Gosia Kot, Sarah Bhatti, Bryan
Stromer
Embracing
your differences and the things that make you unique can be difficult - especially
for young LGBTQI people in Poland. The most recent report by the Campaign
Against Homophobia (KPH) from 2012 reveals that there is very little awareness
in schools towards the discrimination of LGBTQI students. The number of
students that went through physical and psychological violence has been on the
rise and has affected LGBTQI students above-average. Being directly asked about
their sense of loneliness, over half of the respondents affirmed this question
and 42% also said that they were having suicidal thoughts over the last few
months.
Considering
this report, two things became clear to us. First the feeling of loneliness
indicates a lack of support and combined with the report data can be
interpreted as a lack of support within peer groups and in the families of
LGBTQI young people. Secondly we realized that young LGBTQI people are often
victimized in portraits and online representations. This realization struck us
and we decided to challenge this typical ‘sob story’ and to empower young
people to reclaim their story on their own terms. We were very glad that members
of Equality Volunteering (organizer of the Warsaw Equality march) and members
of KPH agreed to meet up with us. They confirmed the need to change the
discourse on LGBTQI people from a victimizing one to a more affirmative
message.
Based
on these impressions, we created a campaign to inspire LGBTQI young people to
embrace their uniqueness and diversity as a counter-speech to the widespread
hate speech and victimization. “Jestem Tu” is the slogan of the campaign in
Polish (English equivalent, “I’m here”). Through social media channels
including Facebook “Jestem Tu” delivers a positive and affirmative message to
LGBTQI youth. We are inviting participants to write down statements about their
personal story, their inspirations and uniqueness and to capture it with a
photo, which we will publish on our media platform, which allows our message to
reach beyond Warsaw and gain a greater audience. Additionally, we met up with
three young LGBTQI people from Warsaw to explore questions like: What is your
wildest dream? What makes you you? What makes you feel strong and what inspires
you? We interviewed them and edited a short video to share their answers and
stories to encourage other members of the LGBTQI youth community to take part
in the “Jestem Tu” campaign.
We
found the answers that the LGBTQI youth gave to be especially inspiring given
that many of them felt comfortable sharing their hopes and dreams. For example,
one person that we interviewed shared that his dream is that he can one day
legally get married to his partner in Poland. The responses that we got to our
posts were also extremely positive and demonstrated the need for this type of
campaign. However, we were most moved by the fact that various LGBTQI youth
from around the country have begun to reach out to us and share their stories
as well. In two weeks of campaign we received 13 stories from young LGBTQI
people across Poland and our FB page has been liked by over 300 people. The
statements we have received are very diverse, they touch upon personal dreams,
sources of inspiration and constitute personal testimonies of their activism:
‘I’m inspired by
music, pure sound. I love alternative and Polish rock music. Music express
what’s hurting a young person. Not only does it give joy, but also shows that
diversity can be openly talked about. My favorite artist is Spięty. He talks
openly how it is globally and in Poland. He doesn’t always discuss it in a
simple language, that’s why it’s so beautiful. Music is the only tool thanks to
this we can talk about out LGBT community without restrains and prejudice.’
‘I’m queer and trans person
who wants for next generations to live in more accepting times, so I do
everything and will do my best to show that #ImHere (#jestemtu), that trans
persons exist, that we’re ordinary people who just want to be happy.
The whole
development of the campaign was an important learning experience for all of us
as we had to face and solve challenges appearing on the way. One of the first
ones was adjusting the message of the campaign we had in mind at the beginning
‘own it’ to Polish language and context. We discussed this issue with LGBTQI
activists and Polish language speakers to tailor the message so it sounds
catchy and clear at the same time. Another challenge was that we had only one
Polish language speaker in the group, so promotion was done mostly by her.
However, we established the task division in our group on every stage of the
campaign, adjusting the tasks to everyone’s skills. Therefore, our cooperation
was smooth and effective. We were in touch every day to assess what works and
plan next steps. We truly enjoyed the group work on the campaign and would like
to cooperate together in the future.
Although we
received positive messages and stories, it has been difficult to achieve more
impact. One of the lessons learnt is to build partnerships earlier on and
contact potential allies before the campaign starts. We contacted many
organizations and media, but response was weak due to start of summer holiday. However,
we were still able to find success. This was demonstrated by a popular LGBT
news website Queer.pl published the article about our campaign and we were
invited by girls’ magazine Girls’ Room to submit a blog post on the campaign.
As we hope for the campaign to continue, the promotion efforts don’t stop.
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