Secret Years: Mosaics of a Hungarian Lesbian Herstory

Lesbian herstory represents a special and even more invisible layer within women’s history, especially in Eastern Europe. In 2008, Labrisz Lesbian Association, started a lesbian herstory project, conducting life-story interviews with middle-aged and elderly lesbian women, resulting in a documentary film and a volume of interviews. The interviews present a unique perspective on recent Hungarian social history through personal lenses. The interviewed women, coming from diverse social and professional backgrounds, lived their lives as lesbians during state socialism either in a complete isolation or within a small social network of lesbians. Through their life stories, we can get a glimpse into the informal social scenes they tried to establish and the different (sexual, professional, sometimes maternal and religious) identities they had to reconcile. The paper analyzes the personal narratives in a gender and social context.

Released: Replika 85–86, 123–146.