Exiles of love

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Mark Cornwall discusses interwar Czechoslovakia, with a special analysis of two forgotten Czech lesbian novels that were deliberately suppressed after 1948 as 'bourgeois literature'.

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Mark Cornwall discusses interwar Czechoslovakia, with a special analysis of two forgotten Czech lesbian novels that were deliberately suppressed after 1948 as ‘bourgeois literature’.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 26, 2024

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This video video discusses the life and works of Czech author Melina Bow (real name Ludmila Ava), a prominent novelist in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s and 1930s. Born in 1906 and passing away in 1988, Bow is recognized for publishing the first Czech lesbian novel, "Exiles of Love," in 1929, which went largely unnoticed for many decades. The novel explores themes of lesbian self-knowledge through the story of two main characters, Tewa and Helena, who navigate their love for each other in a hostile environment, with the narrative culminating in tragedy and personal discovery.

This video video also touches on Bow’s other literary contributions, including writing novels for adult women and adolescent audiences, as well as her activism for lesbian rights during a period when homosexuality was criminalized in Czechoslovakia. The discussion highlights the challenges faced by lesbians in that era, emphasizing a societal backdrop of oppression while also noting Bow's efforts in campaigning against the criminalization of homosexuality.

Additionally, the text briefly contrasts Bow’s work with that of another author, Jill, who published the second Czech lesbian novel, "The Third Sex," in 1937, which presented a grittier portrayal of lesbian life. Lastly, the speaker outlines a broader project focused on recovering lost LGBTQ+ voices and histories within the Czech context, emphasizing the importance of digging deeper into literary sources to uncover the experiences of queer individuals during significant historical periods, including under Nazi and communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

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Leader Molina was a, popular novelist

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of the 1920s and thirties in Czechoslovakia.

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And she, she was born in 1906,

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died in 1988,

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and she published the first, lesbian

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Czech lesbian novel, in 1929.

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Um, we should say that Melina Bow is her pen name,

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which really is a kind of, a female version of Merlin.

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So she took it as a kind of magical term,

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but her real name was Ludmila Ava.

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But she took Melina Bow as her pen name

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and used it throughout her, career.

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And she wrote a lot of other novels in the 1930s.

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She became, really quite well known,

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really for the novels she wrote for, mainly for,

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adult women, but also for adolescents.

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Um, and,

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but what, what, I'm really here to talk about is her,

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I suppose, her novel of 1929,

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because it was the first lesbian novel in Czech.

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And, it's been really undiscovered for, many,

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many decades, really since the, since the 1930s.

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So it's, it's not well known at all.

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The lesbian novel of 1929 is, entitled,

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exiles of Love.

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And she, she said that she wrote it in about a fortnight,

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but actually, probably she, she was writing it in 1927

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to 1928, I think.

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Um, and, she took this title for this novel,

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exiles of Love from a phrase used by the, queer author

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or male homosexual author, Yi Karasek.

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He had used it in one of his poems.

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And he was a, a great kind of activist

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for homosexual rights in the Czech region.

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Um, so she published this book, 1929 in,

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you know, she was in her early twenties,

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and she, basically it sold out very quickly.

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And, in her own words,

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she got 300 tragic love letters from,

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or 300 tragic letters from women who felt

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that they were in a similar situation that this,

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this novel spoke to them, I suppose.

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And if we could say, you know, in terms of roughly

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what the novel is about, you would expect it

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to be not based on a huge amount of experience for somebody

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of Melina's age,

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but basically it's a novel, I suppose, about

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lesbian self-knowledge,

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what she would call female inversion.

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Um, it has two characters main characters in it.

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One is, named Tewa, who is,

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who comes from Georgia in the Caucasus

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and is a very kind of exotic character.

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Um, and she's a kind of Amazonian lesbian,

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taking on a kind of male, male,

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personality to some extent.

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And she meets, she comes to Prague,

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she comes to the Czech capital.

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She meets an actress there called Helena, who is much more

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of a feminine type of lesbian.

