by Christopher Cappiello

While Irish-born activist Brendan Fay and his pediatric oncologist husband, Tom Moulton, were celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with friends in Jackson Heights, Queens, last month, they had no idea that the arch-conservative Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, was using images of their 2003 civil marriage ceremony in Toronto in a televised address warning the Polish people about the moral consequences of ratifying a European Union treaty.

And they certainly couldn’t have imagined that within a week they would be traveling to Poland and engaging the devoutly Roman Catholic country of 40 million in a nationwide conversation about legal rights for same-sex couples.

“We were dancing and singing, with corn beef and cabbage, while the president of Poland was introducing us to the nation,” Fay told IN Los Angeles magazine from his New York home.

Fay is a longtime LGBT activist, perhaps best known for his intrepid efforts to have a gay contingent permitted to march in New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. He has a master’s degree in theology and is a documentary filmmaker, having produced a film about the life of the Rev. Mychal Judge, the gay New York Fire Department chaplain who was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Fay is currently working on a film about the life of the Rev. John McNeil, a Jesuit who founded Dignity, the national LGBT Catholic organization. It was at a Dignity New York Mass in 1996 that Fay and Moulton met.

In Kaczynski’s elaborately produced speech, complete with a music soundtrack and video editing, he warned the Polish people that ratifying the Lisbon Treaty would open the door to the annexation of Polish land by Germany, and force the country to accept unions that “threaten the moral order in Poland.” Fay and Moulton’s wedding video and a photograph of their marriage certificate were used to illustrate the second point.

The Polish Constitution limits marriage to a man and a woman, and there are no domestic partnership rights.

After hearing about the address from a Polish radio reporter, Fay decided to write a letter to the Polish Consulate General in New York, Krzysztof W. Kasprzyk, expressing the couple’s dismay at the use of their wedding images to promote an agenda of intolerance.

When he delivered his letter, Fay was met by two officials, but not the consul general. “It was all of a few minutes,” he explained. A couple of reporters were waiting outside, including the Radio ZET journalist who had called him the day before.

“I didn’t think much of it,” Fay said, “except for telling these two reporters I delivered my letter and I’m going to be waiting to hear back from somebody.”

From there, events went at light speed. The consul general called Fay at home that night to set up a meeting the following week, but in the meantime the story was picked up by news wires and the couple was getting calls from all over the world, including Poland.

“One of the most moving parts was we started getting calls, e-mails and text messages from people in Poland and the Polish diaspora,” Fay said. “People wishing us their prayers and best wishes, and being very clear, all wishing to disassociate themselves from the president.”

At a March 24 press conference with Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, held at the offices of Human Rights Watch, Fay called on Kaczynski to apologize. It was during that event that the enormity of the unusual situation hit home.

“Sometime in the middle, when I was telling the story of what had happened, I found an emotion surface, and I thought, wait a minute, the president of Poland literally attacked our love as something to be feared and a danger,” Fay recalled, his characteristic eloquence giving way to a slower, careful whisper. “And I remember, just for a moment at that press conference, I welled up. And I was thinking, wait a minute, at the very moment that we’re having this press conference, Tom is at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, caring for the children of this city that he loves. And here is this other person, on the other side of the world, portraying the love of myself and Tom in this way. And it just sort of hit me on a really human level. So aside from the activist—there’s the activist me—but for me, this was very different. This was like something very deep and personal.”

At an evening meeting with the consul general on March 25, Fay presented a letter to be delivered to the president in which he requested a meeting to discuss the matter.

“We believe a meeting would foster a better understanding of one another,” the letter read. “We believe that through dialogue you may better understand that gay and lesbian couples like Tom and me are families. We belong to the human family and the family of nations, and we are deserving of equal respect and human dignity.”

Fay and Moulton left the meeting at the consulate considering that perhaps sometime in the months ahead they could actually visit Poland and meet some of the many activists with whom they had been in daily contact since the story broke.

That opportunity came much sooner than expected.

“Basically, we got an invitation, with all expenses paid,” Fay said, explaining that two major Polish television stations offered to fly the couple to Warsaw that weekend.

At first it seemed Moulton’s hospital obligations would prohibit him from making the trip. “But we felt almost a responsibility to go as a couple,” Fay said. It was only Friday morning, the day before they were to leave, that Moulton got the OK to travel.

When the couple landed in Warsaw in the early morning hours of March 30, they were met at the airport by Greg Czarnecki and Tomek Szypula, leaders of Poland’s Campaign Against Homophobia (KPH), as well as a sea of reporters. Even for the media-savvy Fay, this was something new.

“Here’s the thing I didn’t understand,” Fay explained with incredulity, “our story had been in the papers every day since March 18.”

The next few days were a whirlwind of meetings with activists and members of Parliament, press conferences and interviews, with the gay couple from America becoming instant celebrities.

“I have to tell you, it was very strange being followed by cameras, just out for a walk,” Fay said. TVN, the network that flew the couple to Poland, followed them around for a day before creating a major segment for the popular primetime Monday news program Now Us.

“The media attention to this couple and the issue was immense and much more than we expected,” Czarnecki told IN from Warsaw. “Whether we like it or not, Polish people do have some sort of reverence for the U.S. and tend to listen to what Americans say. So they might have been a bit more receptive than usual to Fay and Moulton talking.”

After almost two weeks of print media coverage, the March 31 television program introduced millions of Poles to the legally married gay couple.

“I think [viewers] were amazed: Here is the couple right here in the studio. [They were] fascinated by who we were and where we met,” said Fay, referring to their Catholicism and involvement with Dignity.

Czarnecki said that, as outsiders, Fay and Moulton were able to introduce topics into the LGBT rights debate that local activists often have to avoid. “For example, adoption and child-rearing is one of the most taboo subjects when it comes to LGBT rights. [They] did an amazing job in talking about this rationally, backed up with facts.”

“I think some people were stunned to meet Tom, as a gay man and a pediatrician,” Fay said.

“My aunt, who is 78 years old, said, ‘They just seem very trustworthy,’” said Czarnecki, “and I think many people felt the same.”

“I told people from the word go that for us this was a journey in solidarity and friendship with lesbian and gay people in Poland,” Fay said. “An opportunity to tell our story and to hear the stories of couples like us in Poland.”

Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch’s LGBT rights program, was at a conference in London with Roman Wieruszewski, a longtime human rights activist and a former Polish member of the UN Human Rights Committee, at the time of the Poland trip. Long said Wieruszewski “said elatedly that the publicity around Brendan and Tom had done more to move discussion of LGBT rights in Poland, and society in general, than he had thought possible for 20 years.”

“Their visit gave us a window of opportunity to work together with the government,” Czarnecki said.

On April 2, the day the couple returned to New York, the Polish Parliament ratified the Lisbon Treaty.

To date, Fay and Moulton have received no official response from President Kaczynski.