ABSTRACT
In Poland, reparative therapy (i.e. sexual reorientation) evolved as a political project at the beginning of the 2000s. It occupied an almost hegemonic discursive position, dominant in both the conservative and the liberal Catholic press, and spreading its influence onto secular media outlets. This paper focuses on the press coverage of the reparative approach's rise and fall, offering an analysis inspired by the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Between 2002 and 2003, the configuration of discursive forces enabled a discursive formation composed of various subject positions that drew on available symbolic resources (Christian ‘care’ for homosexual people, family values, national values), promoting the idea of ‘treating’ homosexuality. Discourses about reparative therapy also became part of political struggles important for Polish democracy as a whole and debates such as those about membership in the European Union. This vitalized the articulation of the LGBT community and their counter positions, which were framed in terms of difference or similarity to religion. Subsequent antagonistic struggles have disrupted the hegemony of reparative therapy supporters. Although the liberal press, both secular and Catholic, now distance themselves from reparative therapy, the antagonism between the LGBT community and religion still dominates the discursive field.
Reparative therapy is a method that pathologizes homosexuality and claims to ‘treat’ it; it has drawn public attention in many countries in which movements for sexual emancipation have gained political significance. In this article, I refer to the press coverage on reparative therapy and discuss the rise and fall of this therapy as a political project that achieved an almost hegemonic position at the beginning of the 2000s in Poland. At the analytical level, I draw inspiration from the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) and I set the reparative therapy project within the discursive field's dynamic structure, which is governed by antagonistic struggles between competing articulations. By focusing on conditions that first enabled the growth and subsequently the decrease in importance of the reparative project, I show the conflictual and relational nature of the (trans)formation of subject positions such as the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ or the ‘LGBT community’.1 Furthermore, I demonstrate that debates about reparative therapy served as a platform for the articulation of fundamental concerns about Polish post-communist democracy, in particular those referring to Poland's relationship with the European Union (EU) and religion's influence on state policies.
My analysis of the press coverage on reparative therapy draws on articles and press notes gathered in the Polish Central Archives of Modern Records (covering between 1990 and 2009; collection taken over from Polish Public Television), in all archive units referencing Poland and labeled with the term homosexuality. The collection encompasses texts published in national and local dailies, as well as weeklies. It is not digitalized, hence it does not allow for providing statistical data on the analyzed material. Out of 1863 items gathered in the archive units of my interest, about 80 refer more or less explicitly to the reparative approach. For each of those, I identified communicating subjects and argumentative structures that they employed. I also followed traces of antagonistic struggles that involved various socio-political actors and relied on symbolic resources most commonly activated by the debate (e.g. national values, family values, democratic values).
I refer to a variety of press titles. These are traditionalist Catholic newspapers and magazines (mainly Nasz Dziennik and Fronda) and journals published by the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ (Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, Więź).2 ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ is a term used in Poland for the Catholic milieu that has arisen from the Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia that were set up in several Polish cities during communism.3 The clubs disseminated information about Vatican II decisions among Polish Catholics and became widely known as promoters of the concept of aggiornamento standing for the adjustment of the church's message to contemporary cultural conditions. I also refer to socio-political magazines (Wprost, Newsweek, Polityka), the largest opinion-leading dailies (Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita – the former left-liberal, the latter center-right), and other newspapers that are mainly, though not exclusively, circulated nationwide.
When referring to sexual reorientation therapy, I employ the term reparative therapy as it has been most commonly used within Polish debates. It denotes any therapeutic attempt to change a person's desire from homosexual to heterosexual. In different cultural contexts, particularly in the US, other terms are also in use, for instance sexual conversion therapy. Slight differences in their meaning may be discerned: while sexual conversion therapy has some religious connotations, the term reparative therapy suggests a linkage to an ‘objective’, scientific approach. In the Polish context, both terms are used interchangeably, with a priority given to reparative therapy. In Poland, this term is implicitly linked to religion for it has entered the Polish discursive space as a proposal endorsed in Catholic circles.
Theoretical background
In the social sciences, the discussion of sexual reorientation therapy follows two interconnected strands of inquiry. The first strand addresses social circles of therapy participants, as well as their personal experiences and narratives. The second line of inquiry focuses on the discourses constructed by therapeutic ministries and their supporters, as well as their relationship with discourses produced by other social actors, for instance, politicians. Related research was mainly conducted in the United States, as explored below.
