Kateřina Nedbálková

Community at the Backstage: Gays and Lesbians in the Czech Republic

The following chapter focuses on the gay and lesbian community in the Czech Republic between 1980 and 2010 (including the time before the regime shift in 1989). This time frame plays a key role in regards to the main analytical frame of the text, which is the inspection of the positioning of the gay and lesbian community1 within wider social structures. I attempt to interpret the limits and possibilities created through the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality in the context of the LGBT community. The time period with which my research is situated witnessed a shift from a society forcibly levelled off in terms of wages and property to a society which, as a result of liberalisation and market privatisation, transforms itself into a society setting up and reproducing a multi-layered range of social inequalities (Vecernik, 2010). Regime change also meant the gradual establishment of civic society institutions which affected conditions for the re/establishment and re/organising of gay and lesbian space and community.