Prague around 1900: Outline of a Homosexual History
If Prague’s homosexual history seems less immediately visible than that of Paris, Berlin or Vienna, it is not because queer life was absent there, but because it left behind fewer monumental traces and more scattered ones. Its memory survives in police records, newspapers, literary journals, coded fiction and private circles rather than in already consecrated narratives. Around 1900, Prague was nevertheless far from a void. It was a city of fleeting recognitions, of public cruising grounds, of scandal made visible through repression, but also of literary and aesthetic milieus where desire between men could be named, stylized and cautiously shared. What long obscured this history was not its nonexistence, but the dominance of national, moral and political frameworks that rendered it less tellable. Prague did not lack a homosexual past. It lacked, for a long time, the conditions that would allow that past to be read, transmitted and spoken aloud.
A Queer History Waiting to Be Read
If the homosexual history of cities such as Paris, Berlin, Vienna or London is now relatively well mapped, that of Prague remains harder to grasp at first glance. This is not because homosexual life was absent there, but because of the nature of the traces it left behind. The Czech capital produced fewer places that later became emblematic, fewer famous manifestos and fewer figures immediately canonized by international historiography. Its queer memory appears more often in fragmentary form, through judicial archives, newspapers, literary journals and personal recollections,¹ rather than through already constituted narratives.
The Rediscovery of Queer Prague
It is precisely this dispersed character that makes recent Czech scholarship so valuable. Initiatives such as Teplá Praha("Queer Prague") or the Společnost pro queer paměť ("Society for Queer Memory")² have helped show that Prague does indeed possess a continuous queer history, long left partly buried from view. If that history remained so little visible, it was also because it was often overlaid by national, religious or heritage narratives deemed more suitable, more noble or more worthy of transmission. The problem, then, was not the absence of history, but the very conditions of its legibility.
The Emergence of a New Visibility
If one looks back before the period that concerns us most directly here, a few earlier clues do emerge, but the sources become markedly more eloquent from the end of the 19th century onward, when the capital of the Czech nation begins to appear as a space of homosexual sociability. Czech historians remind us that in the modern era sexuality gradually ceased to be thought of solely as sin and came instead under the scrutiny of law, the police and medicine.³ It is within this framework that the figure of "the homosexual" gradually emerged as a more visible social type, even if that visibility remained heavily burdened with suspicion.
Republic Square and the Pulse of Urban Desire
Around 1900, Prague already appears as a relatively structured meeting ground. Teplá Praha, a landmark work published in Czech in 2014, notes that in 1902 the future náměstí Republiky ("Republic Square"), then called Josefské náměstí("Josefov Square"), appeared in the press and in police discourse as a korso urningů,⁴ that is, a promenade or passing place for the urningové, a period term of German origin used to designate men attracted to men. It was a site of cruising and mutual recognition in public space, near a urinal and the great urban thoroughfares. One thus sees the outline of a modern Prague in which the big city offers anonymity, contact and danger all at once.
A Life Visible in the Archive
The same source also recalls that a criminal case in 1902 brought details of Prague’s homosexual subculture into the newspapers.⁵ This matters greatly, because it proves that this life was not merely fantasized after the fact by historians. It already existed clearly enough to be observed, described and repressed by the police and by the press. In other words, Prague was not a homosexual desert. It was rather a city where this presence became visible in flashes, often at the very moment when the social order was seeking to stigmatize it.
Moderní revue and the Spirit of Queer Modernity
But Prague was not only a space of furtive encounters. It was also a place of cultural formation. In 1894 Moderní revue("Modern Review") was founded, a Czech journal of literature, art and criticism that became one of the major organs of Czech decadence and symbolism. Founded by Arnošt Procházka, a Prague critic, essayist and publisher, in collaboration with Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, a decadent writer, poet, novelist and future major collector, it played an essential role in introducing modern aesthetics to Prague.⁶ The journal did not merely follow Parisian fashions. It helped redefine the very contours of modern sensibility in Bohemia.
Oscar Wilde and a Courageous Prague
In 1895, at the time of Oscar Wilde’s trial, Moderní revue distinguished itself in striking fashion. While a large part of the European press condemned Wilde, the Prague journal defended him and devoted a special issue to him. That issue dealt not only with Wilde as a writer, but more broadly with homosexuality as a cultural and social question.⁷ In the Czech context of the time, this was a remarkably bold gesture. It shows that in Prague, already by the end of the 19th century, a decadent and modernist literary milieu was not merely a refined aesthetic circle, but also a space in which people were beginning to think publicly about what others preferred to keep silent.
