In this paper I examine the relationship between Polish experts on school-based sex education and international developments in the field during the post-war period. From 1956 onwards, Polish experts, hoping to introduce sex education to schools, drew on Western experience and knowledge. Using Polish sources, I focus on the ways in which this knowledge was transmitted, the role of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the approach of Polish experts towards the West. I argue that during the late 1950s and 1960s, Polish experts valued and relied exclusively on Western models. International exchange on sex education intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Polish expert Mikołaj Kozakiewicz becoming a regional leader within the international family planning movement. However, as Polish experts became more critical about certain Western models of sex education, they began to promote the socialist model of family life education as a more appropriate option.

This paper is about a remarkable file, ‘Interviews with Homosexuals’, in the bequest of László Cseh-Szombathy (1925–2007), who was internationally renowned and one of Hungary's most celebrated sociologists. Looking at the ways in which the interviews and the conceptual framework of the questions asked by Cseh-Szombathy were crafted, along with the interviewees’ answers to those questions, the article investigates the interaction of sexual experts and male homosexuals in late socialist-state Hungary. The author contends that, at the same time as sexual experts had historically fuelled and contributed to homophobia, sexual experts during late state-socialism also became the primary agents who started to speak out against the pathologisation of homosexuality and played a crucial role in facilitating homosexual men's exploration of sexual identity and self-acceptance. The paper highlights how Hungarian sexological experts engaged in productive dialogue with their patients and interview subjects, which shaped sexological expertise on homosexuality.

The article demonstrates how the transnational flows of sexual knowledge created a consensus among medical and legal experts for the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the Polish Criminal Code of 1932. This happened despite the absence of any significant activism that would demand such a reform in Poland. The German movement's goal to repeal the notorious anti-homosexual paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code was ultimately brought to fruition in Poland but not in Germany. The medical and legal knowledge spread through imperial networks and became useful for the new Polish nation-state in its search for identity and distinctiveness. The novelty of the reform ideas created in German-speaking countries led Polish legal experts to consider their adoption a perfect opportunity for the new nation-state to prove its modernity. Additionally, an authoritarian setting in Poland after 1926 allowed the decision makers to shut out the Church and parliament from the legislative process.