TARNOW, POLAND – When Artur Sendyka was 18 years old, he could hardly imagine a worse place to come out as gay than his hometown of Tarnow in southeastern Poland.
It was 2019, and he had only heard horror stories from gay friends who had been beaten, abused and kicked out of their homes by their parents.
And then Tarnow County had just been turned into an ‘LGBT-free zone’, where the local government wanted to fight the “ideology” of homosexuals. Local politicians said they would protect the “innocence of children” from “gay propaganda”.
At the same time, the state-owned media labeled LGBT people as ‘pedophiles’ and the Catholic Church described the LGBT movement as the ‘rainbow plague’.
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