In March 1983, the Austrian homosexual organization HOSI (Homosexuelle Initiative) began publishing a bulletin—essentially a zine—addressed to queer audiences behind the Iron Curtain. It sought to circulate information on gay issues, foster cross-border contacts, and mobilize readers politically. Initially appearing in four languages (Czech, German, Hungarian, and Polish), the zine soon became Polish-only under the editorship of Andrzej Selerowicz, a Polish immigrant based in Vienna, becoming the first Polish gay print magazine after 1945. The archive that grew out of the publication, including reader correspondence, constitutes a unique body of sources on the emergence of LGBT activism in East-Central Europe and forms the core of Bewegende Begegnungen (“Moving Encounters”).

Magda Wlostowska faced an uneasy task with her work—one that every PhD researcher dreads. Before she had defended her doctoral dissertation of which the book grew out, Łukasz Szulc had published a monograph on a strikingly similar topic (Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines; Palgrave, 2017). Both works drew on largely the same sources from HOSI Wien archive and adopted similar methodological perspectives. And Szulc's book is good.

Yet, several years later, Wlostowska has also made a successful intervention, approaching the subject in her own way. In her work, she introduces new analytical angles, engages polemically with Szulc and other scholars, and broadens the interpretative horizon of the field. Bewegende Begegnungen follows the development of LGBT movement in Poland from the informal community-building initiatives in the early 1980s to fully fledged political campaigns in the 2000s. At the center of Wlostowska's study are printed gay-lesbian magazines, as was the case with Szulc's book. Wlostowska does a slightly better job than Szulc in contextualizing the subject by presenting its political and social background, and in relating it to the developments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Even so, the transnational perspective in both books remains limited: Poland's queer history stays at the center, and the opportunity to make the transnational itself the primary object of analysis is largely missed. What emerges is comparison rather than an integrated cross-border narrative, as the presence of transnational actors does not, in itself, constitute a transnational perspective.

The carefully constructed contextualization allows Wlostowska to trace the influence of HOSI and Andrzej Selerowicz on Poland's gay community, chiefly through the Biuletyn (later renamed Etap). Where Szulc presents the publication as the primary trigger of LGBT+ activism in Poland, Wlostowska argues that its impact depended on pre-existing readiness—individuals prepared to act when the opportunity arose (108). She further shows that, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, independent initiatives had already emerged in the 1980s, outside Vienna-based activism, suggesting that the moment was ripe for gay movements across communist East-Central Europe and that Selerowicz's zine functioned more as a facilitator than a catalyst (93).

Where Szulc's analysis ends with the formation of the first official and unofficial gay and lesbian groups and magazines in Poland, Wlostowska follows these developments into the 1990s and 2000s, a period marked by the “Europeanization, professionalization, diversification, and politicization” of queer press and activism. This extended chronology allows her to draw on a broader press corpus and to trace longer term transformations.

Wlostowska compellingly argues that over these three decades there was not only a West–East flow of ideas but also a significant East–East exchange (123–124), often more reciprocal and bidirectional than the former. The book implies that it is reductive to see Eastern queers primarily as victims of Western cultural imperialism, gay identity proselytizing, or a western-driven “civilizational mission.” The asymmetries between the two were often less a matter of cultural domination than of structural inequality: economic deprivation, restricted liberties, and the instability of political transition in the East coincided with a moment in which Western activists had access to resources, communication channels, and growing recognition and rights. Grounded in close readings of the sources and attentive to questions of agency, Wlostowska's challenges scholars such as Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska (150), who have tended to frame East–West relations primarily through a dominator–dominated binary. She likewise revises Conor O'Dwyer's claim that Polish gay groupings in the late 1980s were “apolitical, underground, and invisible” (121–122), demonstrating instead how they adapted to rapidly changing political conditions and tested the limits of what authorities and society were ready to tolerate.

Thanks to its long temporal perspective, the book demonstrates how queer people in Poland found themselves caught between two forms of illiberalism: that of the communist regime and, after 1989, its cultural and institutional legacies, on the one hand, and that of the Catholic Church, on the other. Unlike Solidarność, which maintained a strategic relationship with the Church, LGBT activism confronted throne and altar as converging moralistic and authoritarian forces, both intruding directly into private life (130, 134). “Catholic-communist”: this, an anarchist from Gdańsk suggested in 1989, was the condition of queer lives in Poland—between a rock and a hard place (125).

Nonetheless, the book leaves the reader wanting more in several respects. This is felt most strongly in the treatment of the 1990s, a decade that appears somewhat compressed in the narrative despite being a moment of profound transformation. It was precisely then that new freedoms, an explosion of the press, and the rapid proliferation of associations unfolded alongside economic precarity and social crisis. Relatedly, questions of subjectivity and identity are explored somewhat below what the sources seem to allow.

While some of these issues appear amenable to oral-historical approaches, it remains unclear to what extent such methods were employed, as the interviews are not specified in the bibliography despite being occasionally referenced in the text. On a broader methodological note, one might wish for a stronger engagement with queerness as method, in the sense proposed by Laura Doan, rather than queerness as identity alone (Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War, University of Chicago Press, 2013).

There are also minor analytical omissions. The discussion on the name of the periodical Ephebos (112), for instance, does not mention Karol Szymanowski's novel of the same title, written in the late 1910s and regarded as the first Polish homosexual work of its kind. Similarly, the etymological relationship between czarownica [witch] and ciota [a common slur for gay men] is absent from the analysis of activists’ use of czarownica in the 1980s (114), a gap that could have been addressed with the help of Tomasz Łukasz Nowak's Język ukrycia: Zapisany Socjolekt Gejów (Universitas: 2020). Such small slips point less to shortcomings of the book than to the still fragmented state of queer scholarship in Poland, where individual moments and themes are not integrated into longer historical narratives. Finally, although Wlostowska makes a commendable effort to look at the developments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the absence in the bibliography of Anita Kurimay's seminal monograph on Budapest (Queer Budapest, 1873–1961; University of Chicago Press: 2020) is difficult to overlook.

Overall, the book is an important intervention and a good read. What might initially appear as an unfortunate coincidence—its proximity to Łukasz Szulc's earlier book—ultimately proves beneficial for queer studies. The coexistence of these works fosters multiperspectivity, debate, greated attention to nuances, and, not least, provides excellent material for teaching (as the enthusiastic response of my University of Graz students to Wlostowska's chapter two recently confirmed).