(2009) In The story of sexual identity: Narrative perspectives on the gay and lesbian life course. B.J. Cohler and P.L. Hammack, eds. Pp. 77-130. New York: Oxford University Press.
Narratives – both personal stories and presentations of self, and larger discourses of the history and character of the nation/state – are notoriously fluid in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). A corresponding fluidity of sexual identity – both self-(re-)presented and as projected and construed by (Western) others – has contributed greatly to sexual and romantic tourism in many CEE countries and the export of Central and Eastern European sexuality, in the form of pornography and individuals engaged in forms of sex work, to Western countries. In this context, Central European men who have sex with men present interesting alternatives to Western-based assumptions about the directionality of development of LGBTQ consciousness, community organization, and construction and circulation of notions of identity. Because of the relatively rapid and discrete social and economic transformations in Central European countries since the Second World War, CEE also presents a set of cohorts relatively close in age that have grown up within a given national culture but under significantly different sociopolitical milieux.
This chapter is based on the author’s research on emerging MSM communities and identities in Prague, Czech Republic, with nearly four years of fieldwork over the period 1999-2006. It examines the life courses and current narrative presentations of three age cohorts of men who have sex with men (MSM) in the Czech Republic: one set who experienced the liberalization and then repression of the Prague Spring in 1968; one set who grew up during the period of socialist “normalization” in the 1970s and 1980s; and one set, now in their late teens and early 20s, who were children at the time of the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and have lived most of their lives in a democratic capitalist society open to exchange of goods and ideas with the West. Some of these men identify as gay or homosexual, others as bisexual, and some strongly reject any connection with a non-heterosexual identity. Their narratives also vary significantly by age cohort, as they do in Western countries, but with a much shorter time span per cultural generation.
Czech MSMs have developed their narratives of sexual identity and difference partly in dialogue with Western narratives, through film, literature, scholarly writings, health education, and direct experience with Western tourists or as tourists themselves in Western countries. However, these dialogues have always been tempered by the different Czech experience: a deep suspicion of identity politics, stemming from the gross abuses of nationalist occupiers (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the USSR), and the cooptation of identities based on gender, class, creed, ethnicity, and occupation under state socialism; the near-absence of a legitimate or effective local feminist movement; the high degree of ethnic and social homogeneity in the Czech Republic; escaping the ravages of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s due to travel restrictions; the generally more limited economic freedom of Czech individuals until very recently; and a general feeling that Western models are ultimately merely options among many, and not the only way of organizing their lives. There is, in the end, no compelling reason to believe that most Czech MSMs’ narratives and identities are asymptotically approaching a Western norm: they are borrowing motifs from Western narratives as they find them to be useful, but they are using them to tell their own stories.
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