Paper short abstract:

This presentation reflects on flows of expert knowledge of queerness between the East and the West during the Cold War.

Paper long abstract:

In the West, there are "special magazines and clubs designated for homosexuals, along with profiled cafes, beaches and various associations", a Polish sexologist wrote in 1970. He also included a detailed description of US research on homosexuality that led to its depathologization. In this presentation, I reflect on flows of expert knowledge of queerness between the East and the West during the Cold War. With a special focus on sexology, I try to reconstruct how under the conditions of state socialism (censorship, closed borders, inability to self-organize) expert knowledge of queerness was transmitted and what this meant. I ask, how was this knowledge produced and exchanged beyond borders? Who were the experts and what were their sources of information? What did expert knowledge mean to queer subjects? Was it oppressive, or did it contribute to the emancipatory transformation of queer lives by telling stories of queer life in other contexts? What is the meaning of past networks and flows to today's construction of queer expert knowledge? And finally, how can we, as anthropologists, contribute to the project of discovering past queer knowledge?

This presentation is based on my ethnographic and archival research focused on expert knowledge of homosexuality in Poland. My research is part of the multidisciplinary international HERA research project entitled, Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures, which centers on queer social, artistic, intellectual and sexual cultures from the time of the sexual revolution to the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS in Europe.