State Approaches to Homosexuality and Non-Heterosexual Lives in Czechoslovakia During State Socialism
Abstract
The work analyzes the ways, in which state approaches to non-heterosexual sexuality 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, it is the first research of its kind that combines the methods of oral history and discursive analysis of Czechoslovak sexological scholarship from the socialist era.
First, the research revealed the multilayered and complicated role of Czechoslovak sexology, which is not possible to interpret simply, and only, as a heteronormative arm of the socialist state. Contrary to current dominant historical and sociological perceptions of Czechoslovak sexology as a basically negative and repressive discourse, which homogenously defined homosexuality as “deviant” and “perverse” and disciplined the objects of its definitions, this work argues that sexological discourse in socialist Czechoslovakia was first and foremost diverse, and often surprisingly liberal.
The published arguments and case studies, as well as personal attitudes and therapeutic practice of some Czech and Slovak sexologists prove that they crossed the borders of official definitions and actively sought not only to improve the lives of homosexual and transsexual people, but also to change the overall societal perception of non-heterosexuality. And second, the oral history research offered a valuable probe into the lives of non-heterosexual people in the period of state socialism, about which we still know very little.
The memories and recollections of the narrators brought new insights about growing up, youth and family constellations of non-heterosexual people during socialism. They challenged myths about passive female sexuality, as well as myths of homogeneity of “homosexuals” before 1989.