Jiří Karásek and the Making of a Milieu
In this fin-de-siècle Prague, artists’ groups and literary circles therefore played a major role. Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic deserves a somewhat more precise introduction here. Born in 1871, he was a major Prague writer of Czech decadence, at once poet, prose writer, critic, editor and collector. He was also one of the earliest Czech figures in whose literary universe desire between men appears with relative clarity.⁸ His role went beyond writing. He helped create a milieu, an atmosphere, almost a form of sociability. That is why some scholars see in him not only an author, but a genuine organizer of sensibility.
A World of Taste and Recognition
This dimension becomes even clearer when one considers his collection. Recent scholarship has been able to read it as the nucleus of a homophile milieu, structured by taste, affinities and a form of shared recognition.⁹ Here we move away from mere sexual scandal and enter a sphere of aesthetic, intellectual and semi-worldly sociability. Prague thus offered not only a geography of desire in streets or passing places. It also produced a culture of connivance, collection, reading and conversation.
Visibility in an Unwelcoming World
As for social acceptance, however, the situation should not be prettified. Even when certain cultivated milieus proved more open, the law, the press and public morality remained largely hostile. Visibility did not mean acceptance. It often meant, on the contrary, increased exposure to judgment. In Prague as elsewhere, homosexuality had the remarkable talent of being denounced by advocates of every ideology, on grounds whose great irony was that they did not even agree with one another. For some socialists or communists, it was a bourgeois mania, a suspect refinement of privileged people. For certain conservative circles, it was instead a symptom of moral laxity, even a seedbed of social disorder. A rather rare conceptual feat: managing to be at once the product of the decadent salon and the agent of the dissolution of social order. At that level of ideological flexibility, one sees clearly that the reasoning was not there to clarify the question, but to dress up the verdict. This logic of condemnation belongs within a long framework of penalization and medicalization.¹⁰
Refined Circles and Hidden Connections
High society and the aristocracy also appear in this queer Prague, though more by allusion than through massive dossiers. The sources are thin, often literary and sometimes coded. Teplá Praha, for example, evokes the underworld of the noční kavárna U Lojzíčka ("U Lojzíček Night Café"), in the former Jewish quarter, and cites the novel Golem, a major text of fin-de-siècle Prague by the Austro-Bohemian writer Gustav Meyrink.¹¹ There one encounters the figure of an effeminate young man linked to an aristocrat named kníže Athenstädt ("Prince Athenstädt"). The authors are careful to say that a literary passage is not brute proof. But they also suggest that such scenes were probably not pure invention. The presence of aristocratic or semi-aristocratic figures is therefore not absent. It simply remains harder to document than in Berlin or London.
From Constraint to Greater Freedom
Over the course of the 20th century, acceptance of homosexuality in Prague did progress in real ways, but neither linearly nor peacefully. The penalization inherited from the 19th century continued to weigh heavily, including under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, that is, during the period of Nazi occupation of the Czech lands between 1939 and 1945, when repression intensified within a broader context of persecution. Decriminalization in Czechoslovakia in 1961 marked a major turning point, but it did not in any way make stigmatization disappear: under socialism, queer existence remained largely surveilled, medicalized or relegated to social invisibility. After 1989, democratic opening allowed for a new visibility, the emergence of associations, openly acknowledged venues, memory work and later the legal recognition of registered partnership in 2006.¹² The path, then, did not lead in one smooth motion from shadow to freedom, but from a regime of suspicion to a speech that became ever more public and legitimate.
A History Reclaimed
If we return to our Prague of 1900, what distinguishes it is not the absence of homosexual life, but the way in which that life surfaces in the sources. Where other capitals left behind more visible mythologies, Prague requires us more insistently to read between the lines in journals and news items, to pay attention to the clientele of cafés and passing places and to explore private collections. That is precisely what makes it so interesting. It does not lack history. What it long lacked, above all, were permissions to tell that history out loud. And that is why works written in Czech, produced from within this very memory, are so precious today.
This exploration grew out of a work in the Collections section inspired by the art of Mucha: Poseidon and Pelops. Reimagining a little-known myth of love between men, the painting offers a more luminous counterpart to the histories of silence, coded visibility and fragile recognition traced here. Click here to explore the work.