The researchers that represent the first approach, that is, those interested in personal experiences and narratives, perceive these as mirroring individuals’ efforts to manage their religiosity and sexuality in line with the heterosexual norm (Wolkomir 2006). They also demonstrated a kinship of reparative narratives and conversion narratives typical of religious movements, as well as self-help narratives promoted by the therapeutic industry (Erzen 2006) including those of Alcoholics Anonymous (Ponticelli 1999). Whereas scholars focusing on reparative discourse have pointed to its anti-feminist agenda (Robinson and Spivey 2007) and its similarity to the queer theoretical perspective that de-essentializes gay identity but seeks to achieve totally different political goals (Gerber 2008). Robinson and Spivey (2007) also noted the global dissemination of the reparative movement and its ability to adapt its conceptual framework to local cultural contexts. In this paper, I build on this observation by focusing on how reparative therapy has functioned within Polish public discourse, what symbolic contents it has drawn on, and how it has become part of political struggles that are of fundamental importance for Polish democracy as a whole. At the same time, I follow the line of reasoning outlined by Tina Fetner (2008), who studied the mutual relationships between the religious right in the United States and the American gay and lesbian movement. She demonstrated that over the years each have been modifying their strategies and specific goals according to their opponents’ modifications. The promotion of reparative therapy by the US religious right at the end of the 1990s played an important role in this development: it strongly influenced the gay and lesbian movement's rhetoric and the issues at which the movement targeted its activism.
The discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) provides the tools for continuing Fetner's approach to exploring the dynamic nature of subject positions’ formations. Laclau and Mouffe establish an anti-essentialist framework for analyzing social reality: social actors are not conceptualized as stable entities that aim to actualize their defined interests, but rather the center of analysis is the concept of antagonism that denotes the irreducible point at which competing articulations clash. According to this perspective not rational actors produce articulations, but articulation practices construct social identities and relations between actors. The discursive construction of identities implies that meaning, which is established by referencing other identities, is constantly open to change and always temporary and incomplete. That is why Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 115) do not speak about identities, but instead use the notion of subject positions. Accordingly, I refer to subject positions – such as the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ and ‘LGBT community’ – in scare quotes to convey their non-essentialist nature in this paper.
Subject positions compete for hegemony over interpretative schemes of the common good and social harm. Articulation practices, due to which subject positions emerge, operate mainly according to the logic of difference, which consists of the demarcation of the antagonistic Other, and the logic of equivalence, which consists of building a chain of equivalence, that is, of similarities between various subject positions (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 127–134). Subject positions achieve significance through their sharp differentiation from the Other and the designation of their equivalents. Thus the successful articulation by reparative therapy supporters depends on their ability to define their enemies (the logic of difference) and build alliances with the widest possible spectrum of those who for various reasons may feel close to reparative proposals (the logic of equivalence). The reparative project may achieve importance by being articulated through the formation of subject positions (i.e. positions temporarily equivalent by their adherence to this project, e.g. ‘Catholic intelligentsia’, ‘conservatives’) that have managed to gain public attention due to their linkage to signifiers (such as the EU, democracy, family) referred to by different articulations.
In what follows, I present reparative therapy as a project that has been successful in attracting public attention and mobilizing the (trans)formation of important subject positions (‘Catholic intelligentsia’, ‘LGBT community’) at the beginning of the 2000s in Poland. Additionally, I show the temporality of the discursive formation that is bound by the common adherence to the reparative therapy project and the permanency of struggles that shape power relations in the discursive, socio-political field. I do it in two steps. First, I elaborate on the emergence and the rise of the reparative project in Poland and second, I discuss the project's decline.
The emergence and the rise of the reparative project
The idea of ‘treating’ homosexuality, driven by either religious or medical motivations, was not publicly debated in Poland under the communist regime. Both weak gay and lesbian organizing and the poor media coverage of any societal phenomena linked to homosexuality gave no impulse for religious circles’ interest in the issue. Sexologists, in line with medical recommendations of the time, offered techniques to ‘treat’ homosexuality, such as ‘aversion therapy’; however, they never set up a significant therapeutic industry targeting homosexual people. In the last two decades of communism, they rather presented the view that homosexuality should be depathologized and underlined the need to increase societal acceptance of gay people (Kościańska 2014). Careful reading of the press of this period reveals both traces of the discursive pathologization and criminalization of homosexuality and efforts made by some columnists of socio-cultural magazines of the 1980s to prove that homosexual people, although ‘different’ in their sexual behaviors, are in fact the same as the rest of society (Fiedotow 2012). Nevertheless, state control of the media was followed by a restrictive law on associations that did not allow a variety of standpoints on homosexuality to fully manifest themselves publicly and interact with each other.
