Black, Gay and Polish!

Kristian Legierski is the first openly
gay and Black elected official in Poland

This is a great story. Poland has recently elected its first openly gay official, when Krystian Legierski (pictured above) won a Warsaw City Council seat on November 21st. Legierski, a 32-year-old lawyer is biracial (his father is from Mauritania and his mom is Polish) and the first Black elected official in the Eastern European country as well.

Rod 2.0 reports:

Legierski discussed the intersections of race and sexuality in his election: "In Poland there are so few blacks that nobody has ever done research on how many there are. It would not pay to do it. But without a black-emancipation movement, and without a strong organization of sexual minorities, after just 20 years of democracy, we have achieved what elsewhere sometimes took generations. Poland showed its tolerant and nondiscriminatory face."

Poland becomes the most recent Eastern European nation to elect a Black to public office. On October 25, a Ghanaian-born doctor won local elections in Slovenia's coastal town of Piran, becoming Slovenia's first black mayor. Russia elected its first Black elected official in July, a city councilman north of Moscow.