected by militant Catholic magazine Wiez. The critic was angry with, as he put it, “naïveté” of filmmaker Costa-Gavras’s critique of the silence of the Vatican about the Holocaust. Now Zurawiecki was naïve enough to accept and adore Gibson’s body of Christ. But what one sees in the film is not body beautiful, but a bloody pulp, the fulfilment, according to psychoanalyst Klaus Theweleit, of xenophobic and totalitarian fantasies.

The Passion of the Christ belongs in what Camille Paglia dubbed “vulgar horror films awash in red slop” as opposed to “psychological high Gothic.” The pedestrian and predictable violence of Gibson’s picture slides into butchery with whips, scourges or even East European knouts - deadly flogging and flaying. The flagellation, sublimated in iconography from Sebastiano del Piombo to Albrecht Dürer to, as queer art historian Adrian Rifkin indicated, Tom of Finland, is taken in Gibson’s film to the abject extreme, ad nauseam.

The film has no aura, no sublimation, no sacred. Gibson’s scenes are almost as boring as lists of tortures toward the end of The Hundred and Twenty Days at Sodom, but these were improved by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his movie Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini, too, filmed The Gospel according to St. Matthew (1964): his picture was a marriage of Christianity and Marxism – and a very queer marriage, too. Although John is played in Gibson’s movie by slightly androgynous Hristo Jirov, intimacy with the beloved disciple is not touched upon, neither is Mary Magdalene eroticized. The possible jouissance of religion is missing from the movie. The only diversity in The Passion of the Christ is a linguistic mixture which excludes the Greek in which the Gospels were written. Pilate’s Latin in Gibson has a queer precedent: Derek Jarman made Latin the language of dialogues in his Sebastiane (1975). Gibson had Gospel texts translated into Aramaic and colloquial Latin. They were translated into Polish by Father Waldemar Chrostowski (originally contributor to Christian-Judaic dialog, subsequently responsible for a number of anti-Jewish utterances) whose words are splashed on the picture’s poster in this country: “The Passion is a masterpiece of art.”


“Mel Gibson faithfully follows the biblical events,” declares Polish critic Bartosz Zurawiecki - wrongly as the filmmaker was inspired by the mysticism of Anna Katharina Emmerich (1774-1824) a stigmatic nun in Westphalia whose visions were written down by Romantic poet, Clemens Brentano. Biblical scholars (P. Riegler, L. Richen, M. Meinertz) proved the incompatibilities of her apparitions with the topography and history of the Bible. In line with the visions of Emmerich, the picture is saturated in anti-Semitism – it is from them that Gibson borrowed his hate-filled “embellishments”. As Rabbi Marvin Hier, Wiesenthal Center Dean and Founder, had it: “Our disagreement is with Mel Gibson whose own personal embellishments of the Gospel stereotype and denigrate the masses of Jews who were not followers of Jesus.”

“There is something so unique about Christ”, writes Oscar Wilde who detects the “charm about Christ”: “he is just like a work of art”. But the film is not about Jesus; it not only lost the mystique of the iconography of Christ, but also of his biography: Jesus the Jew disappeared in the film. According to Gibson, Jesus is countered and criminalized by Jews. That is how the movie revives the utterly dangerous prejudice of Jews as Christ-killers, an idea that incited anti-Semitism and genocide. In the Poland after the Holocaust, to blame Jews is no innocent act. Gibson’s is anti-Semitism, tragically abused in Poland and dangerously used now in the ex-Communist country. Poland is where, as Polish-Jewish born writer Lisa Appignanesi had it, “the dead are lost.” With the legacy and the present record of the country, warning of the horrors of bigotry is imperative.

Instead Polish critic Bartosz Zurawiecki was lyrically breathless: “Extraordinary film. Extraordinary in particular for me,” and went into rapture when denoting the torture scenes as “trance.” According to the critic, “Gibson “uses simple contrasts: present passion and past bliss, suffering individual and hate-filled crowd. Out of this simplicity come, I think, simple accusations, for instance, of anti-Semitism.” Critics in Poland are not angry with Gibson’s anti-Semitism. But there are sober voices of those who warn about the reaction to his film a country haunted by the memory of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Romuald Jakub Weksler Waszkinel (b. 1943) is a priest and professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin. As a child, he was given by his Jewish parents to a Polish family to be saved from the Holocaust (see New York Times October 10, 1999 frontpage story “For a Priest and for Poland, a Tangled Identity”). In an interview for Kurier Lubelski daily Weksler Waszkinel said “I don’t see any Passion mystery plays and, for sure, I won’t go to see Gibson’s film Passion”. He commented on the reception of the movie, “there are already debates whether it incites anti-Semitic feelings or not. And I hear again that it is Jews who are guilty because they protest.”

Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (b. 1948) dubbed The Passion of the Christ kitsch which contains “monstrous, senseless, thoughtless cruelty.” Agnieszka Holland commented, “I saw Christ not a s a man who gives love, faith and hope, but as a monstrous, bloody forcemeat ball. And I saw frightful hatred toward Jews.” She added that in the film Jewish high priest “Caiaphas, with every blow that falls on Christ, rubs his hands and slobbers with relish. If it were just an issue of the cinematic art, we would talk whether the movie is successful or not. But we all know that behind it stand two thousand years of history, all attitude of Christian Europe to Jews, and ultimately: pogroms and the Holocaust. To my mind, the two thousand years were in a way rectified by the words and deeds of the Church in the last fifty-sixty years. I am afraid that a sociological fact – and this film is a sociological fact – may negate the fifty years”.

Agnieszka Holland was born into a Jewish family in Poland; among her movies are The Secret Garden and Total Eclipse about the love between Arthur Rimbaud (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Paul Verlaine. Following her critique of The Passion, Holland was attacked by Father Adam Lach in a Catholic weekly Niedziela: “In normal conditions I would not dare to polemisize with a person of such outstanding qualifications if her utterance retained at least appearances of logical thinking.” Father Lach detected a regularity: “those who slander The Passion of Mel Gibson, defend the Passion of Dorota Nieznalska” that sparked fury in Poland and led to trial and conviction. If the audiences weep and critics hymn Gibson’s Passion, they were not moved with and supportive of Passion by Dorota Nieznalska (b. 1973). Polish Catholics did not get the point of the installation. Art historian Leo Steinberg argued that Christian iconography indulges in the depiction of Christ’s humanity by emphasizing his penis; accordingly, Nieznalska juxtaposed the penis and the cross. At the instigation of the League of Polish Families, Nieznalska was indicted and sentenced to “freedom restriction in the form of penal labor.”

To Father Adam Lach, Nieznalska’s “ blasphemous Passion” is “according to the luminaries of political correctness an exercise of the right to artistic expression. The same luminaries when watching Mel Gibson’s Passion raise the alarm and wheel out the heaviest arms: long-range and all-purpose accusations of anti- Semitism.” Is Poland at culture wars?

Nieznalska was sued and sentenced for her Passion in Gdansk. Gdansk, the city of the Solidarity movement, had Gibson-inspired Easter decoration this year. In St. Bridget’s basilica, former Solidarity shrine, the tradition of sepuchres where the figure of Jesus is entombed on Good Friday foregrounded the anti-Jewish motto which even Mel Gibson edited out of the film from the English subtitles of The Passion: “His blood be on us, and on our children” (Matthew 27: 25), but retained in the Aramaic dialogues. In the country of the unmourned losses of Jews, the prelate of St. Bridgit’s added a commentary on the sepulchre: “Jews killed Lord Jesus and the Prophets and they persecute us, too.”

The ideas of Gibson and Cohen are up the pole (Pole?), but appealing to Poland’s popular pieties. A Catholic weekly Gosc Niedzielny ran a story “”Saint” Mel”. Although the word saint was in quotes, the article came close to hagiography: an Irish background, alcoholism and conversion to integrist Catholicism, addiction to the Latin mass and traditionalist morality, erection of his own church edifice. When Mel worships, he might as well be saying a Sunset Boulevard prayer “All right, Poland, I’m ready for my closeup.”

Gibson and Cohen rehash and reinforce prejudices. On Radio Maryja Cohen appealed to the listeners to call on their MPs to reject same-sex civil union bill. In Polish Parliament the proponent of “conversion therapy” appealed for money – predictably so; Rictor Norton captures “conversion therapists”: “The main result has been to make many therapists rich while shattering the lives of countless homosexuals. The widespread failure of such therapies has led to their virtual abandonment except by psychiatric institutions supported by the radical religious right in America”. Mel Gibson, champion of the radical religious right in America, made an anti-Semitic movie which sells like hot cakes in Poland. Gibson and Cohen preach to the converted and deepen their prejudices. They do not mince their words about homosexuality, but their rabidness has a mince. Mel is becoming the saint, the diva of Poland. Richard’s voice is set to convert; it comes from - to borrow Wayne Koestenbaum’s formula – “the queen’s throat.” Mel created his affected Gothic monster of a film where violence went delirious, mute and moronic whilst Richard, aah Richaard hypnotized with his mincing manner the ultranationalists of Poland just before this country joins the European Union on May 1. Perhaps they gonna join the tolerant Uncle Sam insteaad, Richaard Big Dad?

Tomek Kitlinski  tkitlinski@yahoo.com


Tomek Kitlinski contributed to Poland’s first study of homophobia, Homofobia po polsku (Warsaw 2004), Our Monica, Ourselves. The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (his essay, co-authored with Joe Lockard is entitled “Monica Dreyfus”, New York University Press 2001, ed. by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan), Queer Views on Everything magazine www.thegully.com and Bad Subjects. Political Education for Everyday Life magazine eserver.org/bs

e-mail:: tkitlinski@yahoo.com

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