The fall of communism in 1989 meant that the previously hegemonic political project lost its plausibility. Under democratic conditions, new articulations were dynamically constructed, new subject positions emerged and new hegemonic formations constituted themselves. The Roman Catholic Church, perceived as the winner in the fight against communism, occupied an important place within this structure. Still, throughout the 1990s, the layout of discursive forces was highly unstable. Gay people started to organize themselves in groups and associations, yet they were among many people who had decided to use their new democratic freedom that way, and thus did not meet any significant support or resistance. This was especially so since at that time gay groups operated in niches and focused rather on community actions than on political campaigning.
The press of the 1990s was not particularly interested in homosexuality and was not consistent in discussing issues related to it. Catholic titles presented the most stable views: they referred to the church officials’ statements and Vatican documents, and in line with these they promoted the vision of homosexuality as an ‘unnatural phenomenon’ that threatens ‘family values’. Even in Catholic newspapers, however, one could find criticism of the church's attitude toward homosexual people (Gałuszka 1997) and voices from gay Christians distancing themselves from the church's stance (Makowski and Strzałka 1999). The mainstream press referenced homosexuality more often by providing news from abroad – mainly about gay pride parades or legislative developments that granted more freedom to homosexual people – than by discussing the gay community in Poland. Still, usually in a neutral tone, it did comment on newly established Polish gay organizations, including the Group of Lesbian and Gay Christians, whose participants tried to combine their homosexual activity with religious engagement (Fabjański 1998). From time to time, newspapers questioned church teachings on homosexuality (Pospiszyl 1995), although it also happened that they supported the church's positions, as exemplified by an article published in Gazeta Wyborcza that praised an American community of gay Catholics for adhering to the Vatican's call for chastity (Gomola 1993).
The first to present the objectives of religiously motivated reparative therapy were columnists of the Fronda magazine, who had intellectual ambitions to comment on the most topical developments within Christianity and who ran a program on state-run television (1994–2001). They addressed youth by combining countercultural esthetics with traditionalist views. In 1995, they published a chapter from the book Homosexuality and Hope by Gerard van den Aardweg (1985), a therapist recognized as an expert in reparative circles abroad (cf. Robinson and Spivey 2007), in which the author confronted claims about the innate nature of homosexuality. In 1999, by bringing out the whole book in Polish, they made their audience aware of the existence of a therapeutic proposal aimed at ‘treating’ homosexuality.
Thus, reparative therapy entered the Polish public space as a proposal articulated by those who used post-communist conditions to access the latest Christian trends from abroad, in an effort to maintain the vitality of the Catholic religion in Poland. However, it was not until 2002 that the reparative project became strongly linked to various important components of the discursive field (subject positions, such as ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ or the institutional church, and signifiers, such as Christian ‘care’ for people) and, by constructing relationships of similarity and difference with these, managed to gain significance. In 2002, Rzeczpospolita published an article about the Poznań Archbishop Juliusz Paetz and presented evidence that he had sexually harassed subordinate seminarians (Morawski 2002). This initiated a public debate on scandals concealed by the Roman Catholic Church. Under media pressure, Paetz resigned from his position as archbishop and acquired the status of archbishop emeritus. Nevertheless, his acts have never been subject to either secular or church court proceedings. Since the Paetz case involved the homosexual practices of the clergy, they became an important focus for press comments. The editor-in-chief of Znak suggested there was a ‘homosexual lobby’ among the clergy, which was to stand for the network of priests bound by conspiracy of silence who supported each other in getting promotion (Bartosik 2002). The editor-in-chief of Więź called for a thorough discussion on homosexuality within the church (Nosowski 2002), and other representatives of the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ echoed this call.
