The gay man who changed the Czech Republic has died. And it will change – List of Messages

Monday Jiří Hromada died at the age of 66. Actor, voice actor and also one of the most successful political lobbyists, thanks to which the Czech Republic today is a better country for hundreds of thousands of citizens.

And if one day he becomes even calmer and more passive, it will again be the merit of Jiří Hromada, because the energy he poured into his efforts for equality will remain even after he is gone .

Jiří Hromada was gay. This has been known to the public since the early 1990s, when he put his acting career on hold for the emerging LGBT rights movement. And he was successful: As chairman of the Association of Homosexual Citizen Organizations (SOHO) and the Gay Initiative, he helped push through the law on registered partnerships within fifteen years – together with Slovenia as the first post-communist countries.

Today it seems completely natural, like something that has always existed and is, and even the most conservative fighters “against LGBT+ ideology” argue in debates about further expansion rights with the words “after all, you already have a registered partnership, so what more could you want”.

However, Mr. Hromada’s life and work cannot be seen through the lens of the time in which he pursued his goals. Because the obstacles that people like him had to overcome are almost too low for us today – but back in the day, it took a strong dose of personal courage to even try to fight back from them.

Just the fact that we’ve been talking about him as a “gay activist” for 30 years. Although this role is not completely without risk even today, he signed it in the days when jokes about “hotties”, or even “buzzers”, were served without “false political correctness” on national television prime time.

In some shoes, we did not and could not walk, so it is difficult to imagine what it means. However, men usually know exactly what women want and need, members of the white majority can advise minorities – and heterosexuals are the most qualified judges of claims and feelings homosexual Although – of course – they have nothing against them, they even find “a lot of friends” among them, but …

Communist Czechoslovakia already stopped criminalizing homosexuality in 1961, but this says nothing about the level of “tolerance” with which the ruling working class treated people with intersexuality. different Officially, homosexuality was not supposed to exist in the new society, better yet, if it did, it was hidden in deep secrecy. In reality, however, this information about private life was often a good excuse by which such people could be blackmailed and humiliated.

If you think today that this did not leave deep traces in the atheistic and traditionally tolerant (joke) Czech Republic even after the fall of communism, you are very mistaken. For Jiří Hromada and his colleagues, the fifteen years that have passed since the adoption of the Act on Registered Partnerships meant, above all, overcoming prejudice and zero information of each day.

Even the famous law on registered partnerships was finally adopted after seven years of fighting and four unsuccessful attempts only because the then chairman of the ČSSD Jiří Paroubek believed that he could given to him in the 2006 elections, and before the final vote in The House. of Representatives, who had to deal with President Klaus’ theatrical veto, put his caucus in the crosshairs. Thank you for that.

Jiří Hromada was able to do it then – and for the rest of his life he had to listen to him as the highest level of what the LGBT community in the Czech Republic is entitled to, because he promised the then they wouldn’t want to. anything else – and of course marriage is not for everyone.

It is not true. And now let’s remove the logical doubt as to how one person could even make such promises through the generations of his followers.

Jiří Hromada himself explained it a few years ago in an interview with LUI magazine – by the way, he shows how much political and diplomatic skills he acquired in those years: “Nothing like that happened. That’s all they could do now – lie and not tell the truth about how it really was. Yes, we had problems with adoptions. The councilors told us that if they were not there, the law would pass. And if it passes, a couple must gradually apply to the courts for patient adoption, until the Constitutional Court rejects that part as unconstitutional. And that’s exactly what happened a few years ago.”

But the Tories were right when they warned in 2006 that accepting a registered partnership opens the door to a world where they definitely don’t want to go, even if nobody is forcing them to . When we look at it list of countries that have adopted registered partnerships since the 1990swe find that this institution has changed over time into a full-fledged marriage for all. And it turns out the same in the Czech Republic. That has not yet been achieved this term, but a move towards a new form of ‘partnership’ with more rights than it will come into force in the New Year 2025 after another series of tense debatesin fact just another stop on the same trip.

And when we as a country reach our final destination, we should immediately remember Jiří Hromada, because he was the one who took the most difficult first steps.