Lukasz Szulc's book has two virtues that make a good academic work. The first consists in gathering dispersed accounts from scattered articles and turning them into a well-elaborated argument which recaps a line of thought that the author shares—for the first time in the shape of a monograph. The second is Szulc's own input and analysis of data previously not covered by scholars.

Regarding the first, Szulc takes a stand against perceiving homosexual politics, activism, and culture in east central Europe as a poorer, late to the table, and always trying to “catch up” and copy the west. Such a western vision is somehow colonial and stereotypical. It also homogenizes east central Europe, much as it problematically unifies the west. Altogether, it reduces the point of view to “the West and the Rest.” Instead, Szulc proposes to analyze the subtleties of east central Europe's conditions as different and unique expressions and experiences, distinct from the west, and also from each state's experience in the communist bloc. Following this path, Szulc stands in one line with those who deflate the ideas of “global gay” or “cosmopolitan queer” as defined by Dennis Altman (1996) and Jeffrey Weeks (2011), as well as “gay imperialism” (Ahmed, 2011). Szulc mentions the broader context of east central Europe, yet focuses mainly on Poland. This is understandable, a comparative project would require a group of scholars with different linguistic abilities; nonetheless, such a project should eventually be done. The call to see the distinctiveness of the Polish queer experience was made by some scholars (Robert Kulpa and Joanna Mizielińska, 2014) and myself on the example of literature and the aesthetic-political practice of camp (2015). There has been no project as thorough as Szulc's, however. East central Europe was and still certainly is in contact with western discourses, yet Szulc justly notes that “the self-descriptions travelling from the West to the Rest most often are not simply adopted but rather adapted by non-Western subjects” (29). Adapted to the distinct conditions and cultural traditions of the region. Poland might be on par with Denmark in terms of the decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1930s (1932 and 1933 respectively), and Czechoslovakia with East and West Germany (1961 and 1969 respectively), yet while in the west police raids on (legal) bars could have been used as means of persecution in spite of homosexuality being legal, in east central European countries the secret services (East Germany's Stasi, Poland's SB), despite homosexuality being legal, likely organized surveillance and detentions resulting in collecting large amounts of data, often unknown even today. Both cases represent persecution, but their experiences are different. This is just one example, Szulc argues, while noting the presenncr of others, such as AIDS and the state reaction to it, and the (non)legalization of gay activist groups (made possible under communism in Hungary in 1988 for Homeros Lambda, yet not in Poland for any of the groups in the 1980s, such as Etap, Filo, or the Warsaw Homosexual Movement). Szulc presents the evidence in a very neat and unclouded manner.

In my account of the “communist camp,” I introduced the category of fetish(ization), which Szulc doesn't use, although it could also work here. The western eye sees east central Europe as fetishizing the west because the west indeed wants to feel fetishized. On the other hand, the communist party and today's conservative politicians in Poland, even more so than in Russia, argue that homosexuality is alien to the local experience: a transferred object that does not suit. Szulc shows how problematic such arguments are. True, the Austrian HOSI and international ILGA organizations tried to reach east central Europe and influence Polish activism, organizing groups and issuing press releases (Biuletyn/Etap was printed in Austria and distributed in Poland). By such means, these groups spread some “global” (or western) ideas and styles of homosexuality. Some of them were also fetishized by the Polish public (not only, however, because they were “gay,” but because, I daresay, of the general tendency to fetishize western music and clothes), yet some were seen as unsuitable and impossible. There were also different points of view among the gay people: some took a stance against communism, some thought gay rights could fit into the state's agenda as it had before, and some wanted a third way between the communist party and the oppositional Solidarity movement. Such “betweenness” also explains why after 1989 neither the postcommunist left nor the post-solidarity right wanted to advance gay rights.

The most original and elsewhere unavailable parts of the book are analyses of the east European Information Pool reports (a program of the I(L)GA) in Chapter 3 and of the Polish gay magazines from the 1980s, Filo and Biuletyn/Etap [Chapters 6 and 7]). Such parts of the book are valuable because these documents are almost otherwise unavailable and should be digitized and published ASAP. Here, however, I am left wanting more. Szulc presents us with conclusions derived from the data he knows (gay magazines), rather than with the process of arriving at his conclusions. It is thus harder to judge them. Instead of the “qualitative content analysis” he employs, I would rather have discourse analysis with a focus on rhetoric. Let me give just one example. When analyzing the ideal of the activist that stems from the magazine Filo, Szulc writes: “by regularly reporting on Operation Hyacinth—informing of its course, speculating about its reasons, giving voice to its victims—‘Filo’ evoked a sense of belonging among its readers” (185). Undoubtedly the conclusion is correct. However, Szulc does not mention fragments of these articles, does not show how they (victims, activists) articulated the experience of this action of persecution. Even the use of vocabulary and sentence structures can be very telling in this respect. Moreover, in Polish scholarship it is commonly maintained that Hyacinth was hushed also among gay men, and there is little data available (even Filo is not available in libraries, not even in the National Library).

Furthermore, Szulc is right to question 1989 as the date “that changed it all” for there were magazines and activism before. I think, however, that he could have at least mentioned that in 1990 a new gay magazine, distributed officially, was established in Poznań: Inaczej (until 2001). Many ideas and the structure of the materials that Szulc analyzes in Etap and Filo, such as the cultural politics of regaining the Polish “queer past,” showcasing western out artists and promoting visibility and being out, and publishing “romantic stories,” were similarly continued in the 1990s, which is noteworthy without producing a bigger social change that came only a decade later. These critical remarks, however, cannot take away from the overall praise of the book.