The mayor of a Polish town that declared itself an LGBTQ-free zone to appease religious conservatives says he’d like to take back the vote.
“We have become Europe’s laughingstock, and it’s the citizens not the local politicians who’ve suffered most,” Krasnik Mayor Wojciech Wilk told The New York Times.
The city, which has 32,000 residents, declared itself “free of LGBT” two years ago. A number of Polish cities have voted to adopt the designation, which, while it has no legal meaning, advances homophobia.
After the vote, officials in a French town that was a sister city to the community dropped the arrangement, and officials in Norway, who had been considering giving Krasnik a $10 million economic development grant, announced that they would not support any community that adopted the anti-LGBTQ designation.