The discussion took place in Tygodnik Powszechny. It was initiated by Adam Fons (2002a), which was probably a pseudonym; Fons revealed that he had ‘experienced homosexuality’4 himself. When sharing his experience, he directed criticism toward two different ways of dealing with homosexuality. On the one hand, he referred to the gay community and labeled them as ‘the victims’ trade union’ that used the argument about the existence of homosexual love to further their agenda. According to Fons, homosexual love is nothing but illusory, since it questions traditional values related to family life. Although Fons did not explicitly refer to the notion of equal rights, he strongly suggested that the equal rights approach cannot adequately respond to gay people's search for well-being. On the other hand, he distanced himself from what the church presented: ‘the negation of the phenomenon’ and the call to the heroism of chastity without showing the way to achieve it. As he presented his situation, neither the gay community nor the institutional church responded to his personal will for managing unwanted homosexual desire. However, after years of grappling with the problem, he had finally found the perfect solution: the reparative program designed by Richard A. Cohen, the author of the book Coming Out Straight, which was just about to be published in Polish. The program was implemented by the newly established Odwaga (Courage) group based in Lublin (Eastern Poland), which had arisen within the Light-Life Movement, one of the most popular Catholic initiatives for youth in Poland. Due to a workshop organized by the group, Fons realized that the ‘model of dysfunctional relationship with the same sex’ proposed by Cohen perfectly resonated with his own experience. However, as he pointed out, Odwaga was operating ‘solely due to the huge determination of two women’ and the support from the local archbishop. He lamented the fact that attempts to implement a similar therapeutic program in other dioceses had failed, and he pointed to the resistance from the church hierarchy as the main reason for the failure. Fons called for a change in attitudes within the church and he justified this call with the Vatican's Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons that recommended the development of ‘appropriate forms’ of ministries assisted by psychological sciences (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1986). He also referred to the Gospel and the scandal surrounding the Paetz case, with which he strengthened the topicality of his address:
Homosexuality is lying in our Church like Lazarus in the tomb. It is waiting for someone to hear ‘Take away the stone’ from Christ and to let them come out of the shadows of death. Perhaps the case of Archbishop Paetz would not have happened if […] in the Church there were people who follow the words Jesus uttered after Lazarus was raised: ‘Unbind him, and let him go’. It is not enough to move away the stone and experience the miracle of the raising. One needs also to be released from the burial robes, to be helped in independent walking. (Fons 2002a)
The discussion in Tygodnik Powszechny was continued. None of its partakers questioned the validity of reparative therapy. The main matters that needed settling were whether the time had already come to implement reparative programs in Poland and what the barriers for their implementation were. Representatives of gay organizations were not asked for their opinion; this did not come as a surprise, as these organizations had already been deprecated in the text initiating the debate with the label ‘victims’ trade union’. On top of this, in 2002 the voice of gay activists was barely audible in the public domain: the articles by Fons and Augustyn had been published before these activists started their wide advocacy for equal rights and the legal recognition of same-sex unions and before they organized their first large-scale billboard campaign in 2003 – Let Them See Us, a widely contested project that displayed gay and lesbian couples holding hands. Thus, the spokesperson of the Light-Life Movement contended that it was not the resistance from the church hierarchy which precluded the development of groups such as Odwaga, but the lack of people prepared to lead this kind of ministry (Jankowiak 2002). Meanwhile, Fons (2002b) put forward another argument for the importance of Odwaga's offer: the wide implementation of the reparative program would provide an alternative to the Group of Lesbian and Gay Christians, which, in his view, did not follow church teachings.
Furthermore, Tygodnik Powszechny gave its columns to editors of Więź, Katarzyna Jabłońska and Cezary Gawryś, who praised the therapeutic program by Odwaga for the response it provided to homosexuality, as it entirely complied with the catechetic recommendation to accept homosexual people ‘with respect, compassion, and sensitivity’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1997 , point 2358). The authors applauded the Archbishop of Lublin for supporting Odwaga, objected to Augustyn's view that the development of such an initiative was premature, and argued that the program offered by Cohen was an excellent proposal due to its difference to any proposals that demand ‘the Church's acceptance for the homosexual lifestyle’ (Jabłońska and Gawryś 2002). At about the same time, the authors published the Więź monographic issue (2002, no. 7) with pieces of reportage on Odwaga and various comments highly valuing the therapeutic program aimed at ‘treating’ homosexuality. Rzeczpospolita enthusiastically reviewed the issue (Czaczkowska 2002), and in the following year Tygodnik Powszechny warmly welcomed a book that reprinted the texts (Lubawski 2003).
The articulation by reparative therapy promoters emerged within a specific structure of discursive forces that ensured its strength. Those who initiated the communication constructed a solid difference to a few components of the discursive field: the institutional church, gay and lesbian organizations in general, and the Group of Lesbian and Gay Christians in particular. Among these, the institutional church was the most powerful actor at that time. The ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ drew on their image of aggiornamento supporters and presented itself as a reform movement within the church that aimed to confront the church's passivity exemplified by the Paetz case. They justified their promotion of ‘reparative therapy’ with a specific attitude of alleged openness that builds on ‘care’ for gay people and the catechetic formula for their respectful, compassionate, and sensitive treatment. While gay communities demanded more rights this attitude strengthened their othering.
