„Behind Stalin, there were bushes where there used to be dark“: Negotiating queer spaces under the state socialism in Czechoslovakia

presentation, poster

English

The life of gay people in Czechoslovakia between the years 1948 and 1989 definitely did not break down into a public life (in the closet), and a relatively safe world of commonplaces or private spheres carefully excluded from the mainstream view. Between these two worlds there was a dynamic that we can think of as permeation. As Jan Seidl and Věra Sokolová have shown, the supervision of queer lives and the effort to discipline their private lives was not only a domain of the socialist part of the Western world: the capitalist governments were similarly or often even more repressive toeards queer people. Although homosexuality was decriminalized under certain conditions in 1961, structural homophobia persisted. The question remains, what queer (in my understanding, safe, respectful and caring) spaces did gay people and people who had sex with people of the same gender establish and negotiate with their surroundings? In the collections of the Society for Queer Memory, there is a variety of archival material, from qualitative interviews, archival funds to visual materials, which can be used to establish certain typology and interpretative frameworks of strategies of negotiating queer spaces by gay men (material concerning lesbian or transgender experiences is not that varied). The paper will focus on three life situations: the search for casual sex, the search for a romantic relationship, and the search for friendship networks and chosen families and their spatial circumstances and qualities. The space of domesticity, public urban space and the queering of the countryside and nature will be discussed. As feminist historian Dana Arnold and feminist art historian Griselda Pollock show, it is precisely the moment of negotiating space that makes it possible to grasp queer people in their social lives as autonomous actors, not as multiple victims of repression and discrimination who are thus deprived of their individuality.

queer; queer studies; queer history; state socialism; LGBTIQ+; queer lives, everydaylife history

JACKSON, L.

18. 9. 2024

International Workshop Queer Urban Underworlds in European State Socialism, 17.–19. září 2024, Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR; Německý historický ústav

Praha

https://www.usd.cas.cz/aktuality/workshop-queer-urban-underworlds-in-european-state-socialism/