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But what the novel is about is basically these women coming

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together, finding

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that they're in a very hostile environment in Prague.

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Um, they find their love is not recognized.

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But on top of that, we would say, Ted is very

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disturbed by her own sexuality.

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She hasn't really come to terms with, it feels that it's,

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terrible in, in the kind

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of the 1930s to be like this.

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Um, and Helena really hasn't come to terms

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with her sexuality at all,

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or she's basically courted by a lot of men.

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So basically, this is a novel about, I suppose,

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lesbian self knowledge, but how lesbians can cope,

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or women who love women, how do they manage to cope in a,

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in a, in a rather hostile environment?

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And, you know, and you, it is not,

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as like many lesbian novels, this doesn't end well, really.

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Um, Tewa has tuberculosis

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and she dies of TB later in the novel.

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Um, but Helena kind of finds her sexuality,

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and as an actress, she then goes on the stage

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and she takes part in a lesbian play

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and feels that she's very fulfilled by that.

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So the novel kind of ends really with, Helena at

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Ted's grave, feeling that, you know, she's, she's,

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going forward into the future with a certain amount

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of new confidence, but still rather, rather anxious.

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So it's a bit typical in terms of,

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there's not a happy ending in this book, really,

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but it's, it's basically about two women who are trying

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to come to terms with their sexuality in, in a kind

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of hostile, environment, I suppose.

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Um, I mean, we could say that it, one, one would say

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that it was naturally not gonna be too happy

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because the, the possible title for this book had been God,

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God Has Forsaken Me, Christ's, cry on the Cross.

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So basically, basically, that was rejected in terms

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of this other title, exiles of Love in the End.

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But yes, it's, so it's really been just lying in libraries,

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a few libraries in, in the Czech Republic

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or Czechoslovakia for a long time

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and has not been, recognized.

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So I've been, I've been writing about that

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and, trying to, bring it to,

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wider attention, essentially.

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She did go on to write, a lot of novels, as I said,

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for adult women and adolescents.

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She rather veered away from writing about lesbian themes,

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but it's very interesting.

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It is only just this week I've realized that she also wrote,

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an anonymous book,

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which was much more erotic about erotic,

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erotic tales about lesbians.

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So that's one, really to be investigated.

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It shows that she didn't completely give up on that theme,

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but otherwise, she was moving into really writing

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about independent women.

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She wrote books for adolescent girls,

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which were really saying, you know, girls do not need

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to just do the traditional feminine occupations.

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They should be going to university.

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They should be, taking part in sports.

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Um, they should, you know, break outta the gender norms

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that have been set for them.

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Um, and, there's a, there's a,

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there's a novel called Chinese Girl,

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which is about an independent Chinese woman who comes

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to Prague,

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and actually eventually rejects conventional love

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and flies back to Beijing, to, to a new world, really.

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Um, and interestingly actually,

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me also wrote a book about a transgender athlete called,

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Dana Kovar.

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Um, it's a novel,

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but it was, it got quite a lot

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of attention at the time in 1935.

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And that is another aspect of Merlin's Merlin's work,

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I think, to be explored, which I'm trying to do,

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which is thinking about possible transgender aspects.

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Um, yeah, and I also, I also should mention that,

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me Levo was also involved in the campaign

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for decriminalization of homosexuality.

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In the, in Czechoslovakia,

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homosexuality was criminalized for men

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and for women under paragraph 1 29 B.

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And in the 1930s, this is very much influenced by,

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campaigns in Germany, of people like Magnus Hirschfeld,

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Melina and others took part in a journal called Voice

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of the Sexual Minority, which ran for only a few years.

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But basically this journal was to really campaigning

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for decriminalization,

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and it also included high literary, forms of writing,

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feeling that, you know, there is a kind of LGBT form

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of writing, which should be high literature.

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So it, it made some impact.

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But as you would imagine, this didn't,

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wasn't very interesting for many ordinary, Czech gays

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or lesbians, I suppose.

