Gay couple fights prejudice and COVID-19 in Poland with rainbow masks
WARSAW — Married gay couple Dawid
Mycek and Jakub Kwiecinski say they face frequent abuse in Poland for being
part of a so-called “homosexual plague.”
“So we thought that if we are
dealing right now with a real plague (the new coronavirus) we could help protect
people from this plague and do something good,” said 37-year-old Kwiecinski.
He and his husband gave out 300
rainbow face masks on the streets of the northern Polish city of Gdansk this
month to help people protect themselves from COVID 19 and raise awareness of the
situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the country.
A video of them distributing the
masks was watched on Facebook over 2 million times.
Poland has reported 10,346 cases
of the coronavirus and 435 deaths, and wearing a face mask is mandatory in
public spaces.
NBC OUT
Kwiecinski and Mycek, 35, who
married in Portugal, said reactions to their masks were overwhelmingly
positive, but the general attitude towards LGBT people in Poland has become
more hostile in recent years.
In Poland, which doesn’t
recognize any form of same-sex union, parades to celebrate LGBTQ life became
violent flashpoints last year in the buildup to October elections.
The country is due to hold
presidential elections on May 10.
“The situation of LGBT people in
Poland is getting worse I would say day by day, we have the right-wing in
power... the Law and Justice party and they are against LGBT,” Kwiecinski said.
“They also encourage people to
attack us, to insult us.”
A spokeswoman for the ruling
conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) did not respond to requests for
comment.
NBC OUT
PiS officials have previously
said they are not against gay couples, they just want them to exist as couples
in private.
Kwiecinski and Mycek said in
recent years they have received death threats from 80 people.
“We’ve heard many times in Poland
from people and from Polish bishops, and from Polish politicians that we are a
plague,” Kwiecinski said referring to comments made by the archbishop of
Krakow, Marek Jedraszewski last August.
Jedraszewki described Poland as
under siege from a “rainbow plague” of gay rights campaigners he compared to
Poland’s former Communist rulers.
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