For totally different reasons, conservative Catholic columnists immediately supported the idea of ‘treating’ homosexuality (Cegielska 2003; Dueholm 2003; Pabis 2004). They drew on the image of gay people as a threat to ‘family values’ and national unity. Both discursive figures had already been used within Polish debates. The former was employed in statements by church officials in the 1990s, and the latter gained its significance on the eve of the discussion in Tygodnik Powszechny. It was closely related to Poland's upcoming accession to the EU in 2004: conservatives posited the homosexual as the European Other that threatened Poland's sovereignty and national values, which were closely linked to the Catholic religion (Hall 2015a). Soon after Tygodnik Powszechny had disseminated the information about Odwaga, reparative therapy became intensively propagated by the Fronda milieu, the Nasz Dziennik daily, and magazines edited by conservative circles. In contrast to Tygodnik Powszechny, their articulation did not emphasize the catechetic formula for accepting homosexual people ‘with respect, compassion, and sensitivity’, but rather the vision of homosexuality as corruption, a disease to be healed in order to protect an endangered society (e.g. Dueholm 2003). Interestingly, traditionalist commentators, although concerned with underscoring the Catholic identity of the Polish nation, did not seem to have any problem with legitimizing reparative therapy by the reference to American ‘experts’ of evangelical Christian background, for example, Richard Cohen. Within Polish debates, the denominational difference of the main American promoters of the therapy has not been discussed.
The voices of conservative commentators harmonized with views presented by high officials within the church. In 2001, the Secretary of the Polish Episcopate publicly compared homosexuality to a contagious disease, which led him to suggest that openly gay teachers should not perform their profession and should be isolated (Graczyk 2001). In these circumstances, the promotion of reparative therapy by the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ – in opposition to the institutional church – lost its reformative potential and became a resource for conservative articulations. Thus, contrary to its initial intentions, by addressing the issue of homosexuality (i.e. an issue of growing public importance when Poland approached accession to the EU), and by suggesting ‘treatment’ to gay people the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ allied itself with conservative Catholics.
Gazeta Wyborcza, a daily considered left-liberal, also came close to the chain of equivalence that was composed of liberal and conservative Catholics, both of which supported reparative therapy. It published an article on the newest findings by the American psychiatrist Robert L. Spitzer, who provided evidence for the therapy's efficacy (Zagórski 2003). It is true that the author of the article mentioned controversies surrounding Spitzer's research methodology, and that the article was followed by comments from a renowned Polish sexologist who distanced himself from Spitzer's research, and a gay activist who warned against using Spitzer's findings to demand ‘treatment’ from homosexual people. Still, by giving the floor to Spitzer, Gazeta Wyborcza legitimated the therapy as a serious option.
At this point it is worth noting that Polish sexologists were not particularly active in the emerging discussions about reparative therapy. When asked by the press, individual experts and members of renowned professional associations opposed the idea to ‘treat’ homosexuality. However, at the beginning of the 2000s, Polish associations of sexologists, psychologists or psychiatrists did not issue any official statement rejecting the reparative approach and neither were they institutionally engaged in the debate. It was only after a few years that the Polish Sexological Association, under pressure from LGBT organizations, issued a document that opposed linking homosexuality to a disease. Still, the association did not make any effort to advertise the publication of the document (Kościańska 2014: 150).
During 2002–2003, reparative therapy emerged as a project with an almost hegemonic position within the discursive field. Its political importance was increasing: the idea of ‘treating’ homosexuality became voiced by the League of Polish Families, a political party promoting highly conservative views, at this time represented in the Polish parliament and supported by traditionalist press. In 2004, leaders of the party invited Richard Cohen to a conference on parliamentary premises. Additionally, they campaigned to make the teaching profession inaccessible to both homosexual people and those supporting same-sex civil unions, and proposed amendments to the Criminal Code so that it penalized public statements in favor of such unions (Kurowska 2004). Law and Justice, the biggest party in opposition to the left-wing government of 2001–2005, more or less openly supported these radical proposals while building its political strength on the societal reluctance toward gay people as well as on references to national and Christian values. During parliamentary debates on the never-enacted draft act on civil partnerships in 2004, an MP from Law and Justice claimed that the act ‘obviously contradicts the centuries-old Christian tradition of this country’ (Graczyk 2004), and he argued that homosexuality was a pathology and gay people should rather be given access to medical and psychological care than to legislative solutions sanctioning their partnerships. In 2005, after the national elections were won by Law and Justice, at which time the League of Polish Families was about to enter a governmental coalition, the press reported on the League's proposal for reparative therapy to be state-funded (MK, KB 2005).
The decline of the reparative project
The political proposals by the League of Polish Families have never been implemented. This is due to the fact that between 2002 and 2005 the discourse was subject to a significant reconfiguration elicited by two interconnected phenomena. First, LGBT organizations dynamically entered the discursive field focusing on LGBT rights. Second, the shift of conservative articulations to the hegemonic position, which resulted in the conservative composition of the Polish government in 2005, mobilized a strong resistance to change in the political arena.
