He cites several filmmakers who claim their films are not about homosexuality, but about loneliness, or insanity, or the power of lies to destroy people’s lives, about anything but homosexuality. Plays about gay characters became films about Jews or about characters with unnamed differences. In The Celluloid Closet Vito Russo documents the ways gay material was censored in Hollywood under the Hays Code. At the same time they portray these practices as an import from the colonizing capitalist West. His three films about Czech rent boys, Not Angels, but Angels ( Andělé nejsou andělé 1994), Body without Soul ( Tělo bez duše1996), and Mandragora (1997) purport to be objective, honest documentaries in which (in the language of the video box) the boys’ "frankness and need to talk become the engine that drives the film." In reality, Grodecki's films are both highly manipulated and highly manipulative in ways that serve to enforce "normal" sexuality while demonizing various "abnormal" sexual practices.
Wiktor Grodecki is a Pole who studied film in the US, then returned to Poland in 1992. If they feel their rights are infringed they can always go and live in another country." Ī similar reaction to gay pornography and prostitution in Prague can be found in the films of Wiktor Grodecki. Valentin Rasputin, for example, said of homosexuality, "That kind of contact between men is a foreign import. As I have shown elsewhere, conservatives in Eastern Europe regularly conflated sexual dissidence with political dissidence. The same kind of moral outrage that had been part of the racist colonizing project was reversed: it was the Europeans who had corrupted the hitherto pure Africans. Rudi Bleys writes about how nativist Africans began to describe homosexuality, which had earlier been described by Europeans as an African vice, instead as a European import, unknown in native tradition. Colonial and orientalist exploitation can produce a backlash. The lower age of consent and economic disparity meant that younger boys were more readily available than in Vienna – asexual experience unavailable in Western Europe. " Ĭzech rent boys – indeed all Czechs, according to the gay Austrians, were not constrained by the homo/hetero binary of traditional Austrian society – they had a different type of sexuality. For some gay Westerners in the 90s, Prague became the place to look for "sexual experience unavailable in Europe." As Matti Bunzl documents, Austrian men found a different type of sexuality described through tropes of "availability, passion, and pansexuality.". Wolff cites Casanova's experiments withsame-sex sex (the only such episode described in his voluminous memoirs) in Russia. The same kind of relaxation of compulsory heterosexuality that allowed Flaubert to dabble in boys in Egypt functions for Westerners in Eastern Europe as well. " Robert Aldrich's Colonialism and Homosexuality is an even more thorough examination of the connections between homosexuality and imperialism from the 1800s on. Joseph Boone's "Homoerotics of Orientalism" shows just how important – even central – gay sexuality was in the orientalist project: "the possibility of sexual contact with and between men underwrites and at times even explains the historical appeal of orientalism as an occidental mode of male perception, appropriation, and control.". Edward Said describes the Arab Orient as a place where Westerners expected "sexual experience unobtainable in Europe" and "a different type of sexuality." While Said's analysis is framed in heterosexual terms, the sexually available feminine Orient that can be penetrated and catalogued by the rational West is neither always female nor always heterosexual. The Slavs' sexuality, like their language, was inscrutable and therefore open to Western projection. A cosmopolitan who could understand most of the languages of Western Europe was completely baffled by Slavic. Larry Wolff writes about how Mozart invented nonsense language and silly nicknames for members of his party as he traveled West to Prague.
West of Berlin and Vienna, Prague was nevertheless perceived as the East by its German-speaking neighbors. As the Western most outpost of the Slavic world, Prague had always had a special place in the Orientalist construct of Eastern Europe.
The main center of both industries in the 90s in Central and Eastern Europe was Prague, which also became the favored destination of Westerners eager to explore the "new Paris." Gay porn and male prostitutes were among Prague's attractions. As controls on sex, sexuality, and capitalism relaxed in the former Warsaw Pact countries after 1989, pornography and prostitution flourished.