This isn’t my first blog.

That’s a bit of an understatement. My blog (in Polish) about my depression can still be found somewhere in the depths of the internet. My political blog (in Polish) used to attract hundreds of readers. My comedy political blog (in Polish) became so popular it got quoted by Polish press, except they haven’t noticed it was meant to be a joke; when I was accused of spreading hate-speech, I closed it down. I’ve had a blog on my portfolio site but I could never decide what to write about there, so it died a quiet death.

I still have three blogs, two of them in Polish. One is more or less on extended hiatus. Another, heteroseksualisci.blox.pl is me being really nasty towards poor little Polish heterosexuals and their funny problems. (Most of them along the lines of “is it normal if my husband sits down when he’s taking a pee” and “can I get infected with homosexuality if I saw Elton John on the telly”.) And now this one. Yes, I do have the attention span of a fruit fly and yes, I am a multiple dater. How did you know?

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I decided to come out, so to say, and show myself as the author of this blog because my friend, Trekker, has been asked by a Polish paper to be featured in a webcast about a gay portal he is co-authoring and found the decision very difficult. Of course, I realise that living in Poland makes being out somehow more difficult (see part I of this post). On the other hand, the journalist writing the article was being understanding, so he offered to film Trekker in a dark room, with his voice electronically altered and face pixellated. The idea sounded awful. Yet I couldn’t really condemn him, because I remembered myself being interviewed by Newsweek Poland about being gay and not wanting my face to be shown next to the article either; at the end they picked up a photo where my eyes were obscured by a hat I was wearing. People from my old job recognised me… and congratulated me on being so brave. But was I really?

For the entire week the issue remained on the newstands I was constantly afraid of being recognised on the street and having shit beaten out of me. Nothing such has happened; the photograph was at least partly obscured and people who didn’t know me personally didn’t care who was on the picture. But I’ve had reasons to be afraid.

Fast forward to… yesterday, November 26, 2008. A gay couple — the first celebrity gay couple in Poland — gets an award for “Couple of the year” from Polish edition of Gala. Polish TV transmits the ceremony live. After the show a famous Polish journalist, Wojciech Reszczynski publishes an article in which he writes that showing a gay couple and giving them an award (voted by the readers of Gala) is against the law which states that programs broadcasted by Polish public TV need to respect the Christian value system. The executive director of the TVP2 channel is asked to explain the “promotion of deviations” in front of the director board of the Polish TV.

I’ll keep you posted about who gets fired and for what — and about Trekker becoming famous (or not).

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Last night, for the first time in my life, I did something that straight people normally practise every other day starting from the age of 13: I made out with a boy on a busy tram stop. For 10 minutes we kissed (mmm, tongue piercings are… interesting). Most people ignored us; some boys beeped a car horn and whistled. Nobody called us names (unless they did it very quietly and only in languages I do not speak).

Most of my Polish gay friends will never see what the appeal of kissing in public is; mostly because in Poland you’d have to be suicidal to try that. I’ve had wood planks and beer cans thrown at me for holding hands with another guy; once my partner texted me, at 1am, 45 minutes after we split and went our separate ways, “don’t be nervous, everything is OK, but I got beaten up”. A group of football hooligans followed us when we walked through the city holding hands; they picked him as their target because my bus arrived first and I got in.

Yes, you might say that I am not proud to be Polish. And that for the first year here I felt like I was a political asylum seeker.

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I am changing. It is a process which has started when I changed my name legally in May 2006. Then I decided to move to the Netherlands, found a job, moved here (this sounds so much simpler than it actually was), rented an apartment in the Red Light District (quite an eye-opening experience, that). Split with my boyfriend. Got a knee injury which kept me out of more or less any action for three months. Recovered. Dated. Broke hearts. Got heartbroken. Met people who were so fucked up I started feeling positively normal in comparison. Met people whose sex lives made me feel virginal and Victorian. Met people who became my friends.

The journey continues.

And I will be writing about it, but in much shorter posts, I promise.

Taking a short break from writing this post at my hotel room, Nov 2008

(Originally written on November 19, 2008.)

I used to idolise flying completely and utterly. My stepfather used to work at the Warsaw Airport and he was a demigod in my eyes when he would bring a napkin with the LOT logo or plastic spoons or a pen. I thought, beaming with pride: this is my daddy and he works with PLANES. They FLY. By association I almost expected him to be able to fly as well, and without the need to use an actual aeroplane for that.

Then when I was on my first flight — Warsaw-Amsterdam if I recall correctly (see? I can’t even recall what flight it was so blase I became) I was ecstatic. I was about 21, and about to take off from the ground. Before the start I overheard a conversation; apparently the day before a flight from the US was so turbulent the people talking about it were certain they would die. That didn’t make me feel much more calm, as you probably imagine. But the flight went — just like all my subsequent flights — without any troubles.

The most exciting stuff I have ever encountered on a plane was the stewardess telling us to sit down (everybody was sitting anyway) and lock our seatbelts due to turbulences. A moment later we flew into a thunderstorm. Rain and thunders hit the wings (at least that’s how it looked) and… not much happened really. There was a bit of turbulence, not enough to spill my coffee. And that was it.

Nowadays I am bored with flying before I even leave for the airport. The excitement reaches about as far as making sure my passport hasn’t jumped out of the bag, but this time I was so blase about it I only checked once instead of the five times required by law. Despite that I arrived safe and sound. On the plane I had a conversation with my neighbour, a lovely lady around 40, back from her trip to Ecuador. I thought about whether it would be a sensible thing to tell her I don’t actually believe planes can fly, but decided not to.