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So basically it folded

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because they couldn't get enough subscribers.

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But it's an interesting example of Melina and others,

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and she was an unusual, it was mainly men who wrote

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for this journal, but she was unusual in being a woman

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who also wrote for this journal

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and, you know, in forms of some short

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stories, things like that.

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Um, so she, it shows that she was, trying to be,

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you know, she was a certain, to a certain degree,

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an activist in the 1930s as well.

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You asked me about, Jill said, and I wanted to mention her

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because she wrote, really the second Czech lesbian novel in

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1937, published it in 1937,

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and that is called The Third Sex.

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Again, it's very unknown.

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It was banned after 1948 under the Communists.

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Um, so it's very unknown, and this is interesting

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because it's, it is an interesting contrast to,

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me exiles of love.

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It's much more, much more kind of racy, gritty type

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of novel about the subculture of lesbians in Prague

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Hedonistic world.

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Um, the leading character, Sabina, again, again,

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it's really a novel about lesbian self knowledge.

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The, the leading character Sabina is, a drug addict.

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She's very high on cocaine all the time.

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She sleeps around all over the place

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and gradually joined the novel.

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She realizes that this is not the way she,

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this is not the world she wants to live in

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as a modern lesbian, just kind of going around the bars

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and, you know, being high on all the time.

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Um, she has friends of hers who are committing suicide.

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It's all rather dismal, you know?

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So we actually do, we do meet a lot

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of different lesbian types in this novel,

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but by the end of the novel, she's really seen the light

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and she decides, you know, she's gonna leave pra,

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she's gonna go out on her own into the wider world,

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and she's gonna lead really a more moral life

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or find, find a way, which is not just hedonistic.

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So it's, you know, some,

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some commentators on this novel thought, you know,

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it's rather trash literature,

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but it actually, I think it, it does open up, yeah,

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a different side of, perhaps the lesbian world.

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And we should say that it's very hard

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to get at sources about lesbian life.

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I should have said this earlier, but it's very hard

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to get at sources on lesbian life in, Czechoslovakia.

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It's very hard to get at lesbian sources anyway.

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Um, so these novels are a good way into

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finding out about lesbian outlooks or what their views were.

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Um, and Jill said Lava herself was a,

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she was a small film actress,

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and she also wrote a lot of scripts for ple for films.

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That was her main occupation, really.

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She was a script writer for films,

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so she knew the film world.

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So, you could see that she would come into contact

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with a lot of individuals who had been around the world.

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She herself went off for Paris.

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So she was quite cosmopolitan individual,

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and I think she builds this into the novel, really.

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She builds in some of her experience into the novel,

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in showing a kind

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of a rather more cosmopolitan world than the, than the world

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that Mova had in, exiles of Love.

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So I think it is an, it is an interesting,

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novel in its own right,

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and it's, it's, it's more upbeat than exiles of love.

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I mean, it ends with a kind of, yeah,

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more optimistic measure, a conclusion that,

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lesbians can make it in the, in the hostile environment.

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If you like. The purpose of this project, this is one part

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of a project I've got, which is really a,

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a book about queer bohemians I'm very interested in, in,

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exploring different queer lives in,

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in the Czech environment.

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Um, there's been work in the last 10, 15 years

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by historians like Yang Zeal, Martin Puter,

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which has given us a kind of basic understanding of,

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homosexuality in the Czech lands in the 19th

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and 20th centuries.

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But we haven't really dug deep down into this.

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Um, I wrote my own book, the Devil's Wall,

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which came out in 2012,

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which was about a German homosexual he router

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who was involved in one of the major homosexual scandals

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of the 1930s, in 1937.

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So that made me interested in following this through

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and finding other queer voices, I suppose.

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So my project is really, to recover different types of,

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LGBT voices.

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Uh, this includes MEbA, it includes,

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Henrich, Ruter and the German who was really,

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who was a German fascist basically.

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So it's homosexuality in the SUD

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and German fascist movement.

