I was 18 when I first came to the UK and this is 1994. I came here because I was running away from the Army, so at the time there was a compulsory Army service that I did not want to do. I was gay, it was just after the Communist collapse and people’s mentality was still very affected by the olden days. Living in Poland at that time I would not be able to be out or even find a partner, I guess, it would be very difficult. It’s completely… sort of, you could compare it then to what’s going on in Russia at the moment.
I came here for two weeks’ holiday to visit my friends who were living here at the time. That opened my eyes to quite a few things. My main contact with the gay community would be in Soho obviously, because then Soho was the hub of gayness and seeing that I had no doubts that I’m not going back to Poland, this is where I’m going to stay! It felt great, it felt so amazing and exciting that I didn’t really care how and it didn’t really matter what I’m going to do here as long as I stay.
My family was very scared of me coming here, because they thought this is very far away and they won’t be able to see me for years at a time, but I think when I came out to my parents, they saw how better my life would be here than there, so they were actually the ones who were saying to me, ‘You’ll be better off staying in the UK.’ They knew how serious homophobia in Poland was.
At the beginning of my life in here, I was a student so I wasn’t allowed to work. I had to work, obviously, so I was working illegally. It was very stressful not being allowed to work and having to have to work. The first 10 years of my life in here was just playing around with my visa situation with the Home Office and all of that. I even got deported once. Being deported was probably the worst experience of my life, it was something really horrible. I was interrogated, then I got handcuffed, I felt like a criminal, I was treated like a criminal as well.
My life changed completely when I could stay here legally. When I finally got my rights to stay here it was like, ‘Wow, I can plan my life, I can move on from now on.’ Me and my partner, we’re getting married, we’ve been together for 10 years and we decided to get married in Walthamstow, since this is where we met and this is where we’ve spent out 10 years together. We were not really keen on doing it anywhere else than the Waltham Forest, so yeah, this is where we live, this is our life.