The takeover of virtually the whole discourse on homosexuality at the beginning of the 2000s by the reparative therapy project was enabled by the lack of opponents. Although gay activists confronted the idea, at that time it was almost exclusively the niche media that published gay voices and commented on them. The International Lesbian and Gay Cultural Network in Poland notified the public prosecutor about the claims by the Secretary of the Polish Episcopate in 2001 that suggested a kinship between homosexuality and contagious disease. The prosecutor refused to initiate proceedings and it was only radically anti-clerical (AR 2001) and traditionalist (WM 2001) press that published any comment on the issue, both ridiculing their antagonists – the clergy and the gay community, respectively.5 The most categorical voice against the reparative project came from the gay activist and film critic Bartosz Żurawiecki. He directed his criticism toward the Więź issue of 2002, which was devoted to reparative therapy, and by employing a strong rhetoric he showed that the views on homosexuality presented by Więź were in fact a set of stereotypes driven by prejudice. Furthermore, he decidedly opposed the notion that gay people should be ‘cared for’ and he argued that the idea of mercifully dealing with gay people deprives them of their dignity and subjectivity, making it no less harmful than a regular condemnation. He concluded in a tone that perfectly conveys the character of his address:
Enough is enough. I'm banging my fist on the table. I do not wish guys in black, moronic politicians, and a fellow who looks like an unfulfilled masturbator to be experts on my feelings, my identity, and my sex. I can't bear them implying that I am suffering and adding misery to my biography. I do not suffer and there is nothing I lack in the pastures of the Lord. That is why – as a gay man, a Pole, a citizen, a taxpayer, etc., as an individual – I tell you one thing, my dear sermonizers, therapists, and veterans of the Holy Trinity Trenches. Fuck off! (Żurawiecki 2002: 20)
I know, and scientific evidence supports this, that what is unnatural and has a bad influence on the human psyche is celibacy. And the Primate […] lives in celibacy. Thus, his statements are not acceptable to me. These are words coming from a man who lives in celibacy and who should probably be subjected to some therapy, just as he tries to subject homosexual people to such therapies. (JK, JZ 2003)
How can you treat homosexuality, if you do not know its cause? You can brainwash them, you can try to reprogram them to have a heterosexual orientation, but this is no treatment. Slogans such as ‘Homosexuality should be treated’ are reminiscent of the massive re-education of citizens in totalitarian systems. (Lizut 2005)
What contributed most to the change in the articulation by the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ was that the main promoters of the reparative approach from the Więź milieu lost their belief in the therapy's efficacy. This happened in particular to Cezary Gawryś, who strongly distanced himself from the idea of ‘treating’ homosexuality after having cooperated with Odwaga for two years. He realized that the well-being of some of the reparative program participants had declined as a result of suppressing their homosexual desire, while other participants had found happy self-fulfillment within a sexually active same-sex relationship. He repented his former views and the fascination with Cohen's proposals (Gawryś 2007). Gawryś still has not retreated from the notion of Christian ‘care’ in his comments on gay people, which in light of the critique from Żurawiecki may be considered a highly problematic practice. However, his recent employment of the concept has little to do with how the call to ‘care’ functioned in 2002, when it was strongly linked to the reparative project and implicitly opposed to the equal rights approach. Nowadays, the ‘care’ voiced by Gawryś embraces support for LGBT activists’ demands, including those of the legal regulation of same-sex partnerships (Sporniak 2011).
Meanwhile, since about 2005 various mainstream media that are supportive of Poland's European integration have distanced themselves from the idea of protecting ‘Christian values’ (which are allegedly endangered by Poland's accession to the EU). In their opposition to conservative articulations, they have included the criticism of reparative therapy. Reparative therapy has become a very convenient signifier linked to the conservative project. It has proved easy to dismiss based on views by professional organizations of psychologists and psychotherapists; the press recalled statements by American professional associations, as well as the fact that homosexuality had been withdrawn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used in the US, and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems used in Europe. By referencing reparative therapy, the pro-European media could point to the narrow-mindedness of their opponents and parochialism of their views, and they willingly used the emergent discursive opportunity. They drew on scientific findings and reported on the shortcomings of the reparative approach (Reszka 2006; Zagórski 2009). Tygodnik Powszechny and other press linked to the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ followed this practice (Prusak 2009; Woleński 2005). Since that time, building on the atmosphere of the scandal, Gazeta Wyborcza has also reported on conferences in which foreign promoters of reparative therapy participated, especially when the conferences were organized by state-funded institutions. In 2009, under pressure from the newspaper, a conference with Paul Cameron, an American expert in the reparative approach, as a keynote speaker, took place in a Catholic retreat center instead of the assembly hall of one of Warsaw's universities (Wiśniewska 2009). In 2011 the Poznan University of Medical Sciences refused to host a similar event with Joseph Nicolosi, another American expert, as a special guest (Kędzierski 2011).
