[URBAN NOTE] "A Gay Mayor in Poland? No Big Deal"

[rfmcdonald]

The election of Polish GLBT activist Robert Biedroń as mayor of the medium-sized Polish city of Słupsk got a fair amount of international coverage, including from the The New York Times' Rick Lyman.

In the end, the fact that Robert Biedron is one of Poland’s most prominent gay-rights activists seemed to play almost no role in his election as the new mayor of Slupsk, a conservative city of 97,000 near the Pomeranian coast.

“There is no reason to think that Mr. Biedron’s private life was an advantage, but it looks like it wasn’t a disadvantage, either,” said Jaroslaw Flis, a sociologist and political commentator. “Sexual orientation didn’t matter for the voters in Slupsk.”

[. . .]

“Poland is not the most progressive European country, of course, on this issue,” Mr. Biedron said Tuesday in an interview. “There is a lot of conservatism and homophobia and prejudice. But Poland is also on the track to change. The lesson of tolerance is being learned, and Polish society is changing.”

Mr. Biedron, 38, was the country’s first openly gay member of Parliament and is now its second openly gay mayor. The first, Marcin Nikrant, 26, was elected in 2011. He runs a relatively tiny village of 1,500 residents and, though not in the closet, was not as openly gay in his community as Mr. Biedron is.

“Of course they knew I am gay, because everyone in Poland knows that I’m gay,” Mr. Biedron said of the voters on Tuesday. “But it did not matter. In the campaign, none of the seven candidates tried to use it as a tool against me, not even the right-wing ones.”