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Um, but I also have other chapters there about,

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life in the Nazi protectorate,

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and how homosexuals were, were to some degree rounded up.

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Then I have chapter, chapter also about queer geography,

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which is trying to think about

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where does Czechoslovakia sit in the wider picture of

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how we think about, lesbian

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and gay lives in Europe at this time.

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So I would say that the purpose of this is to, recover

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this lost history, actually.

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Um, we don't know a lot about it,

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and certainly as I've mentioned already,

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just just exploring, trying to find sources

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for lesbian lives is very difficult.

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So on your second point about, you know, the life

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of the Czech lesbian, what, what was it like

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to be a Czech lesbian in the interwar period?

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I mean, as I mentioned, lesbianism was criminalized,

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and we do have some cases where, lesbian

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activity occurred or physical sex occurred

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and lesbians were put on trial.

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We just certainly have some of those cases.

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They haven't been researched very much,

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but we know about them from the newspapers

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and, the trials, are there to be explored.

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So, but not a lot, probably, I think,

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I think most of the trials of,

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homosexuals were, were men.

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Um, CZE, lov VA was a fairly liberal place in this regard,

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compared to, say, certainly in regard to Nazi Germany

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or, or Soviet Russia.

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It was more of a liberal environment.

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But even so, I think women who loved women or,

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or what we, what we would call lesbians

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or what they would call themselves, female inverts, I think,

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they, they had, an opportunity certainly to,

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well, no, basically they had, they had a,

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I think they could feel fairly oppressed in their own way,

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that their, their, their sexuality was not seen as normal

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and, they were trying to strike out on their own.

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And I think this links a little bit up to the fact that,

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you know, in the 1920s as in much of Europe, there was a,

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a new type of woman appearing, a kind of new woman

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as it would be called, who, was more independent.

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She wanted to get outta work, she, wanted

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to test gender restrictions.

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And I think some of these lesbians certainly felt

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that they could fall into that group,

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and, almost kind of hide in plain sight, I suppose.

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Um, so they were testing the boundaries of, set by men

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and, they were also testing the sexual

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boundaries, I suppose.

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Um, yeah, so I think, I think to be, be a lesbian in,

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in particularly in Prague,

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'cause that's where most of our sources would be there,

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there were probably,

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there were certainly obviously lesbians in other parts

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of the Czechoslovakia,

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but it's very hard to get at the sources for this.

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We, we, we need to almost, we can get into some trials, but

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otherwise we need to look in other places like,

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like these novels, essentially to find out, more about,

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the lives of these women.

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Yeah, and actually then you mentioned the Nazi protector,

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but I would say it is interesting, I mean, someone like me

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did try to, she tried to keep going with her publishing,

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joined the Nazi protector from, 19 39, 45.

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Um, probably no real persecution

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of lesbians actually at this time.

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And I think that's to some degree the same in Germany,

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in the Nazi protectorate.

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Um, the research that's been done on this suggests

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that any lesbians who got arrested, it was usually

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for other reasons, it's

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because they got politically involved in some way

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and were, found out, found out by the Gestapo

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for political crimes, not usually for their sexuality.

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So we don't really, as far as I know, the research

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that's been done on this has not found much evidence

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of lesbians, having,

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having particularly more difficult lives

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than anyone else, I suppose.

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Um, a little bit of a contrast with men,

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because men joined the Nazi protected,

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or homosexual men were more likely to perhaps be blackmailed

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to suffer violence because they were perhaps out in the

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public sphere perhaps cruising around, and

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therefore they would be rounded up like anyone else

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who would be round, who was out, perhaps at night.

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So I've got some cases certainly of, homosexual men

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who were arrested,

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but I would say there's not a kind of mass persecution.

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So anyway, so that leads really into the communist period

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when you could say, you know, everything is clamped down on

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and, everything goes silent, really.

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And people like Meline Kova really disappear from view.

