Queer Places:
Royal Castle, plac Zamkowy 4, 00-277 Warszawa, Poland
Łazienki Park, Agrykola 1, 00-460 Warszawa, Poland
St. John's Cathedral, Świętojańska 8, 00-278 Warszawa, Poland

Stanislaw August II (January 17, 1732 – February 12, 1798) was a Polish king. The last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was born Stanislaw Poniatowski, the son of a respected Polish diplomat of the minor aristocracy, and his wife, a member of the semi-royal Czartoryski family. His elected regency (1764–1795) followed a half-century of political near-anarchy under the Saxon Wettin dynasty. Despite his occasionally successful reforms, Stanislaw's position was dependent on Russia's formal protection of the Polish-Lithuanian polity, and the actual administration of government was done in uneasy convention with successive Russian ambassadors and in habitual discord with parliament. It was during his reign that the Commonwealth's threefold partition by Prussia, Russia and Austria took place; Stanislaw is chiefly remembered for his weakness in the face of this political outrage, as well as for his lifelong emotional subservience to his former lover, Catherine the Great, who had arranged his election as regent.

Recent historians, however, have begun to reassess Stanislaw and his reign. In his own time, he was renowned throughout Europe as an exemplary, if inadequately tyrannical, Enlightened ruler; his personal kindness and generosity were legendary (see Casanova's lively account of Warsaw); and his court, which was a magnet for artists, architects and defrocked Jesuits, drew the attention of such luminaries as Voltaire and Rousseau. Stanislaw introduced to the Commonwealth educational reforms, a literary culture and public sphere, industry and a nascent sense of Polish national identity; he proclaimed the emancipation of Jews and supported that of peasants; and he declared the Constitution of 3 May 1791, the first national constitution of its kind in Europe; it affirmed Polish-Lithuanian sovereignty, threatened widespread political reform, and ultimately instigated the third and final dismemberment of the Commonwealth in 1795.

Stanislaw remodeled Warsaw's Royal Castle, and erected the elegant Royal Baths Palace (Palac Lazienkowski) complex in Warsaw's most romantic park. He created a numismatic collection, a picture gallery, and an engravings room. Stanislaw August was forced to abdicate (November 25, 1795) and left for St. Petersburg, Russia. There, a virtual prisoner, he subsisted on a pension from Catherine the Great and died deeply in debt.

By his own account, Poland's bachelor king was ambivalent about his sexuality: 'I did not feel that I was made for women; my first attempts seemed to me like a mere necessity to be accounted for by circumstances', he writes in his memoirs, describing himself before the famous affair with Catherine. The question of his personal life is, however, one that few historians have addressed with much objectivity. Prior to his life as monarch, the precocious, handsome and introspective Poniatowski, the diplomat's son, travelled widely throughout aristocratic Europe, establishing personal friendships and political alliances. The most important of these was with the English nobleman Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, a childhood friend of Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, who was serving as ambassador to the court of Frederick the Great when Poniatowski met him, and was later transferred to Russia, where the future king joined him as his secretary. Williams, 24 years Poniatowski's senior, was a mentor and father-figure to the young Polish nobleman, educating him in the complexities of European diplomacy, and, in St Petersburg, aiding his dangerous liaison with the empress-to-be. Whether their own relationship was ever sexual is anybody's guess, but it is not implausible. Neither man was a homosexual or a bisexual in a contemporary understanding of the term, but the emotional attachment they displayed for each other, recounted by Stanislaw in his memoirs, was intense even by eighteenth-century standards of friendship. The king continued to cherish the memory of Williams long after the latter's death, and had a portrait of his English friend in his boudoir at the time of his own death.

Poniatowski died of a stroke on 12 February 1798. Paul I sponsored a royal state funeral, and on 3 March he was buried at the Catholic Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg. In 1938, when the Soviet Union planned to demolish the Church, his remains were transferred to the Second Polish Republic and interred in a church at Wołczyn, his birthplace. This was done in secret and caused controversy in Poland when the matter became known. In 1990, due to the poor state of the Wołczyn church (then in the Byelorussian SSR), his body was once more exhumed and was brought to Poland, to St. John's Cathedral in Warsaw, where on 3 May 1791 he had celebrated the adoption of the Constitution that he had coauthored. A third funeral ceremony was held on 14 February 1995.

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• Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History Vol.1 (pp.882-883). Taylor and Francis. Edizione del Kindle.