EN
During „the long 1970s” in Poland homosexuality began to be thematized in public and semi-public discourse, enabling a sense of community among people who were not personally acquainted. The discursive emergence of homosexuality was gradually eroding an unspoken pact of silence which had prevailed before. Early selforganizing relied heavily on private networking, in which forms of proto-political sociality supported and enabled the emergence of properly political activism. The paper draws on oral history interviews and on letters which men in Poland sent to the Austrian organization HOSI Wien in the mid-1980s.