queerwashing (don’t do it)

STEFAN: this isn’t a real ball

EDITH: this isn’t a pride parade or drag race

TOMEK: not so fast, my love

JUSTYNA: not so quick, darling

TOMEK: not immediately that “LGBTQIA shit in da club”

STEFAN: THANKING THE GRANDMOTHERS FIRST

EDITH: The real ball is in 1868, NYC, Harlem, Hamilton Lodge

TOMEK: The real ball is officially called the “Faggots Ball” - you can tell that to your kids

STEFAN: The real ball must take place in a royal courtyard

TOMEK: at Władysław Warneńczyk’s, at Boleslaw the Bold’s, at Jacob Sobieski’s, who “loved men to the point of fear”

STEFAN: at Friedrich the Great of Prussia’s…

EDITH: The real ball is a glimpse of a fairy tale

JUSTYNA: The real ball is butch dykes, cioty, sissies, wolves, fairies, pocieraczki, warm brothers, Saffonki, Tunten, Friends of Dorothy.

TOMEK: The real ball is an enclave

STEFAN: The real ball is a question of survival

EDITH: And the real ball never forgets that

STEFAN: This is real masquerade, real dancing

TOMEK: The real ball takes place in the beginning of the 20th century in Berlin

STEFAN: In Filarmonia -

EDITH: in Hotel König von Portugal,

STEFAN: in trans club Eldorado -

EDITH: Admission was only 1.50 German marks

JUSTYNA: Or maybe the real fag ball is in Warsaw, when a French company builds street toilets in the shape of a mushroom…

TOMEK: The real ball is a demonstration in 1892 around “Le Champignon”

STEFAN: The real ball is when men of various social classes share a fleeting moment of intimacy in a small tin shed

EDITH: The real ball is in parks, saunas, and public toilets

STEFAN: The real ball is cruising points in London, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Munich, Baden-Baden, Busko Zdrój…

JUSTYNA: The real ball is the queens Barbela, Chamka, Podkasana, Josephine Baker…

TOMEK: The real ball is created in the names of those living from sex work, those from factories and shelters

STEFAN: And the real ball never forgets that

EDITH: The real ball is Eve Kotchever’s lesbian literary salon in Manhattan

JUSTYNA: The real ball must be in Munich in 1920, in “Harmonie” and “Herrenbühne”, where all decent Bavarian homsexuals wear Lederhosen

TOMEK: The real ball is organized by the great Slavic goddess who decriminalized homosexuality in 1932, almost 40 years before the Germans

EDITH: The real ball is in 1919, when Magnus Hirschfeld founds the Institute of Sexology.

STEFAN: The real ball is a diligent herstorian on a December night in 1927 in Warsaw:

JUSTYNA: “17 homosexuals in custody behaved freely, even with a little… coquetry. They demanded lipstick, powder, perfume, and chocolate. In the evening they held a noisy demonstration and ended the day with… a ball. They danced in the dim light of the prison lamps”

EDITH: Officer, I suspect this is probably a real ball

STEFAN: Officer, I suspect this is probably a real ball

TOMEK: Officer, this is just the beginning of the state’s mobilization on the morality control front

JUSTYNA: I know, and I’m really scared

EDITH: But the real ball ends in the 1930s

STEFAN: Eve Kotchever is deported Trans club Eldorado is transformed into a building for the Sturmabteilung

EDITH: Nazi students burn the library of the Institute of Sexology

STEFAN: The Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homsexuality and Abortion is founded

JUSTYNA: The real ball is when those who hate it write in their war memoirs that:

TOMEK: Lesbian love in the concentration camp Ravensbrück persists like a plague, like a flame… a passion that consumes everything

JUSTYNA: The real ball is in 1941 when Stefan Kosinski falls in love with Willi, a Wehrmacht soldier, in occupied Toruń

EDITH: The real ball is in a shed, far away from the city, where they plan their future
together

JUSTYNA: The real ball is when they celebrate New Year’s Eve there, their first night together

EDITH: Maybe the real ball is when they dance

JUSTYNA: Or maybe the real ball is when they drink champagne from the Officers’ quarters, and they dance a bit more, and maybe they know it’s their last ball together, before one is sent to the Eastern Front and the other is sentenced by the Gestapo

STEFAN: At a real ball, the question is posed: when is life worth mourning?

TOMEK: The real ball exists, even though Poland and many places in Europe do not have a single memorial for the queer victims of Naziism

STEFAN: The real ball is a taboo

EDITH: The real ball exists, even if “homosexuality did not exist” in the Polish People’s Republic

JUSTYNA: The real ball is when 2 female teachers in Starachowice live together. Everyone knows, but no one says anything

TOMEK: Because the real gay salon in communism takes place in the civilisation of private homes

JUSTYNA: You can invite “ours” to a real ball… Our friends, our aunts, our friends, and our sisters

TOMEK: The real ball takes place in “oriented” spaces, in the Oskar Club in Wrocław, in Retro in Zielona Góra, in Amateur in Nowy Świat…

EDITH: At a real ball in the late 80s, the word “gay” appears for the first time in Poland.

TOMEK: And the real gay balls in the USA are in Chicago in Club Chesterfield, in New Orleans in Wonderclub…

EDITH: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”

STEFAN: Despite surveillance and blackmail in Poland’s Operation Hyacinth and the USA’s Lavender Scare, the real ball expands

TOMEK: The real ball is when Richard Kisiel decides he has nothing to hide and founded the gay magazine “Filo”:

EDITH/TOMEK: “Who will help us, if not ourselves?”

JUSTYNA: The real ball exists despite a divided country

TOMEK: The real ball in West Germany exists in gay bars in Munich, like Teddy Bar, or Mylord for lesbians

STEFAN: The real ball is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s salon, hidden in her East Berlin Gründerzeit Museum

EDITH: The real ball on the other side of the wall is Rosa von Praunheim’s film, titled: “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives”

JUSTYNA: The real ball is the founding of the “Homosexuelle Aktions-Gruppe München” in 1980

TOMEK: The real ball is the Stonewall Riots of 1969

EDITH: The real ball happens in streets full of drag queens and drag kings

TOMEK: The real ball happens in ‘87 in the only primary school in Bukowice when little Tomasz Tyndyk performs his first lipsync to Sabrina

EDITH: And Queen Crystal LaBeija hosts the first real ballroom in Harlem, NYC, in 1972

STEFAN: The first and real ballroom house is the House of LaBeija

JUSTYNA: The real ballroom is chosen families

STEFAN: The real ball is Paris Dupree, who holds the first, legendary “Paris is Burning” ball in 1981

TOMEK: “I’m so into voguing right now”

EDITH: The real ballroom is not invented by Madonna

TOMEK: The real ballroom is not a club move to imitate

STEFAN: The real ballroom is a celebration of black, queer culture, and also a lineage of survival

JUSTYNA: The real ballroom is like a good, state-sponsored abortion

EDITH: The real ballroom raises $400,000 for the fight against AIDS

TOMEK: The real ballroom is happening today in Berlin, in Katowice, in Paris, in Detroit, in Leipzig…

STEFAN: These queer kids, for whom the real “Heimat” was always just some ball

JUSTYNA: The real ball is all those people who are not in any archives, whose names you will never know, and thanks to whom, those few names have survived to be spoken, shouted, whispered, danced…