Acknowledgements
I owe my sincere gratitude to my dear Friends for their support, comments and help. Some of you are scholars, some artists and activists, and without you I would not be here. A huge thank you to: Agata Lisiak, Elżbieta Korolczuk, Gośka Myk, Mateusz Janik, Barbara Godlewska-Bujok, Krystyna Mazur, Zofka Łapniewska and Maja Zabawska, Marsha Bradfield, Tim Waterman and Jason, Kasia Przyborska, Zorka Wollny, Baruch Gottlieb, Robert Kulpa, Kostek Szydlowski, Jarosław Lipszyc. I would like to thank Andrzej Leśniak for the discussions concerning criticality and its crisis. I want to thank Paweł Żukowski for helping me to find persons willing to be interviewed.
Fellow activists, such as Andrzej Selerowicz, John Clark, Ryszard Kisiel, Jacek Solista, Krzysztof Kliszczyński, the kind man, who contacted me after the radio interview I gave, to talk about his experiences during the Hiacynt operations, and to all those who either participated in the interviews or otherwise provided knowledge, facts, documents and support within the project.
My Colleagues at the SWPS University and in other academic institutions and galleries, for their suggestions, questions and connections, Mirek Filiciak, Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, Tomek Basiuk, Jakub Urbanik, Katarzyna Bojarska, Monika Weychert, Adam Leszczyński, Antke Engel, Roberto Kulpa, Tomek Fudala, Paweł Leszkowicz and Tomeka Kitliński, Adam Adach. Mr. Piotr Borysiuk taught me about the specificity of police archive, which was a priceless lesson.
Already in the course of my small 2015 archive research I realized that I will not do it on my own. I collaborated with the expert on data protection and anonymization, Paweł Dudzik in the years 2022-2025. I had support of Sylwia Urbańska, expert in planning, conducting and analysis of the interviews, and of Paweł Żukowski and Katarzyna Przyborska in the making of the interviews and transcripts. The collaboration with prof. Adam Bodnar broadened my understanding of the complex relations of human rights and the state, and opened many doors at the Ministry of Interior and the Police's Main Headquarters. A special thank you to Mr. Jacek Dobrzyński for coordinating this complex operation. I would like to thank to the policemen and policewomen at the Main Police's Headquarters in Warsaw (KGP) for selecting and sending the Hiacynt operation's documents to me in 2024 and 2025.
I would like to thank the Journalists, conference Organizers and Curators, who gave me space to talk about my analysis of the Hiacynt operations and their archive, including: Margarita Tsomou, Viktor Neumann, Paulina Małochleb, Kasia Szustow, the authors of "Różowe Archiwa" (Pink Archives) project, organizers and participants of the Historical Materialism conferences in London and Athens, and dr Claudia Peppel, the coordinator of research at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, for the invitation to the conference "Can we have some privacy?" in 2015, and to the ICI Berlin's directors, dr Christoph Holzhey and prof. Manuele Gragnolati, for the two-years long fellowship I had there. It was there that I first presented a talk about the Hiacynt operation, for which I had to make a query in the IPN archives for the first time. A larger version of this talk was published as article, which I submitted in 2016 to the Interalia. Journal of Queer Studies, and published in 2018, and I want to thank its Editors for their amazing work.
I owe my gratitude to the archivists at all these and other archives I visited: to Krzysztof Kliszczyński from the Queer Museum Warsaw, Wilfred van Buuren and Danny Halim at the IHLIA archive in Amsterdam, Hannes Sulzenbacher at QWien archive, Tim Waterman, who introduced me to the London's queer archives, the kind workers of the Bishopgate Archive in London and the fantastic crew of the London's MayDay Archive, Łukasz Russ and others.
My family - my Father, Henryk Majewski; my Mum, Maja Majewska-Keane and her husband, John Keane, also Sergio Frutos and Nico, were with me and this is a heroic gesture, especially by the end of my writing. Thank you, Dad for your engagement in this project, support I got from you was so fantastically non-patriarchal! Thank you, Sergio for all the support and for the beautiful cover image. And Nico - for making our lives even fluffier!