When sexologists rewrote the criminal code
Communists, sexologists and a persistent activist: how Czechoslovakia decriminalised gay sex in 1961.
On 29 November 1961, the National Assembly of Czechoslovakia in Prague passed a new criminal code. Something was missing from it that had been taken for granted for decades: the general ban on sexual acts between men. The law had never covered women anyway. The reform took effect on 1 January 1962, years before England or West Germany followed suit.
That it was a communist regime, of all things, that took this step had to do with science, not tolerance. In the fifties, Prague sexologists tried to "cure" homosexuality. After eight years of research they had to admit that they had not succeeded with a single patient, not even with men who had since married. Their conclusion: what cannot be cured cannot be punishable. They wrote an expert opinion for the legislative commission, and the party, which regarded such questions as a matter for experts, followed it. In the same year, Hungary also lifted its total ban.
Others had fought for this too. Imrich Matyáš, a social insurance official from Bratislava, had been writing articles, petitions and diaries since 1919 against the paragraph that made people like him criminals. For forty years. He lived to see the success, even if only half of it.
Nobody was completely free as a result. For sex between men, the age of consent was 18; for heterosexuals it was 15. Anyone who paid or caused a "public nuisance" still risked prison. Many led a double life, often in a marriage with a woman. State security kept "pink lists" and used them for blackmail. Only in 1990 did the special provision disappear from criminal law entirely.