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They meline retreats back into private life, I suppose,

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you know, one of the key conclusions would be, that

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with this kind of research, we are recovering lost voices,

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lost lives really, because

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after 1948 with the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia up

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to the 1990s, we hear very little about,

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LGBT lives.

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Okay, in 1961,

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homosexuality was decriminalized in Czechoslovakia,

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but it was still kept very much under wraps.

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No real public discussion.

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Um, and, so this is from an earlier period,

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but it's, it's a period when suddenly there were,

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gay and lesbian voices.

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Um, and it's an opportunity, I think also

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to put this region on the map in terms of LGBT history,

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there's a lot of work done on Germany.

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On Germany, certainly, obviously America, Britain,

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even Russia has got some great historiography now on,

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LGBT history.

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But, the, research on this part of the world on kind

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of east century a is really only opening up.

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We've got some good books on Hungary now on Poland,

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but, certainly in English,

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we haven't got much about the Czech region.

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So my project is really trying to, yeah,

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investigate this further, dig deeper

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and, in case in, in the case of, lesbian

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identity to really explore what that, that, what

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that meant in the Czech context.

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So I, I think, as I've tried to show,

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there was a kind of, there,

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there is quite a lot actually there

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that you can find if you look hard by reading the novels

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and then seeing how the subculture in Prague particularly,

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developed.

392
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Yeah. And, you know, I would say probably just

393
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as a last point, you know, if you think, well,

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what did happen to, Viva?

395
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And I said she went off into private life.

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Well, she has an a, a, a small archive in Prague,

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but it's almost all her novels and her photo collection.

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Um, but what we do see there is

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that she found a new partner.

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She found a partner called Keta Luka,

401
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and, as far as we can tell,

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they lived very happily together from about 1950.

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So she didn't publish anymore.

404
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Her books were just, confiscated. Were not available.

405
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You can find them now in the bookshops

406
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'cause they'd be coming back into the check bookshops.

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But she herself, you know, went, went off

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Into private life and I think that's what most, gay

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or lesbians did in the communist period.

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So there's, there's a lot there to still be explored,

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but it's, it's, you have to really dig hard to find,

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find the sources.

Melina Bow: Pioneer of Czech Lesbian Literature

00:00:00 - Leader Molina was a, popular novelist of the 1920s and thirties in Czechoslovakia. And she, she was born in 1906, died in 1988, and she published the first, lesbian Czech lesbian novel, in 1929. we should say that Melina Bow is her pen name, which really is a kind of, a female version of Merlin.
00:00:33 - but her real name was Ludmila Ava. But she took Melina Bow as her pen name and used it throughout her, career. And she wrote a lot of other novels in the 1930s. She became, really quite well known, really for the novels she wrote for, mainly for, adult women, but also for adolescents. and, but what, what, I'm really here to talk about is her,
00:01:03 - because it was the first lesbian novel in Czech. And, it's been really undiscovered for, many, many decades, really since the, since the 1930s. So it's, it's not well known at all. The lesbian novel of 1929 is, entitled, exiles of Love. And she, she said that she wrote it in about a fortnight, but actually, probably she, she was writing it in 1927
00:01:34 - and, she took this title for this novel, exiles of Love from a phrase used by the, queer author or male homosexual author, Yi Karasek. He had used it in one of his poems. And he was a, a great kind of activist for homosexual rights in the Czech region. so she published this book, 1929 in, you know, she was in her early twenties,
00:02:08 - And, in her own words, she got 300 tragic love letters from, or 300 tragic letters from women who felt that they were in a similar situation that this, this novel spoke to them, I suppose. And if we could say, you know, in terms of roughly what the novel is about, you would expect it to be not based on a huge amount of experience for somebody of Melina's age, but basically it's a novel, I suppose, about
00:02:39 - what she would call female inversion. it has two characters main characters in it. One is, named Tewa, who is, who comes from Georgia in the Caucasus and is a very kind of exotic character. and she's a kind of Amazonian lesbian, taking on a kind of male, male, personality to some extent. And she meets, she comes to Prague, she comes to the Czech capital. She meets an actress there called Helena, who is much more