QFA
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1. Jan Seidl, Ruth Jochanan Weininger, Ladislav Zikmund-Lender and Lukáš Nozar, Teplá Praha. A Guide to the Queer History of the Capital City, 1380-2000, Brno, Černé pole, 2014; Petr Nagy, “Teplá Praha. A Guide to the Queer History of the Capital City, 1380-2000,” iLiteratura.cz, September 9, 2014, https://www.iliteratura.cz/clanek/33623-seidl-jan-ed-tepla-praha-pruvodce-po-queer-historii-hlavniho-mesta-1380-2000, consulted March 13, 2026. (iLiteratura)
2. Společnost pro queer paměť [Society for Queer Memory], “Společnost pro queer paměť,” official website, n.d., https://www.queerpamet.cz/, consulted March 13, 2026. (iLiteratura)
3. Pavel Himl, Jan Seidl and Franz Schindler, eds., I Love Creatures of My Own Sex. Homosexuality in the History and Society of the Czech Lands, Prague, Argo, 2013; Martina Siwek Macáková, “On Same-Sex Relations from the Middle Ages to the Present,” iLiteratura.cz, October 27, 2013, https://www.iliteratura.cz/clanek/32195, consulted March 13, 2026. (iLiteratura)
4. Jan Seidl, Ruth Jochanan Weininger, Ladislav Zikmund-Lender and Lukáš Nozar, Teplá Praha. A Guide to the Queer History of the Capital City, 1380-2000, Brno, Černé pole, 2014, entry concerning Josefské náměstí and the korso urningů. (iLiteratura)
5. Jan Seidl, Ruth Jochanan Weininger, Ladislav Zikmund-Lender and Lukáš Nozar, Teplá Praha. A Guide to the Queer History of the Capital City, 1380-2000, Brno, Černé pole, 2014, entry concerning the criminal case of 1902 and its coverage in the press. (iLiteratura)
6. Neil Stewart, Bohemians in the Bohemian Sea of Journals: The Periodical Moderní revue and Prague Modernism, Beiträge zur slavischen Philologie, vol. 20, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
7. Neil Stewart, Bohemians in the Bohemian Sea of Journals: The Periodical Moderní revue and Prague Modernism, Beiträge zur slavischen Philologie, vol. 20, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019; Melvyn Clarke, “Some Half-Forgotten Treasures from the Czech Literary Corpus,” CzechLit, January 4, 2016, https://www.czechlit.cz/en/feature/some-half-forgotten-treasures-from-the-czech-literary-corpus/, consulted March 13, 2026. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
8. Melvyn Clarke, “Some Half-Forgotten Treasures from the Czech Literary Corpus,” CzechLit, January 4, 2016, https://www.czechlit.cz/en/feature/some-half-forgotten-treasures-from-the-czech-literary-corpus/, consulted March 13, 2026; Neil Stewart, Bohemians in the Bohemian Sea of Journals: The Periodical Moderní revue and Prague Modernism, Beiträge zur slavischen Philologie, vol. 20, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019. (CzechLit)
9. Ladislav Jackson, “‘A Crookedly Grown Shoot’: Images of Homosexuality in the Art of Czech Decadence,” in Martin C. Putna, ed., Homosexuality in the History of Czech Culture, Prague, Academia, 2013, p. 321-338; Vít Novák, “‘Eccentrically, Absurdly, with Delight and Despair.’ The Collection of Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic,” bachelor’s thesis, Prague, Charles University, Faculty of Arts, 2021, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/171969, consulted March 13, 2026. (Jihočeská univerzita)
10. Franz Schindler, “The Life of Homosexual Men under Socialism,” in Pavel Himl, Jan Seidl and Franz Schindler, eds., I Love Creatures of My Own Sex. Homosexuality in the History and Society of the Czech Lands, Prague, Argo, 2013, p. 271-386; Věra Sokolová, “Rainbow Life under the Red Star: State Approaches to Homosexuality and Non-Heterosexual Lives in Normalization-Era Czechoslovakia,” in Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová, eds., The Expropriated Voice: Transformations of Gender Culture in Czech Society, 1948-1989, Prague, SLON, 2015, p. 243-285; Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945-1989, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018. (gender.fhs.cuni.cz)
11. Jan Seidl, Ruth Jochanan Weininger, Ladislav Zikmund-Lender and Lukáš Nozar, Teplá Praha. A Guide to the Queer History of the Capital City, 1380-2000, Brno, Černé pole, 2014, entries concerning U Lojzíčka and the literary uses of Golem in the reconstruction of Prague queer sociability. (iLiteratura)
12. Jan Seidl, “Decriminalization of Homosexual Acts in Czechoslovakia in 1961,” in Kārlis Vērdiņš and Jānis Ozoliņš, eds., Queer Stories of Europe, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, p. 174-194; Holocaust.cz, “Queer Persecution,” n.d., https://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/queer-persecution/, consulted March 13, 2026; Czech Republic, Act No. 115/2006 Coll., on Registered Partnership and on the Amendment of Certain Related Acts, January 26, 2006, https://www.zakonyprolidi.cz/cs/2006-115, consulted March 13, 2026; Czech Republic, Public Administration Portal, “Formation of a Registered Partnership,” portal.gov.cz, n.d., https://portal.gov.cz/informace/vznik-registrovaneho-partnerstvi-INF-83, consulted March 13, 2026. (Masaryk University)
