Lovetown

Commie queens Patricia and Lucretia find themselves dancing and strutting their way to oblivion in this 70s/80s Polish underground novel, where sex is everywhere, carelessness and carefreeness are synonymous and Soviet soldiers are easily lead, mostly into bed. While friends die and drunks fry their brains, Patricia and Lucretia, two flamboyant leads in this sordid tale watch their friends die of AIDS and other mishaps, while they gleefully recount to the gather in Lovetown, a Baltic beach town where time has move on, a generation has emerged from the closet and life is now standardised for homosexuals, meaning our heroes aren’t nearly as legendary as they feel they’re owed, and ultimately, being gay is normal now, not as dangerous or decadent and underground as it once was.

This is an interesting slice of history juxtaposition, told through countless oral histories, stories, anecdotes, snippets of dialogue and clipped fragments of memory, put together to tell a funny and energetic tale of how it used to be and how it ain’t like it was and maybe all that stuff we were fighting for was only worth fighting for during the actual fighting. An illuminating insight into Poland’s underground and post-communist guilt and regret, the day of the comedown after an outlandish few decades of danger and debauchery.