Lesbian Struggles in 1930s Prague

00:03:13 - But what the novel is about is basically these women coming together, finding that they're in a very hostile environment in Prague. they find their love is not recognized. But on top of that, we would say, Ted is very disturbed by her own sexuality. She hasn't really come to terms with, it feels that it's, terrible in, in the kind of the 1930s to be like this.
00:03:43 - with her sexuality at all, or she's basically courted by a lot of men. So basically, this is a novel about, I suppose, lesbian self knowledge, but how lesbians can cope, or women who love women, how do they manage to cope in a, in a, in a rather hostile environment? And, you know, and you, it is not, as like many lesbian novels, this doesn't end well, really. Tewa has tuberculosis and she dies of TB later in the novel.
00:04:17 - and as an actress, she then goes on the stage and she takes part in a lesbian play and feels that she's very fulfilled by that. So the novel kind of ends really with, Helena at Ted's grave, feeling that, you know, she's, she's, going forward into the future with a certain amount of new confidence, but still rather, rather anxious. So it's a bit typical in terms of,
00:04:46 - but it's, it's basically about two women who are trying to come to terms with their sexuality in, in a kind of hostile, environment, I suppose. I mean, we could say that it, one, one would say that it was naturally not gonna be too happy because the, the possible title for this book had been God, God Has Forsaken Me, Christ's, cry on the Cross. So basically, basically, that was rejected in terms of this other title, exiles of Love in the End.
00:05:21 - a few libraries in, in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia for a long time and has not been, recognized. So I've been, I've been writing about that and, trying to, bring it to, wider attention, essentially. She did go on to write, a lot of novels, as I said, for adult women and adolescents. She rather veered away from writing about lesbian themes, but it's very interesting. It is only just this week I've realized that she also wrote,
00:05:55 - which was much more erotic about erotic, erotic tales about lesbians. So that's one, really to be investigated. It shows that she didn't completely give up on that theme, but otherwise, she was moving into really writing about independent women. She wrote books for adolescent girls, which were really saying, you know, girls do not need to just do the traditional feminine occupations. They should be going to university.

Exploring Gender Norms and LGBTQ Literature

00:06:25 - they should, you know, break outta the gender norms that have been set for them. and, there's a, there's a, there's a novel called Chinese Girl, which is about an independent Chinese woman who comes to Prague, and actually eventually rejects conventional love and flies back to Beijing, to, to a new world, really. and interestingly actually, me also wrote a book about a transgender athlete called,
00:06:57 - it's a novel, but it was, it got quite a lot of attention at the time in 1935. And that is another aspect of Merlin's Merlin's work, I think, to be explored, which I'm trying to do, which is thinking about possible transgender aspects. yeah, and I also, I also should mention that, me Levo was also involved in the campaign for decriminalization of homosexuality. In the, in Czechoslovakia,
00:07:31 - and for women under paragraph 1 29 B. And in the 1930s, this is very much influenced by, campaigns in Germany, of people like Magnus Hirschfeld, Melina and others took part in a journal called Voice of the Sexual Minority, which ran for only a few years. But basically this journal was to really campaigning for decriminalization, and it also included high literary, forms of writing,
00:08:04 - of writing, which should be high literature. So it, it made some impact. But as you would imagine, this didn't, wasn't very interesting for many ordinary, Czech gays or lesbians, I suppose. So basically it folded because they couldn't get enough subscribers. But it's an interesting example of Melina and others, and she was an unusual, it was mainly men who wrote for this journal, but she was unusual in being a woman who also wrote for this journal and, you know, in forms of some short
00:08:34 - so she, it shows that she was, trying to be, you know, she was a certain, to a certain degree, an activist in the 1930s as well. You asked me about, Jill said, and I wanted to mention her because she wrote, really the second Czech lesbian novel in 1937, published it in 1937, and that is called The Third Sex. Again, it's very unknown. It was banned after 1948 under the Communists. so it's very unknown, and this is interesting
00:09:07 - me exiles of love. It's much more, much more kind of racy, gritty type of novel about the subculture of lesbians in Prague Hedonistic world. the leading character, Sabina, again, again, it's really a novel about lesbian self knowledge. The, the leading character Sabina is, a drug addict. She's very high on cocaine all the time. She sleeps around all over the place

