Signs and road signs

Just over one week before the March, the Father Piotr Skarga Association for Christian Culture placarded the city, suddenly and massively, with a very large poster: "Stop the promotion of homosexuality in Cracow". In the middle of the poster - a red stop sign with stylized road-sign silhouettes representing two men holding hands, flanked by the words: "Stop - deviance". A wordy text on a bright green background filled the rest of the poster: "Do you know that another homosexual march is planned for Cracow on the 28th of April 2006? Do you want the sin that Sodom was known for to become the calling-card of Cracow? [...] You have the right to demand of the mayor that he ban such a shameful march of homosexuals in our city."

A few days later you began to notice, here and there, that invisible hands were tearing the poster down or writing over it with spray paint. You saw the word "FOBIA" or "HOMOFOBIA" or, in places, the original word "Stop..." crossed out and "START" sprayed above it. As the days went by, more of the posters came down. You also began to see the surface of the poster pasted over with white strips of paper giving you simply the web site www.tolerancja.org.pl , where you could find the complete program of the Culture for Tolerance festival in Cracow, 27-30 April 2006.

Whatever it cost the Father Piotr Skarga Association for Christian Culture to put up this enormous, glaring, official-looking poster on your neighborhood block (assuming they were the ones who paid for it), it was more than the organizers of the March for Tolerance could ever have dreamt of affording to publicize the event, the second such march in the city's history. The immediate effect of the "Stop the promotion of homosexuality" campaign was to inform absolutely everyone in town that the March was going to take place, with the exact date.

And as for dates, if maximum visibility was what the initiators of the poster campaign were out for, they couldn't have chosen a more propitious week on the calendar: just when the poster went up, delegations from many countries of the world were arriving to participate in another march, the annual March of the Living to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. On their way to, or back from, the camp in Auschwitz, marchers from Europe, Israel, America, Australia saw the posters. The way the poster was designed, you didn't have to understand Polish to get the message; and anyway, the key words (stop / promocja / homoseksualizm / dewiacja / Sodom...) were easily recognizable.

Every Pole I spoke to personally was appalled by the language of the poster and by the poster itself. I was sure, though, that there were also people who approved. But how many? And of those, I wondered how many wouldn't content themselves with a call or a letter to the mayor's office but would show up on the 28th of April 2006 to try to "stop the promo..."

The day - as it turned out, warm and sunny and full of green cheer - finally arrived. Far from banning the march (as the former mayor of Warsaw - now Poland's president - had endeavored to do last year), Cracow city hall made a point of assuring the marchers that they would have adequate police protection. At the same time, however, it authorized a counter-demonstration, a so-called march for "Tradition and Culture", organized by the Mlodziez Wszechpolska (the All-Polish Youth, who always make their presence heard and felt on such occasions). Considering the scale of the "Stop the promotion..." poster campaign preceding this year's March; considering the warning by the Mlodziez Wszechpolska, published by the dailies two days before the March, that they would not allow the marchers for Tolerance to set foot on the Rynek (Main Market Square); considering that both the March and the counter-demonstration were to take place early enough that Friday afternoon before the long May-Day week-end for most Cracovians to still be around; considering the excellent weather; and, finally, considering the amount of homophobic poison deliberately injected into Polish air over the past twelve months in an unnameable political game, the mini-Armageddon and final victory hoped for by the local self-declared enemies of Tolerance was - as they call it in show business and in the world of advertising - a big flop. Precious few people, for a city of 800,000, showed up that afternoon to say they could ever confuse their city with "Sodom".

The show of calm determination, on the other hand, visible among the participants of the March for Tolerance, as well as the good humor, was probably for many - under the circumstances - a source of unspoken pride. And that was the mood that marched on Friday. It wasn't only thanks to massive police presence from start to finish (you had a policeman in full combat-gear walking next to you no matter where you were in the 2,000-strong procession); it wasn't only thanks to perfect coordination between the police and the organizers of the March (an unannounced change of route at the last minute gave the slip to the counter-demonstrators - the few hundred of them - who showed up on the Rynek to wait for us and "stop" us, while, in the meantime, we headed straight for Wawel castle); it wasn't only thanks to immediate intervention by solid walls of police-in-armor at two (and only two) points along the route when groups of egg-and-rock-and-bottle-throwing, 'fagot'-shouting defenders of tradition (about 150 of them all together) managed to find us and get close enough to aim their projectiles, their hoarse shouts and their emblem (which again was a road-sign, again the fixation on sodomy, the red diagonal for "forbidden" and the word "fagotry" - its Polish equivalent - underneath, as if such a word existed) at peaceful marchers holding signs and rainbow flags and daffodils (and even a couple - man and wife - holding their baby); it wasn't only thanks to the little boost given by clusters of teenaged boys and girls, dressed up this Friday in their Sunday best for the last day of the school term before exams, crowding open windows to wave and smile at us as we marched by; it wasn't only thanks to little extra boosts given by people like an elderly man standing at the entrance to Filharmonia Hall who gave us a long applause as we marched away from the smashed eggs on the pavement... it was thanks not only to things like these, in the street, but probably also to the beginnings of a change elsewhere, in the home for example, that it was possible, at last, for the March of Tolerance in Cracow to keep its rendezvous - promised two years ago - with the Wawel dragon, the traditional mascot of the city.

Perhaps you noticed with a bit of surprise, just a moment ago, the couple - man and wife - holding their baby among the marchers. How foolhardy, you might say, to risk bringing such a fragile little thing to something like this. After all, one marcher got injured this time, and it was no light scratch. I personally wouldn't have risked it. But actually, if I was a Cracovian, and not just a familiar friend from the moon, I think I could look at this as a sign of the times. It takes confidence in something - not just in the police - to take such a risk, no? Mom and dad and a babe in arms... at the Marsz Tolerancji in Cracow. A sign of the times.


Shawn Bryan