Confession: yes, I meant what I just said — I do not believe planes can actually fly, despite having flown at least 30 times (I lost count). They’re too big and too heavy, and they have loads of people inside. They can’t fly. I studied mathematics (this is the moment when my degree should get revoked) and it’s just logical that planes can’t fly. Now teleportation — THAT seems perfectly plausible. If we can access wireless internet through 3G more or less everywhere in order to check if there are new articles on dlisted.com, I can’t see why we wouldn’t be able to teleport. (Duh.)

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I am at a four star hotel in Birmingham. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about the city and what I have seen so far looks fantastic. (I know that this is because I have only seen the city centre, but I’m going to stay here for two days and I’m here for a training course, not to write a book about all hidden mysteries of Birmingham.) The hotel, in particular… There is a major difference in what 110 pounds a day gives you in London and Birmingham. My room is HUGE. In London the room was more of a closet size, this room would acomodate at least five guests if I found it fitting to have a small party. The bed, in particular, is GIANT, very very very comfy and it’s almost a shame I decided not to look for any man to man action here, as it would, no doubt, have been reeeeeally good.

(Oh, and this time I do have a bathtub. I could spend the evening watching The L Word, but I forgot to copy the DVDs to my DVD-less laptop, so it’s not quite going to happen.)

I love the contrast between the way I look, the way I live and the way I am treated right now; it must almost look like some kind of fashion shoot, one of those far too contrived, ironic sessions, when I lie on this giant bed, surrounded by plushy curtains, in my giant room, wearing boxers and socks and nothing else; the punky tattooed boy with his nipple piercings, stuck in the luxury he doesn’t feel he belongs at, listening to Saint Etienne from his iphone, drinking coffee and a protein shake simultaneously. There is something so fundamentally wrong with this picture. And yet it is, indeed, me; far, far away from Poland, from the boy who got his first job as an assistant of a designer, paid pennies under the table so his boss could avoid taxes, doing amazing tasks such as cleaning the cat pee, carrying disks to a print shop and back, calling couriers and sending spam mails to hundreds of companies suggesting that perhaps they would like to get a new website.

I am 31 and I do not regret any step in the journey that brought me here.

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I feel so international.

I get this strange confused feeling when I travel to England because at home English is used everywhere but as a second language, and here it is the main, first language, and somehow that makes me feel as if everybody was a tourist, including hotel clerks. Then I go back home, where I am working with people from 27 or so nationalities and dating and befriending people of all races from all continents. In a way, this is the life I have dreamt of.

In Warsaw everybody looks, acts and talks the same, and my friends were recruited from the small group of outcasts and weirdos that didn’t fit. Strangely, about half of my friends in Poland suffered from depression, including, well, myself. (As I wrote this sentence, I wondered if the “strangely” bit at the beginning isn’t just me being a hypocrite. I know damn well why they suffered; I know why I suffered.) I would sit at home wishing that I could meet people I saw in the movies; people that didn’t look so… Polish. People who were not catholics or homophobes; people who spoke English. I started associating English with sexiness and found out that I prefer to have sex in English, so to say.

I was extremely excited when I travelled abroad for the first time. I was, of course, dead scared as well; I had no idea if I’d be able to communicate with my internet friends in real life, I didn’t know if my English was good enough, I was scared to get lost at the airport. Nothing such happened. Then we went on our way from the airport and I couldn’t stop myself from gasping at the sight of everything and everyone; people of all races, nationalities, speaking more than one language (none of them being Polish). I was in heaven. (Coincidentally, is anyone really surprised that I fancy black men? We simply don’t get those in Poland.)

The thing that I love about Amsterdam the most is the incredible variety; it’s the whole melting pot of humans that is the sexiest thing about the city. You never know who you are going to meet next. You never know what they’re going to show you or talk to you about; where they took their holiday snaps; what are their hidden abilities they might share with you. The cultural differences, that most people dread, are — to me — the stuff that dreams are made of. I crave them. Whenever I find out that someone acts different to what I expected (unless that someone is someone I am dating and they’re lying to me, but I don’t think any culture is free of that kind of, erm, difference) I am thrilled. In that aspect I am the perfect fodder for the Stuff White People Like blog; I like discovering food, drinks, thoughts, rituals, dances, melodies, spices, kisses…

The things that I miss about Warsaw are, mostly, my family and friends. Yes, I am making new friends here, but it does take a while — and I don’t make friends too easily. As for family, well, what can I say. They’re in Poland. I am here. But, at risk of sounding heartless, I don’t miss them enough to even consider going back. It would kill my soul. It almost did. I suffered from depression for two years.

I remember listening to a radio show somewhere in 2005; the topic of discussion was the discrimination of heterosexuals. They were, you see, repressed in Poland because they couldn’t beat up gays. That was the public radio, with callers on the air, working in cooperation with one of the biggest weeklies in the country. I remember playing fussball with my coworkers, giving my “teammate” a hug at the end and then finding out that after I went home he’s been asking everyone nervously whether I am gay — as if that hug could have infected him somehow. (He wasn’t even my type. His flatmate, on the other hand, oooh, I would.) I remember writing an article which was later published by the international Lambda magazine about the gay parade in Poznan which was declared illegal, then the people who gathered anyway were beaten up by the police and arrested. That wasn’t in the sixties. That was three years ago.

Resolution: continue travelling.