Poland’s heinous ‘LGBT-free zones’ sue the defiant activists fighting back against their hate

In late 2019, Polish activists began compiling an interactive map of the country’s ‘LGBT-free zones’. Within these towns and cities, the promotion of so-called ‘LGBT+ ideology’ is banned. Enraged by this state-sanctioned homophobia, a team of campaigners – Jakub Gawron, Kamil Mczuga, Paulina Pajak and Pawel Preneta – came together to build the Atlas of Hate, a visual representation of discrimination seeping across the country. The colour-coded map characterises areas into three categories: green areas have rejected calls to become ‘LGBT-free zones’; amber areas are sites of lobbying by far-right activists; red areas are officially ‘LGBT-free zones’.