Abstrakt:
In this contribution, I approach the question of how and why the homosexuals in
Czechoslovakia reflected, in the 30s of the 20th century, the way they were seen by the majority
society, focusing on the polarity manliness-femininity.
The medical discourse on homosexuality was, from its beginnings in the last third
of the 19th century, very marked by references to this polarity: the effeminacy in homosexuals
constituted a favourite topic of this discourse. The journalism was adding the public
image of the homosexual with other characteristics, supporting and nourishing a widespread
notion of the homosexual as an effeminated, depraved and criminal being.
In the the 30s of the 20th century the Czechoslovak homosexuals, willing to improve
their social status, founded a magazine, the Hlas sexuální menšiny. I use this magazine
as my principal documentary basis to discuss the above mentioned questions. On the
pages of the Hlas, we can observe a gradually increasing tendency to keep aside the original
goal to obtain the decriminalization of homosexuality and, instead, to accomplish at
first a change in the behaviour of homosexuals themselves.
The homosexual activists acted on the assumption that only after the negative
public image of the homosexual is modified, would it be possible to ask seriously for a decriminalization.
Denouncing the effeminacy in male homosexuals (and the masculinity in
female ones) and urging their readers to get rid of these features in the name of a homosexual
respectability, they were reproducing the stereotypes connected to the traditional system
of the gender roles distribution and claiming their validity also for the homosexual milieu.
