Birbeck Institute for Social Research
Winter Colloquium
Beyond the Pink Curtain?
Eastern European Sexualities, Homophobia and Western Eyes. 22nd Jan. 2010
Despite knowing very little about Eastern European Sexualities, I attended this Colloquium owing to a particular Paper being presented by Anna Gruszczynska of Aston University, Birmingham. The abstract stated:
Tearing down the Walls, Building up Hope: the Involvement of the Metropolitan Community Church in Promoting Eastern European LGBT Rights
The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), founded in 1968 in LA, is an international fellowship of Christian congregations (currently 250 member congregations in 23 countries) that has a special affirming ministry with LGBT communities. This paper looks at the MCC Eastern European Initiative, a ten-year project launched in 2006, the goal of which is to offer support to local LGBT communities, as well as to plant new MCC churches in Eastern Europe. For instance, as part of that initiative, MCC has supported the efforts of the Romanian activists to hold gay prides in Bucharest, Romania, and has assisted activists in Chisinau, Moldova in their efforts to organize a demonstration on behalf of the local LGBT community. Church leaders involved in the Eastern European Initiative have also travelled to Latvia, Poland and Bulgaria, where they participated in pride marches and held public MCC worship services. While there is an ongoing scholarly interest in LGBT communities in Eastern Europe, including scholarly works which look into the involvement of Western activist discourses on local LGBT communities, none of this work addresses the potential impact of the activities of international LGBT Christian movements, such as MCC. While certainly a worthwhile project, the Eastern European initiative raises a number of questions that have not been addressed. To start with, in the context of the initiative, what are the discourses of Eastern Europe that MCC is advancing? The official web site of the initiative promises to offer support to "fledgling LGBT communities in countries which continue to emerge from the repression of the former Soviet Union", which raises further questions about the ways in which the project perpetuates the Western/Eastern divide and local/global tensions with regard to LGBT activism. And finally, how do the "fledgling LGBT communities" themselves perceive the involvement of MCC especially in the context where religion is almost unanimously associated with homophobic statements of powerful church authorities?
Her presentation was supported by extracts from specific blogs from the main MCC web site, to illustrate the cultural relativity of their interpretation being dependant on the geographical location (East or West) of the reader. It was a new experience for me to engage in a discussion with a significant number of East Europeans and Britons/Europeans, on the ideology, strategy and religious practices of MCC as a global denomination.
Part of the context of the Colloquium was the following query - "What are the specificities and particularities of Central and Eastern European identities, within the region and compared with Western and other non-Western formations?" After listening to papers addressing the regulation of intimate citizenship in Bulgaria, Serbian discourses on human rights and sexualities within EU integration, the temporalities of LGBT and queer politics in Poland and in the 'West' and lastly British and Polish Discourses about 'Homophobic Central and Eastern Europe' I had my own question, which I posed during the afternoon deliberations. In acknowledging Western traditions of demonstrating 'gay pride' through street parades, for example, I queried what were the indigenous expressions of LGBT Pride in specific Eastern European countries. One response was most telling - not 'pride' but 'anger'. Truly a very thought provoking day that has implications for MCC's outreach in Jamaica and Caricom.