Transnationally Queer

Four Central European Men Between Nations and Sexualities, 1935-1956

Kamil Karczewski

“Transnationally Queer” follows the lives of four men from Warsaw over a period of two decades spanning the late 1930s in authoritarian Poland to the 1950s in the McCarthyist United States. What connects their stories is not only their common city of origin but the violent impact of Nazism that set all of them in tireless cross-border motion. They evaded fitting squarely into the hegemonic categories of nationality and sexuality prevalent at the time. They traversed political, national, and sexual borders challenging normative notions of identity. Their very recalcitrance, their unwillingness or inability to fit it, presents an opportunity for a historian to shed some new light on ways in which global migrations shaped the history of sexuality (and the other way around) in the twentieth century. To this end, this research project aims to supplement the sources that I have already gathered during the work on my PhD dissertation with critical materials from US archives. These should help to flesh out more fully the four life stories that span both shores of the Atlantic.

I believe that weaving together these four stories into one narrative allows me to explore and develop a more comprehensive, intersectional understanding of various linked aspects of mid-20th century migration, including sexual subjectivity, homophobia, and national identification. These men of different classes and backgrounds called into question dichotomous national and sexual categories. A closer look at their experiences offers unique opportunities for historical analysis of these categories’ fragile boundaries. Although the men had little choice when they were transported, imprisoned, or when they fled or migrated, their homosexual desire stood prominently among various motives that prompted their movements. And even in the situations of extremely limited freedom they used forced mobility to create new opportunities for themselves. At the same time, the institutions of heterosexual marriage and family made it easier for some of them to maintain a degree of social respectability and thus to move more easily between countries. In what ways might their sexual and national identifications have influenced their migrations? Did their social class and background (religious, ethnic, national) affect the way they conceptualized their sexuality? Finally, how did their experiences in their destinations (their cultures and legal frameworks) influence the men’s sexual subjectivities