At the time when Gazeta Wyborcza decidedly opposed the reparative approach, the other most important daily – Rzeczpospolita – rather supported it, although maintaining the semblance of objectivity. For instance, it published an article by Grzegorz Górny (2007) of the Fronda milieu, who referred to numerous experts in the reparative approach and praised reparative therapy, and it gave space to Robert Biedroń (2007), the leader of the Campaign Against Homophobia, to denounce Górny's views. Nevertheless, Rzeczpospolita concluded the debate with a text confronting Biedroń's opinions (Dokowicz 2007). Within such discussions, the ‘LGBT community’ as a subject position crystallized. Biedroń drew on scientific findings to further his arguments, but his attack was not only on the scientific shortcomings of the reparative approach, but also on the Catholic Church as an institution (represented by Górny) that hinders tolerance in society by sticking to ‘superstition and prejudice’ (Biedroń 2007). Four years later, Biedroń won the parliamentary elections on behalf of the Palikot Movement party, which had built its political campaign on anti-clerical sentiments and the postulate of limiting the power of the Catholic Church in Poland, by which he reinforced the image of the ‘LGBT community’ as antagonistic to the church.
Today, the issue of reparative therapy has not entirely disappeared from press publications. From time to time the conservative press still suggests the possibility of ‘treating’ homosexuality. The church has never issued any official statement that endorses or rejects the approach but it happens that church officials have publicly presented their beliefs on the efficacy of reparative treatment (Sporniak 2014). On the other hand, newspapers and magazines occasionally publish information about the ongoing activity of reparative groups in Poland (Podgórska 2013), and – employing various strategies, including journalistic provocation (Gębura 2014) – they denounce how the therapeutic methods used by these groups are not consistent with psychological standards of treatment. A few reparative groups still operate and maintain websites with ‘testimonies’ from those who claim to have experienced the change in their sexual orientation.6 It is worth noting, however, that the actual development of the Polish reparative industry seems to be strikingly poor compared to what might have been expected from the fierce promotion of the therapy at the beginning of the 2000s. During my fieldwork among Polish LGBT Christians (Hall 2015b), I met several people, mostly women, who got inspired by the public debate and tried to contact reparative groups. However, they have never received any answer to their messages asking for help and guidance, which suggests a significant weakness at these groups’ organizational level, at least in how they address women.
Nevertheless, the issue of reparative therapy does not spark significant discussions anymore. Conservative publicists have changed their strategy and, instead of highlighting the value of a reparative approach, have attacked the so-called gender ideology (Grzebalska 2015). The attack builds on public unawareness of issues covered by ‘gender studies’, including the meaning of the notion of ‘gender’, and it involves criticism not only of gay people's political demands, but also of feminist postulates and efforts to introduce sexual education in schools. It is difficult to dismiss these attacks by reference to a defined authority, such as professional organizations of psychiatrists or psychologists. Since this change in focus, new discussions have emerged. What links them to the debates about reparative therapy is that they are still about the character of Polish democracy and the extent to which Christian perspectives and the institutional church can legitimately influence policy-making processes and govern the social order.
Conclusion
The reparative therapy project entered the Polish press as a proposal advocated by conservatives who were working toward maintaining the strength of the Catholic religion in post-communist Poland. However, it was not until 2002 that the project sparked a debate. This was as a consequence of a highly particular event, the sexual harassment scandal involving Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, which overlapped in time with the political struggles surrounding Poland's upcoming accession to the EU. The promotion of the therapy by Catholic circles was to prevent scandals such as that involving Paetz from occurring among the clergy and to help homosexual Catholics to find a comfortable space in the community of believers. However, due to its focus on ‘treating’ homosexuality, it appealed particularly to those who perceived homosexuality as a ‘disease’ and stigmatized gay people as the European Other that endangered Poland's national values, which were closely linked to its Christian heritage.
Within a very short time period, the reparative project managed to achieve an important position within the discursive field and revealed its hegemonic aspirations. For various reasons and in various ways, numerous social actors supported the therapy. The Catholic press that is considered liberal underscored the ‘care’ for homosexual people in their message. The Catholic press that is considered conservative, which mirrored the views of a significant share of the members of the Polish Episcopate, highlighted the need to resist homosexuality as a threat to the family and the religious values of Poles. The secular press legitimated the reparative approach by giving space to its promoters, which suggested their perspective should be taken seriously. At the same time, the therapy was not challenged by any opponent that was well positioned in the discursive field.
