Abstract
Despite of it seemingly private character, homosexuality is an important social phenomenon, conditioned by given society, and changing in the course of time. This notion of homosexuality and its treatement by social institutions such as church, law, school or media in the Czech Lands from the Middle Ages to the 20th century are the issues the book focuses on.
Its authors not only present particular, historically situated cases of the criminalisation of homosexual acts. They also provide analyses of the legal and social frameworks which defined and legitimized the impermissibility of such behaviour, and they emphasise the broader power relations of how homosexuality was being dealt with.
This includes, among other things, the construction of the close link between the image of the homosexual on the one hand and the image of the 'improper' citizen on the other (the anti-social person, the spy, possibly the feminine man or the masculine woman, or the bad parent).