Putting Together a Rainbow Mosaic: State Approach to Homosexuality and "Gay" and "Lesbian" Oral History in Communist Czechoslovakia
Abstract
The article 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 that combines oral history with a gender analysis of sexological literature from the communist period to put together a complex mosaic of sexuality in the 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 article offers a multilayer reading and analysis of normality/deviance, public/private and submission/resistance in communist Czechoslovakia.