Skládání duhové mozaiky: Česká sexuologie a „gay“ a „lesbická“ orální historie v komunistickém Československu

Abstract

The paper analyzes the ways in which the state approach to homosexuality in Communist Czechoslovakia intersected with actually lived lives and experiences of ordinary non-heterosexual people who identified (mainly retroactively) as gays, lesbians or transsexuals. In the Czech context, this is the first research of its kind and combines oral history with a gender analysis of sexological literature from the communist period, to put together a complex mosaic of sexuality in recent past. This confrontation of methods exposes the processes by which gender and sexuality in this era worked as tools of regulation and control, and shows how non-heterosexual people responded to this pressure. The paper offers a multilayer reading and analysis of normality/deviance, public/private and submission/resistance in communist Czechoslovakia.

Keywords

• homosexuality
• gay
• lesbian
• oral history
• sexology
• Czechoslovakia
• communism