Preliminary Programme

This paper maps out “Czech queer space” during the decades of the first Czechoslovak Republic through Nazi occupation up to 1948. After 1918, male and female homosexuals had new opportunities to express their sexuality despite the continued criminalization of male homosexuality. New novels set in Prague explored facets of the homosexual dilemma. By the early 1930s, Novy hlas, a new journal, was the first literary periodical aimed at the Czech homosexual; it campaigned for reform, its members linked to a European-wide network for sexual reform. From these publications and social networks we can analyse Czech queer space: not just specific reference points in the Czech lands, urban and rural, but also evidence that Paris, Berlin or London could be broader geographic reference points. The paper analyses how and where ‘Czechoslovak queers’ (including German-speakers) felt a spatial security, where they could meet like-minded individuals socially or sexually. It also uses evidence from court records to explain how far space changed in the 1940s under Nazi occupation. Ultimately, the paper maps out a Czech queer landscape at a local, regional and European level, exploring the mentality of many Czech men and women who pursued their own agenda in a heteronormative society. (Show less)

In this paper I trace the history of official and semi-official homophobia in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, asking how discourse shaped politics and vice-versa. Stalin inaugurated a modern anti-homosexual politicized discourse, integrated into official ideology. Yet that same ideology had no discursive room for sexualities and the actual policing of homosexuality was conducted in secret: regulation was governed by silence. In social life, homosexuals were “erased” through criminal law (men), psychiatry (women), and through family and workplace hostility that required discretion to navigate.
Late-Soviet and post-Soviet politics began to embrace new “perspectives” that relied on open discourse about all sexualities. The existing perspectives of criminality or mental illness were not entirely abandoned, but they competed in a marketplace of ideas with liberal perspectives about sexualities. Sexual “discourse” was not apolitical but expressive of democracy and post-Sovietness. Political “mobilization” in reaction to democratic perspectives, combined with an end to silence, has compelled homophobia to speak openly. Paradoxically, Putin is the first leader of Russia ever to speak publically about homosexuality, and his statements have remixed legacies while searching for a modern conservative rhetoric.
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My paper considers the effects of historical silencing of Hungarian queer sexualities and in particular of same-sex sexualities on the post 1989 politics of sexuality. Using the historical fate of the homosexual registry of the Budapest Metropolitan police as a lens the paper discusses how from the late nineteenth century onward Hungarian political regimes consciously and at times even retroactively, erased historical documents about the presence and tolerance of queerness in Hungary. It highlights how different Hungarian political systems—the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the archconservative interwar regime, and post-WWII communism—were all invested in the concealment of queer sexualities. I argue that prior to WWII silencing was driven by beliefs about minimizing the spread of “homosexual disease.” Containing sexuality and particularly homosexuality gained new importance during the Cold War, however. Following the establishment of the Communist Dictatorship in 1948, homosexuality became an important tool for the Communist party in the surveillance of the Hungarian population. Since homosexuality was used to blackmail and to turn people into informants for the price of keeping their sexuality “secret,” both homosexuals and the Communist Party became invested in suppressing knowledge about non-normative sex. Since 1989 the cumulative historical silencing of queer past has been feeding into a growing homophobia and the idea that liberal democracy brought queerness to Hungary—an idea that academics and the LGBTQ community have only recently begun to challenge.

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The aim of presentation is to show a possibility to enrich the present historiography on the history of homosexuality in the Soviet Union using the experience of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic as a case study. Author will present the results of research based on the analysis of records available at the Latvian State Historical Archives. The year 1961 is chosen as a beginning of period for then the Criminal Law of the Latvian SSR was enacted. Until then the Criminal Law of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was into force in Latvia annexed by the USSR at the end of the World War II. Archive records provide evidence that in 1965 a specific suppression system of homosexuals was implemented in the Latvian SSR based on at least two Registration Files organized and maintained by institutions controlled by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. 481 homosexual people were listed on the Registration File of Soviet Militia of Riga, the capital of Latvia, in 1969 forming a data base used by the Soviet authorities to control the community in question. Author will therefore focus on mechanisms that were used by the Soviets to suppress and to supervise homosexuals in the Latvian SSR in the 1960s – 1980s. (Show less)

I will trace the effects of Carelian evacuation during the 2WW to Finland for the queer descendants of the refugee families. I will raise initial questions about the connection between queer lives, lost heritage, and nationalist sentiments.
In my wider research project on queer will-writing and inheritance arrangements, I have looked at how the family wealth has been collected and/or invested in Finnish families during the past three generations. To my surprise, the Carelian evacuation features rather strongly in the data I have collected so far. In most cases, my respondents have one or two grandparents from Carelia, or of Russian Jewish roots.
In my paper, I will highlight the influence of the interrupted heritage – lost homes, lands and properties – to discuss in which ways Carelia figures in my queer respondents’ family stories. In the postwar regime of the building up a social-democratic and urban Finnish welfare state, Carelian immigrants struggled with lots of issues, and their children inherited a complicated mental legacy but often there was not much to inherit in the material sense.
I will discuss how the history of "interrupted heritage" is related to the way my respondents narrate their family backgrounds. I will furthermore elaborate on how they think about their sexuality and their own “legacies”.
Tentatively, I will argue that the experience of silenced racism that many Carelian refugees experienced in Finland, and the impossibility to return to their own lands in the Soviet Russia, has influenced the identities of their queer children and even grandchildren. (Show less)