#eastern bloc
My piece for @lgbtstoryzineabout Akcja „Hiacynt”/Operation Hyacinth, ,,a secret mass operation of the Polish communist police, carried out in the years 1985–87. Its purpose was to create national database of all Polish homosexuals and people who were in touch with them, and it resulted in the registration of around 11,000 people.‘‘
This event is sadly not well remembered even here and much, much less aboard so I’ve wanted to bring attention to it, even if only slightly. The drawing was completed somewhere in June of 2018.
Big thanks to the zine mods for letting me participate!
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Sofia Pride: How and why Bulgaria legalised homosexuality in the 1960s - Emerging Europe
The National Musical Theatre organised a march in the capital to demonstrate against this unfair treatment. During the event, which has been described by some as Bulgaria’s first-ever Pride parade, the men wore extravagant clothing, some dressed as women, and alongside some Sofia locals, marched from the city’s Central Mineral Baths to Gorna Banya, one of the best districts of the city, at the time largely reserved for the communist elite.
Needless to say, the Bulgarian Communist Party was not best pleased with this show of free will and accused the men of “undisguised manifestation against the people’s power”. The Minister of Interior at the time, Diko Dikov, threatened them: “We will destroy all who are like you.”
The 1963 march led to a group trial year later of 26 men for practicing homosexuality, many of whom were high profile individuals, including actor Georgi Partsalev, pop singer Emil Dimitrov and his rumoured partner, songwriter Vasil Andreev, poet and translator Borislav Georgiev, and other actors, film directors, and dancers – all of whom were in the public eye.
