Europe has recently become closely associated with LGBTQ rights. It remains unclear, however, what is the role of this association in everyday European imaginations and identifications. Empirical research on European identity hardly ever discusses the role of LGBTQ rights. Nor do we know much about European identifications of LGBTQ people themselves. In this article, I address those gaps from the perspective of Polish LGBTQs in the UK. Drawing on 30 interviews from a recent two-year research project, I discuss my participants’ European imaginations and identifications by developing the concepts of ‘uncanny Europe’ and ‘protective Europeanness’. I show how my participants tend to view Europe as ‘diverse’, ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’, while attributing those characteristics exclusively to Western Europe. I also demonstrate that they tend to readily identify as European in the context of increasingly hostile national identities, with the increasing anti-Polish xenophobia in the UK and growing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in Poland.

欧洲最近与 LGBTQ 权利密切相关。然而，目前尚不清楚这种关联在欧洲日常想象和认同中的作用是什么。关于欧洲身份的实证研究几乎从未讨论过 LGBTQ 权利的作用。我们对 LGBTQ 人本身的欧洲身份认同也知之甚少。在本文中，我将从英国的波兰 LGBTQ 的角度解决这些差距。借鉴最近两年研究项目的 30 次采访，我通过发展“不可思议的欧洲”和“保护性欧洲性”的概念来讨论参与者的欧洲想象和认同。我展示了我的参与者如何倾向于将欧洲视为“多样化”、“开放”和“宽容”，同时将这些特征完全归因于西欧。