Exploring Lesbian Identity in Literature

00:09:39 - She realizes that this is not the way she, this is not the world she wants to live in as a modern lesbian, just kind of going around the bars and, you know, being high on all the time. she has friends of hers who are committing suicide. It's all rather dismal, you know? So we actually do, we do meet a lot of different lesbian types in this novel, but by the end of the novel, she's really seen the light and she decides, you know, she's gonna leave pra, she's gonna go out on her own into the wider world,
00:10:12 - or find, find a way, which is not just hedonistic. So it's, you know, some, some commentators on this novel thought, you know, it's rather trash literature, but it actually, I think it, it does open up, yeah, a different side of, perhaps the lesbian world. And we should say that it's very hard to get at sources about lesbian life. I should have said this earlier, but it's very hard to get at sources on lesbian life in, Czechoslovakia. It's very hard to get at lesbian sources anyway.
00:10:44 - finding out about lesbian outlooks or what their views were. and Jill said Lava herself was a, she was a small film actress, and she also wrote a lot of scripts for ple for films. That was her main occupation, really. She was a script writer for films, so she knew the film world. So, you could see that she would come into contact with a lot of individuals who had been around the world.
00:11:14 - So she was quite cosmopolitan individual, and I think she builds this into the novel, really. She builds in some of her experience into the novel, in showing a kind of a rather more cosmopolitan world than the, than the world that Mova had in, exiles of Love. So I think it is an, it is an interesting, novel in its own right, and it's, it's, it's more upbeat than exiles of love. I mean, it ends with a kind of, yeah, more optimistic measure, a conclusion that,
00:11:47 - If you like. The purpose of this project, this is one part of a project I've got, which is really a, a book about queer bohemians I'm very interested in, in, exploring different queer lives in, in the Czech environment. there's been work in the last 10, 15 years by historians like Yang Zeal, Martin Puter, which has given us a kind of basic understanding of,
00:12:19 - and 20th centuries. But we haven't really dug deep down into this. I wrote my own book, the Devil's Wall, which came out in 2012, which was about a German homosexual he router who was involved in one of the major homosexual scandals of the 1930s, in 1937. So that made me interested in following this through and finding other queer voices, I suppose.

Czech Lesbian History Under Fascism and Communism

00:12:51 - LGBT voices. this includes MEbA, it includes, Henrich, Ruter and the German who was really, who was a German fascist basically. So it's homosexuality in the SUD and German fascist movement. but I also have other chapters there about, life in the Nazi protectorate, and how homosexuals were, were to some degree rounded up.
00:13:24 - which is trying to think about where does Czechoslovakia sit in the wider picture of how we think about, lesbian and gay lives in Europe at this time. So I would say that the purpose of this is to, recover this lost history, actually. we don't know a lot about it, and certainly as I've mentioned already, just just exploring, trying to find sources for lesbian lives is very difficult.
00:13:55 - of the Czech lesbian, what, what was it like to be a Czech lesbian in the interwar period? I mean, as I mentioned, lesbianism was criminalized, and we do have some cases where, lesbian activity occurred or physical sex occurred and lesbians were put on trial. We just certainly have some of those cases. They haven't been researched very much, but we know about them from the newspapers and, the trials, are there to be explored.
00:14:28 - I think most of the trials of, homosexuals were, were men. CZE, lov VA was a fairly liberal place in this regard, compared to, say, certainly in regard to Nazi Germany or, or Soviet Russia. It was more of a liberal environment. But even so, I think women who loved women or, or what we, what we would call lesbians or what they would call themselves, female inverts, I think, they, they had, an opportunity certainly to,
00:15:04 - I think they could feel fairly oppressed in their own way, that their, their, their sexuality was not seen as normal and, they were trying to strike out on their own. And I think this links a little bit up to the fact that, you know, in the 1920s as in much of Europe, there was a, a new type of woman appearing, a kind of new woman as it would be called, who, was more independent. She wanted to get outta work, she, wanted
00:15:33 - And I think some of these lesbians certainly felt that they could fall into that group, and, almost kind of hide in plain sight, I suppose. so they were testing the boundaries of, set by men and, they were also testing the sexual boundaries, I suppose. yeah, so I think, I think to be, be a lesbian in, in particularly in Prague, 'cause that's where most of our sources would be there, there were probably,

