The largest pride parade in central and Eastern Europe was expected to bring thousands of people to the streets of Warsaw on Saturday, at a time when the gay rights movement in Poland is under siege by hate speech and a government campaign depicting it as a threat to families and society.
Diplomats from Canada, the United States and other Western nations will continue a tradition of joining the Equality Parade to show their support for what is considered a basic human right in many places.
Warsaw’s mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, was expected to join the parade for the first time.
While many Poles in Warsaw and other cities have grown increasingly supportive of the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual and transgender people, a backlash is underway.
In recent months, officials from the right-wing governing party, Law and Justice, have portrayed the rights movement, particularly calls for sex education stressing tolerance, as a threat to families and children.
Poland is to have 20 pride parades this year, a record number.
In some cases, even centrist and left-wing mayors have tried to ban them, usually citing security concerns.
The Law and Justice leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, recently called the gay rights movement a foreign import that threatens the nation’s identity.
In conservative areas, town councils have been declaring their municipalities “L.G.B.T. free.”
On the eve of the parade, a far-right journalist on public television, Rafal Ziemkiewicz, sent chills down the spines of the L.G.B.T. community with a Twitter post.
“One must shoot at L.G.B.T.” people he wrote, before adding, “Not in the literal sense of course — but these are not people of good will or defenders of anybody’s rights, (the movement is) a new mutation of Bolsheviks and Nazis.”
Five Arrested in London Bus Attack on Two Lesbians
The British police said Saturday that they had made five arrests in the case of what they called a homophobic attack on two women who were assaulted and robbed on the deserted top deck of a double-decker bus in North London last month.
Four teenagers ages 15 to 18 were arrested on Friday on suspicion of robbery and aggravated grievous bodily harm, the Metropolitan Police of London said in a statement.
On Saturday, a fifth person was detained, the police said.
. . . .
The attack took place around 2:30 a.m. on May 30 on a bus heading toward the neighborhood of Camden, according to the statement.
The women, sitting on the upper deck, were approached by “four males who began to make lewd and homophobic comments to them,” the police said.
The two women were “punched several times” and robbed, the police said, and were treated at a hospital for facial injuries.
One victim described the attack in a Facebook post and in an interview with BBC Radio 4, identifying herself as Melania Geymonat.
She said that she and her girlfriend, Chris, had been heading toward Camden after a date when a group of young men harassed them.
“We must have kissed or hugged or something like that, because right away they saw that we were together, so they came after us,” she said in the radio interview.
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