Eltitkolt évek : tizenhat leszbikus életút

A. Borgos

This book with 16 interviews is the first sustained research in Hungary whose goal it is to provide the life stories of Hungarian lesbians. The publication is based on oral history life course interviews given by sixteen Hungarian women, ranging in age from 47 to 70, whose central identity is lesbian. The book is an outgrowth of a film by the same title directed by Mária Takács, which was first shown in 2009. The title of the book and film refers to the women now "confessing" their lives, loves, happiness and pain, and struggles during those "secret years" from the sixties through the Kádár regime of the eighties, when they were living in a barely tolerated subculture. The analysis of the narrative interviews focuses on the construction of a lesbian identity while these women lived lives of invisibility during the socialist period.