Preliminary Programme

Since the 1980s a wide variety of lesbian oral history projects have been undertaken, but few of the testimonies gathered have been preserved, and almost none are available to other researchers in archives or other publicly accessible repositories.

My presentation describes the creation of a new digital archive that aims to prevent thedisappearance of these valuable historical sources.
Housed at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, The Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony (ALOT) strives to make oral histories and other oral testimonies accessible to researchers around the world by digitizing analogue tapes, and making them available to the public on a password protected site. (Show less)

This paper is an analysis of Czech lesbians living in the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-38). It seeks to uncover different facets of these women’s lives and to understand how they manoeuvred for a stable existence in a framework where lesbianism was criminalized in the western (Czech) half of the state but not in Slovakia. I will explore firstly the ‘lesbian perspective’ as presented in some key novels of the interwar period, and secondly, the arguments employed cautiously by some public Czech lesbians in the 1930s for decriminalization. The first theme will be investigated especially through the work of the novelist Lída Merlínová whose papers in the Czech literary archive (Památník narodního písemnictví) are wholly unresearched. Merlínová was a prolific writer and her novel of 1929, Vyhnanci lásky (Exiles of Love) contributed strongly to building a Czech lesbian discourse in the 1930s; it paralleled the impact of Radclyffe Hall in England and built on earlier Czech works such as Marie Majerová’s popular Plané milování (Plans of Lovers, 1911). The major source for the second theme will be the Czech journal for sexual minorities (Hlas sexuaní men‎šiny), published in Prague 1931-4 as part of a largely male campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in Czechoslovakia. Merlínová contributed articles and short stories to this journal, as did the actress-novelist Gil Sedláčková. The paper will explore how closely this mild lesbian agitation was integrated into the more dominant male discourse; how writers like Sedlá‎čková broke new ground through an unusual work of 1937, Třetí pohlaví [The Third Sex]; and how far Czech lesbian perspectives were informed by broader reference points from the contemporary ‘sexual struggle’ across Europe. The research is a first attempt to establish a framework for understanding Czech lesbianism in the mid-twentieth century. In its broader context it builds on new Czech work on the history of homosexuality (as set out at a conference in Prague in March 2009). But it also contributes to more traditional historiography on the actual ‘democratic’ nature of interwar Czechoslovakia. (Show less)