Our Global LGBT History: Spotlight on Krystian Legierski (Blog Series)

Photo Credit:Wojciech Surdziel / AG (Agencja Gazeta)

  

Krystian Legierski was born April 22, 1978 in Koniaków, Poland. He is a Polish/black LGBT activist, entrepreneur and member of the Greens 2004. In local elections in late 2010 he won a seat in the Warsaw City Council. This made him the first openly gay politician elected to a political office in Poland.
He was born in Poland, to a Polish mother and a Mauritanian father. 

Legierski studied Law at the University of Warsaw. He has been active in LGBT movement in Poland for sometime. In 2003 he co-authored the first draft of a law on civil unions sponsored in the Polish Senate. This draft however, did not pass. Since 2009 he has been involved in another effort to introduce civil unions into the Polish legal system.

In 2003 he founded the club Le Madame in the Warsaw Old Town. Le Madame was a nightclub, but also a cultural center, providing space for alternative theater, music, drag queen shows, art exhibitions and political debate. It was closed by the acting mayor of Warsaw, Miroslaw Kochalski, in March 2006.The closure was met with protests, which came to be labelled as "the Polish Stonewall.” Along with Le Madame, Legierski founded a gay club Tomba Tomba (later renamed Usta Mariana) as well as M25 - a nightclub and a theater scene.

Legierski was among the founding members of the Polish Green party Green 2004. In November 2010 he won a seat in Warsaw City Council, making Poland the most recent Eastern European nation to elect a Black to public office. He ran on a Social Democratic ballot. Legierski reportedly stated, shortly after his election "I can’t compare myself to Harvey Milk, but I’m glad that I am the first openly gay candidate to be elected for a public office in Poland.” He also spoke of the intersection of race and sexuality in the election stating, "In Poland there are so few blacks that nobody has ever done research on how many there are. It would not pay to do it. But without a black-emancipation movement, and without a strong organization of sexual minorities, after just 20 years of democracy, we have achieved what elsewhere sometimes took generations. Poland showed its tolerant and nondiscriminatory face."

(NOTE: Information for this post was obtained from Wikipedia and other sources.)