However, in subsequent years antagonistic struggles disrupted the chain of equivalence that had enabled the strong articulation by reparative therapy supporters. The change was linked to LGBT organizations’ emerging articulation, which emphasized their relationship of difference to the church. The change was also linked to the 2005 electoral success of conservative parties, which strengthened hostility between conservatives skeptical of the advantages of Poland's European integration (who referenced ‘Christian values’ in their policy-making) and pro-European liberals. The reparative therapy project had lost its opportunities for achieving hegemony. Now, it has been taken over by conservatives and has become strongly contested by the liberal media. Moreover, it has contributed to the antagonistic split between conservative Catholics (who still support the therapy) and the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ (who have rejected reparative ideas). The othering of the gay community by conservative social actors has been intensely opposed by liberal actors, who refer to conservatives’ belief in the efficacy of reparative therapy to highlight the backwardness and parochialism of conservative views.
The history of debates on the reparative therapy project in Poland points to the dynamism of the discursive field and the relational nature of subject positions’ formation and transformation. The ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ launched the promotion of the reparative approach in line with their self-positioning as a reformatory force within the Polish Catholic Church. However, the idea of ‘treating’ homosexuality triggered the constitution of a discursive formation dominated by articulations that did not challenge the institutional church in any way, and instead contributed to the othering of gay people as a threat to Poles’ values on the eve of Poland's accession to the EU. Due to that, the articulation by the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ began to resemble highly conservative articulations. This in turn enabled the articulation of the ‘LGBT community’ within an unambiguous opposition to the church, whose various fractions had been symbolically glued together by the reparative therapy project. In the 2000s, the ‘LGBT community’ constituted itself as an anti-church movement. But in the 1990s, before ‘reparative therapy’ was debated, there were possibilities to build the subject position indicative of gay people on ideas presented by the Group of Lesbian and Gay Christians, who criticized the official church stance on homosexuality but still wished to stay within the church. Nevertheless, this group was othered by ‘reparative therapy’ promoters and it disappeared from the press. From that point in time onwards, newspapers focused on reinforcing the discursive polarization between religion and LGBT issues. This polarization still dominates the discourse, despite the fact that the ‘Catholic intelligentsia’ has shifted toward more gay-friendly positions in recent years.
Using the example from Poland, this paper also shows that public debates engage a multitude of signifiers at the same time: they are not only about homosexuality or religion, but rather about homosexuality and religion and their related symbolic values (family values, national values, etc.). Furthermore, they point to unsettled issues of fundamental importance for democracy, such as the scope of the state's dependence on international political structures and the scope of religion's (in particular the church's) influence on policy-making processes. Debates such as the one about reparative therapy define lines of conflict and distribute the power used for hegemonic operations. In Poland, this power has been distributed in such a way that conservative articulations, although permanently challenged and contested, dominate competing political proposals. This brings real-life consequences to gay people, who still cannot enjoy legal equality, at least as far as their partnerships are concerned.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dorota Hall, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and sociologist, an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, and the vice-president of the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association (ISORECEA). Her current research interests focus on religion, gender, sexuality and emotions. In 2016, she published a book, Searching for a Place: LGBT Christians in Poland (in Polish), which combines discourse analysis with intersectional analysis based on ethnographic research.
Footnotes
Since reparative therapy addresses specifically (male) homosexuality, in this paper, I refer to gay people when speaking of those targeted by the therapy and referred to by related discussions. I use the LGBT acronym with reference to organizations or the community self-defined in that way. The acronym, standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, has entered the Polish discursive space after 2003, when the movement for sexual emancipation managed to attract public attention.
Since too much nuance is lost if press titles are translated from Polish to English, I resigned from providing the translation.
The Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia gathered people of significant cultural capital who were distanced from communism and drew on the ethos of intelligentsia developed in the nineteenth century. This ethos encompassed responsibility for a complex education of those belonging to lower social strata.
All quotes offered in this paragraph, marked by inverted commas, come from the Fons’ article. Since the Central Archive for Modern Records does not provide information on pages on which articles were published, I am not able to refer to exact pages. For the same reason, I am not referring to pages when quoting other articles in subsequent parts of the paper.
In the Polish press, authors of short articles do not provide full names – the texts are signed only with initials. The full names of these authors were not available to me, so they are cited using the initials, in this instance and throughout the article.
For example, Odwaga: http://www.odwaga.oaza.pl/; Pascha: http://pascha.pl/.