Czechoslovakia's LGBTQ History in Difficult Times

00:16:03 - of the Czechoslovakia, but it's very hard to get at the sources for this. We, we, we need to almost, we can get into some trials, but otherwise we need to look in other places like, like these novels, essentially to find out, more about, the lives of these women. Yeah, and actually then you mentioned the Nazi protector, but I would say it is interesting, I mean, someone like me did try to, she tried to keep going with her publishing, joined the Nazi protector from, 19 39, 45.
00:16:37 - of lesbians actually at this time. And I think that's to some degree the same in Germany, in the Nazi protectorate. the research that's been done on this suggests that any lesbians who got arrested, it was usually for other reasons, it's because they got politically involved in some way and were, found out, found out by the Gestapo for political crimes, not usually for their sexuality. So we don't really, as far as I know, the research
00:17:10 - of lesbians, having, having particularly more difficult lives than anyone else, I suppose. a little bit of a contrast with men, because men joined the Nazi protected, or homosexual men were more likely to perhaps be blackmailed to suffer violence because they were perhaps out in the public sphere perhaps cruising around, and therefore they would be rounded up like anyone else who would be round, who was out, perhaps at night.
00:17:42 - who were arrested, but I would say there's not a kind of mass persecution. So anyway, so that leads really into the communist period when you could say, you know, everything is clamped down on and, everything goes silent, really. And people like Meline Kova really disappear from view. They meline retreats back into private life, I suppose, you know, one of the key conclusions would be, that
00:18:15 - lost lives really, because after 1948 with the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia up to the 1990s, we hear very little about, LGBT lives. Okay, in 1961, homosexuality was decriminalized in Czechoslovakia, but it was still kept very much under wraps. No real public discussion.
00:18:46 - but it's, it's a period when suddenly there were, gay and lesbian voices. and it's an opportunity, I think also to put this region on the map in terms of LGBT history, there's a lot of work done on Germany. On Germany, certainly, obviously America, Britain, even Russia has got some great historiography now on, LGBT history.

Exploring Czech Lesbian Identity and History

00:19:16 - of east century a is really only opening up. We've got some good books on Hungary now on Poland, but, certainly in English, we haven't got much about the Czech region. So my project is really trying to, yeah, investigate this further, dig deeper and, in case in, in the case of, lesbian identity to really explore what that, that, what
00:19:43 - So I, I think, as I've tried to show, there was a kind of, there, there is quite a lot actually there that you can find if you look hard by reading the novels and then seeing how the subculture in Prague particularly, developed. Yeah. And, you know, I would say probably just as a last point, you know, if you think, well, what did happen to, Viva? And I said she went off into private life. Well, she has an a, a, a small archive in Prague,
00:20:19 - but what we do see there is that she found a new partner. She found a partner called Keta Luka, and, as far as we can tell, they lived very happily together from about 1950. So she didn't publish anymore. Her books were just, confiscated. Were not available. You can find them now in the bookshops 'cause they'd be coming back into the check bookshops. But she herself, you know, went, went off
00:20:59 - or lesbians did in the communist period. So there's, there's a lot there to still be explored, but it's, it's, you have to really dig hard to find, find the sources.

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